Intercom Pricing: The Complete Guide You Need to See

Intercom pricing shouldn’t be this confusing. 

I’m sorry, but this is true. If you think you just pick a plan and the number there is exactly what your monthly bill will look like…well, you’re in for a surprise. 

Once you try to figure out how much it will actually cost your customer support team, things get messy rather quickly.

Of course, no one will argue that Intercom is a robust tool that offers great value. But at what cost (I refer here both to the price and mental overload from all the calculations you are to make)?

What’s more, there are other customer support tools out there that offer similar core features with simpler pricing, fewer surprises, and much less mental overhead. 

Take HelpCrunch: pricing plans that start from only $15/mo per team member. Plus, you can get a plan with 5 AI agents for just $25/mo per team member. Yes, that’s what will be written on your receipt, period. Just sign up for a 14-day free trial to test before you commit.

Anyhow, are you ready to crack that murky secret called Intercom pricing?

What is Intercom?

Gone are the days when, perhaps, one of the most famous and highly demanded customer support features of Intercom was their Business Messenger, or as we mere mortals call it — live chat. Sure thing, the company still offers this customer support feature, saying you can customize it how you see fit: enhance it with different AI chatbots, apps, knowledge base articles, etc.

Plus, now, live chat is by default enhanced by an AI assistant, Intercom’s very own Copilot, which assists support agents in real time right inside the chat.

Today, the core of the platform is Fin, Intercom’s AI Agent, combined with the next-generation Helpdesk into one seamless service suite.

Intercom now presents Fin as the first point of contact, handling customer questions and actions, while the Helpdesk supports agents with AI-powered workflows for automation for more complex cases. 

Intercom offers a great number of other key features as well:

• Help desk software (Team Inbox)
• Basic CRM
• Email marketing (Outbound Messaging combined with multi-channel Campaigns)
• Knowledge hub (Help Center Articles)
• Product tours
• Bots
• Banners

Let’s now see what the cost of such all-inclusive AI-powered customer support by Intercom is.

Intercom prices overview

Currently, the Intercom customer service platform offers three main pricing packages: 

• Essential—$39/month per seat
• Advanced—$99/mo per seat
• Expert—$139/mo per seat.

Plus, you can opt for using the Intercom Fin AI Agent only with your existing helpdesk. The Intercom Fin pricing is $0.99 per resolution (the queries Fin resolves). Yes, things are already starting to get fun.

As I said, you should be cautious since these are not the final numbers you’ll see in your invoices. 

So, why exactly are Intercom fees so complicated and unpredictable? Well, you can’t just choose a subscription plan with all the features you need and pay for it. 

Remember that you will pay additional costs for every agent seat, almost every channel usage, and the number of Fin’s Resolutions. This complicates their pricing — you can’t predict your business growth and shouldn’t be “punished” for it. And! If you compare Intercom and Drift, the situation won’t be any different.

Why is Intercom so expensive, you will ask? Let’s dive a little deeper and see.

Intercom pricing plans explained

Time to actually ask the question: how much does Intercom cost? Long story short: you pay for a subscription plan you choose, either monthly or yearly.

There are three plans to choose from:

The Essential plan 

This plan costs $39/mo for every seat (billed monthly). It’s perfect for small customer support teams and ideal for using Intercom Fin (I want to remind you that even though Fin service is included in every plan, you pay for it separately based on the resolution number).

As per its name, the Essential plan covers the essentials:

• Messenger
• Shared inbox
• Ticketing system
• Pre-built reports
• Public help center
• Simple automations
• Fin AI Agent
• Slack integration for team workflows

Plus, all plans include unlimited live chat (so Intercom chat pricing is included in the plan), support email, in-app chats, banners, and tooltips.

Think of Essential as a pizza base: everything else costs extra. Usage across channels is charged separately, and once you start relying on AI resolutions or channel outreach more actively, the costs can grow quickly.

The Advanced plan

The Advanced plan is built for growing customer support teams that have outgrown the basics and want more automation and structure. It costs $99/mo for every seat (billed monthly).

Of course, it still includes Intercom Fin AI Agent, but now with additional tools to help with everyday support work and customer engagement.

On top of everything in Essential, you get:

• Multiple team inboxes to organize conversations by team or function
• A workflow automation builder
• Round-robin assignment
• A private and multilingual Help Center
• 20 free Lite seats for teammates who need limited access

This is where Intercom starts to feel more “enterprise-ready.” 

What’s more, in Intercom’s pricing model, each teammate who uses the platform needs a seat. All plans include full agent seats, while Advanced and Expert also come with lite seats for teammates who need limited access. The Advanced plan includes 20 lite seats. 

Lite seats are useful for roles like managers, product owners, or occasional contributors who need visibility into conversations but don’t actively handle support tickets. 

The Expert plan

The Expert plan costs $139/mo per seat and is designed for large support teams that need advanced collaboration, stronger security, and support for multiple brands.

It includes Fin AI Agent and everything from the Advanced plan, with extra features aimed at enterprise-scale operations.

In addition to all Essential and Advanced features, you get:

• SSO and identity management
• HIPAA support for compliance-heavy businesses
• Service level agreements (SLAs)
• Multibrand Messenger and Help Center to support multiple products from one workspace
• 50 free Lite seats for teammates with limited access

This plan targets complex organizations with high support demands.

