Help Scout Free Plan

Help Scout’s free plan is a great way to get started with delivering exceptional customer service at no cost. Whether you’re a small team or just starting out, the plan offers a robust set of tools to help you provide high-quality support.

When it’s time to grow, upgrading is easy. Unlock additional features and scale seamlessly to meet your team’s needs, ensuring your customers always receive the best experience.

Included in the Free Plan

The free plan includes the features you'll need to start helping your early customer base. Use all of these features together to help up to 50 contacts per month, via email, channels, live chat, or AI Answers.

Shared Inbox

You get 1 shared Inbox with unlimited users. You get unrestricted use of many of our Inbox features, like the ability to schedule a reply to send later, the option to snooze a conversation, and AI helpers like AI Drafts, AI Assist, and AI Summarize.
Create up to 10 Inbox views to sort conversations.
Use up to 100 tags to categorize conversations.
Have up to 10 saved replies ready to answer customers quickly and consistently.
Connect social media channels to handle Instagram and Facebook Messenger conversations in Help Scout.

Knowledge Base

Build 1 Docs site to hold your help documentation that can be managed by unlimited users, allowing your whole team to offer their own knowledge up.
Create as many collections, categories, and articles as you need.

Help Widget

Create a Beacon help widget that you can embed in your website or app to give your customers easy access to self-service options or to reach out to your team.
Enable AI Answers in Beacon to enable an interactive interface with your Docs knowledge base, allowing your customers to utilize self-service that makes it easy for them.
Offer live chat with your team and/or a contact form to send an email to your Inbox from your Beacon.

Messages

Have up to 10 Messages. Proactively send targeted notifications in your app or website anywhere Beacon is embedded.

Automation

Create up to 10 workflows to take automated actions on conversations as they meet your criteria.
Set up an Inbox auto reply that will send the reply you define to each to new conversation.

Reporting

Report on volume, responses, and customer happiness over the last 30 days.
Use report views to filter the data to create custom reports.

Security

All users can set up two-factor authentication to secure access to your account.

Contact Limits

Free accounts are limited to helping 50 contacts per monthly cycle.

When you reach that limit before your monthly cycle is up, you won't be able to reply to customers — using email, channels, chat, or AI Answers in Beacon — until the next cycle or you upgrade.

You'll still receive any emails your customers send during this time, you just won't be able to reply.

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

Email conversations with at least one reply
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

Note: You can interact with the same person across multiple channels, but they only count as one contact. The contact count resets to zero each monthly billing cycle.

Some additional clarifications:

Auto replies sent using the Inbox auto-reply feature do not count as a reply.
Automatic replies sent via workflows do not count if that is the only 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.

How to Upgrade

When you find that you need more advanced functionality, or if you're exceeding the 50 contact per month limit on a regular basis, it's time to upgrade.

Your Account Owner can upgrade anytime!

Click your avatar or initials in the right corner of the top navigation menu, then select Your Plan.
Click Manage your plan.

Choose Monthly or Annual billing, then choose the plan that best suits your needs. Note that the image below is for illustrative purposes only; actual plan details you see in your account may vary.