A helpdesk with a website widget attached

Help Scout is an email helpdesk. The thing you are actually buying is a shared inbox for a team, with a knowledge base product called Docs beside it that publishes a help centre you can restyle with CSS. Published plan prices on the date checked were Standard at $25 a user a month, Plus at $45 and Pro at $75, with the same per user figures showing against both the monthly and the annual billing views. There is a free plan, and it is specific: five users, one inbox, one Docs site, up to ten tags, ten saved replies and ten articles.

Its AI is four separate things with four separate rules. AI Assist, which expands, shortens, edits and translates text, is on every paid plan. AI Drafts and AI Summarize are unlimited on Plus and Pro only. AI Answers, the one that talks to your website visitors, is not on any plan at all. It is an add on billed per resolution.

A resolution costs $0.75, billed in arrears, and Help Scout's own documentation defines it as a single AI chat session resolved without help from a human. You are charged once per session even where several questions were answered inside it, and you are not charged when the AI greets somebody, asks a follow up, or the person asks for more help. New customers get three months free to train it. You can set a monthly spending limit expressed in resolutions, and when you reach it AI Answers switches off until the next cycle or until you raise the limit.

The subtlety worth spotting is what a contact is. Help Scout counts contacts as well as users, and its documentation lists a question resolved by AI Answers as one of the things that creates a contact. On the free plan that ceiling is 100 a monthly cycle, and once you hit it you cannot reply to anyone, through email, channels, chat or AI Answers, until the cycle resets or you upgrade. Standard and Plus offer fifteen days to try the plan with no card; Pro is behind a demo booking. Everything above is Help Scout's published position on the checked date, and it moves, so read their pricing page and ours before deciding.

Written to be used rather than to be waved at. If any of these describe you, this is the wrong product and the rest of the page will not change that.

• Email is where your customers actually are. Help Scout is a mailbox first and best, with assignment, saved replies, tags and reporting built around a queue that two or more people share. There is no mailbox here, no queue and no second person to hand anything to.
• You want somewhere to publish your articles. Docs hosts a help centre, lets you restrict it or authorise readers through their API, and reports on failed searches so you can see the gaps in your own writing. AI Answers then grounds itself in that plus your own website. Askably reads what you point it at and publishes nothing.
• The meter may genuinely beat a flat fee, and you can find out for free. Three months of AI Answers at no cost, then 75 cents a resolution with a spending cap you set yourself. A site fielding forty real sessions a month pays thirty dollars and cannot accidentally pay more. That is a better shape than a subscription when volume is low or unpredictable.
• You want the AI pointed at your staff rather than your visitors. AI Drafts and AI Summarize are unlimited on Plus and Pro, and AI Assist is on every paid plan. Nothing here writes a reply for a colleague or summarises a thread, because there is no thread.
• Two people and a hundred contacts a month is a real business, and Help Scout gives that away. Five users, one inbox and one Docs site at zero is more product than most small teams need, and it is worth exhausting before paying anybody.

• There is one number and it does not move. $0, $29, $99 and $299 a month, with no per user charge, no per resolution charge and no contact ceiling underneath the plan. Help Scout counts users, then counts contacts, and an AI Answers resolution consumes one of those contacts as well as costing 75 cents.
• Every reply is footnoted. Numbered references point at the passages that produced the answer, so a disagreement about a wrong answer becomes a disagreement about a specific document rather than about the assistant's judgement.
• The refusal is arithmetic, not tone. Below the match score you set, the request stops before it reaches the model and the visitor receives the sentence you wrote. Retrieved text is handled as data, never as something the assistant should obey.
• Indexing capacity is written into the plan rather than earned by writing articles first: 500 pages and 50 files on Starter, 5,000 pages and 500 files on Growth, 50,000 pages and unlimited files on Agency. Point it at the site you already have.
• Every visible detail is configurable, including custom CSS, and the launcher runs in a closed shadow root with the panel in its own frame so it cannot inherit or break your page styles. Our name is off the widget on every paid tier.

Read off their own site on that date, quoted narrowly. Prices and packaging in this category change often, so treat this as a snapshot and check both before you decide.

Listing this is more useful than filling it in. Every line here is something that was not clearly published, or was behind a sign-up.

• The monthly and the annual views showed the same per user figures, so what an annual commitment actually saves was not readable from the pricing page.
• Whether AI Answers shows the visitor which article an answer came from was not stated in the documentation read.
• How many Docs sites each paid tier allows, and whether a custom domain is included with one, was not stated on the pages read.

Could I keep Help Scout for email and use this on the website?

That combination is coherent, unlike most. Help Scout keeps the mailbox and the help centre, this answers on the page, and the two do not fight because only one launcher sits on your site. You would be paying twice, so it only makes sense if the flat allowance beats what AI Answers would meter.

Is 1,000 replies comparable to 1,000 resolutions?

No. Their resolution is a whole session that ended without a human, so several answers can sit inside one. A reply here is a single answer returned to a visitor. Work out your own session count before comparing the two prices, because the ratio is yours, not ours.

Do I need to write help articles before this works?

No. It indexes documents you upload or crawls your own site following your sitemap and obeying robots rules. If your policies already exist as pages, that is the whole setup.

What happens when a visitor asks for a person?

It takes a name, an email and a message and sends that to an address you nominate. There is no inbox on this side to receive it into, which is exactly the gap Help Scout fills.