Contact-based Plans & Billing

In November 2024, Help Scout launched new plans that bill for contacts instead of users (aka seats). All of the new plans include unlimited users. We have no plans to migrate current customers to the contact-based plans at this time. Any future migrations will follow our legacy plan changes policy, which requires at least six months advance notice of any plan changes.

Why contacts?

We changed Help Scout's business model for three reasons:

1. Delight is a team sport. When everyone in the company is empowered to learn from and help customers, your team can deliver better customer service. We don't believe you should be taxed unnecessarily for giving everyone access to Help Scout.
2. Performance-based pricing. You only pay for Help Scout if it drives results for your team. In per-seat models, 15-20% of the seats you pay for don't use the product. Our pricing removes slack in the system and focuses on what matters to your business: helping people.
3. It's simpler, less variable, and usually more affordable. We pride ourselves on keeping things simple. Billing for contacts means we don't have to bill for other things like users, tickets, or AI features. Thanks to the fair billing policy, it's also 34% less variable than charging per seat. Finally, it's still more affordable than the competition in most cases.

What's a contact?

A contact is someone you've helped, which includes:

• Email conversations with at least one reply, including replies generated by workflows
• Phone conversations created in Help Scout
• Channel conversations (such as Messenger or Instagram) with at least one reply
• Chats accepted and replied to by a user in your account
• Questions resolved by AI Answers

Some additional clarifications:

• Auto replies sent using the Inbox auto-reply feature do not count as a reply.
• Only the To: address in an email conversation counts as a contact; any addresses in the CC or BCC fields do not count.
• AI Answers resolutions from unidentified users are distinguished by the device ID recorded with each session. Sessions with the same ID are associated with the same contact. More about identifying customers via Beacon here.

Calculating contact count

Most other help desks have a report that can tell you how many contacts you've helped over a specific period. In Help Scout, you can find that count in the Company Report. The Customers Helped metric is an approximate count, although it can sometimes vary. We're working on aligning this metric definition to contacts.

In Gmail, you can type the following in the search bar to get an approximate count of conversations you replied to in the last 30 days: from:me newer_than:30d . We suggest multiplying the number in the search results by 0.7  to get a contact count, although you can use a higher multiple if you believe you have a higher ratio of unique contacts.

Another option you have is to import data free of charge, up to 500,000 records. Imported conversations do not count towards contact count. You can start one here.

Finally, you can sign up for a trial and start using Help Scout for free. When your trial is up, we'll show you the prices for each plan based on your projected contact tier.

Fair billing policy

When your contact volume fluctuates in seasonal or otherwise busy periods, we've got your back. Help Scout determines your contact tier based on the average of your last three months of usage. As a result, contact-based billing is 34% less variable than charging per user/seat.

The example below illustrates the impact of the fair billing policy. For a company that would otherwise be in a different contact tier every month — thus paying different amounts — the fair billing policy smooths out the bumps so the bill only changes once. Although the customer exceeds 5,000 contacts on three occasions, the three-month average never exceeds the 5,000-contact tier. We cover the overage to keep your bill more consistent and predictable.