You can use the pricing calculator on Intercom’s website to predict an approximate cost.

Usage-based fees: Fin AI Agent, WhatsApp messages, and other channels

Intercom’s pricing doesn’t stop at the base subscription. While every plan includes unlimited live chat, inbound email, in-app messages, banners, and tooltips, many of the most commonly used channels are billed separately.

In practice, this means you’ll start paying extra once you actively use features like the Fin AI Agent, WhatsApp, SMS, phone calls, or outbound messaging. And the more these channels are used, the faster usage-based fees begin to stack up.

To be more precise, here are the channels that require an additional usage-based payment:

• SMS 
• Bulk emails
• Bulk WhatsApp messages
• Phone calls
• Messages (Posts, Product Tours, Mobile Push, Mobile Carousels, and Surveys).

Now, buckle up because we are going on a roller coaster of Intercom’s usage-based charges, or hidden costs, as one might call them. Spoiler: it can get pretty complicated.

I won’t bore you with breaking down every single channel’s spending tiers (yes, you read this right, there are multiple tiers for many channels).

In short, the more you use a channel, the lower the cost per unit becomes. The monthly bill is calculated by combining usage across multiple tiers. 

Plus, some channels, such as SMS and phone calls, have different rates depending on the region.

As a result, predicting channel cost, like Intercom WhatsApp pricing, can quickly become tricky, especially when usage grows across several channels at once. Yes, you do need a spreadsheet, a calculator, and a strong coffee to at least approximate what awaits your budget this month. Or embrace the surprise.

What’s more, let’s remember that Intercom Fin pricing is $0.99 for each Resolution. That is, you will be charged any time the customer confirms that the Intercom Fin’s response solved their issue, or the customer doesn’t ask for further help after the AI’s final reply. 

So, if you are planning to use it or any other usage-based tools, expect your final bill to be (a bit) higher than just the chosen plan rate.

Add-ons: Intercom Product Tours pricing and other options

Did you get tired yet? Hold on, that’s not all the complexities of Intercom support pricing.

If you want to use Intercom to the fullest, you will need to pay separately for add-ons.

At the moment, there are two add-ons:

• Proactive Support Plus
• Copilot 

Proactive Support Plus

Proactive Support Plus is an add-on package and includes a bunch of extra features like News, Checklists, Product Tours, Posts, Mobile carousels, Surveys, and others. 

With this add-on, there’s a base monthly cost, and some channels will add usage-based fees on top. 

For example, you need to pay both the flat add-on fee and the extra usage fee to send mobile pushes or show posts.

It will cost your budget an additional $99/month for a minimum of 500 messages sent/mo.

Copilot AI assistant

Copilot AI assistant is another add-on you can purchase. It comes with limited usage per user by default in each plan (maximum 10 conversations per month), with an option to unlock unlimited access per seat as an add-on.

To have more than 10 conversations per month, you can sign up for unlimited Copilot usage. That will take $35 per seat per month out of your pocket.

So, how do you feel after reading this? I dare you to calculate that monthly invoice for Intercom. It’s quite a task!

Intercom billing example

With Intercom, the price range can go over $1000. The Pro and Premium versions come with a set of prices for the subscription, agent seats, and add-ons. These prices can vary according to one’s requirements. It is common to find people paying anywhere between $500 to $1000 for Intercom’s incredible features. — Brian Hardesty with On Display Signs

So, how much is Intercom going to charge your business? 

It will be easier to understand the Intercom final price if we look at an example.

Imagine a growing SaaS company that chooses the Advanced plan. The team has five support agents, all using full seats. With a seat price of $99 per month, the base cost for seats alone comes to $495/month.

Since Intercom is now clearly AI-first, the company also uses Fin AI Agent to handle customer questions. Let’s say Fin resolves 500 conversations per month. At $0.99 per Fin resolution, that adds $495/month on top of the seat cost.

Apart from the support, the team sends some outbound messages, around 500 outreach emails per month. It adds roughly $16/month.

When you put it all together, the monthly bill looks like this:

• Seats: $495
• Fin AI resolutions: $495
• Outreach emails: ~$16

That brings the total to around $1006 per month.

And this is still a relatively simple setup: no phone support, no SMS, no WhatsApp outreach, and no heavy campaign usage. Yet the final price is already more than double the “per-seat” number you see at first glance. This is exactly where Intercom pricing starts to feel hard to predict, especially as usage grows across multiple channels at the same time.

Intercom alternatives: HelpCrunch for seamless support with transparent pricing

Just by looking at Intercom pricing, it’s pretty obvious that Intercom can be somewhat too expensive for many companies and startups. 

Luckily, Intercom alternatives are not scarce, as hundreds of tools provide live chat, ticketing, knowledge base, and even chatbots either separately or in one package.

HelpCrunch is the closest when it comes to Intercom alternatives. It offers similar tools and features that Intercom does, including the AI agents:

• Live chat with the ability to send automated and targeted chat messages.
• AI-powered shared inbox with custom inboxes, real-time customer data, team collaboration features, etc.
• AI Agents that can automate up to 80% of queries.
• Chatbot with a no-code visual editor and bot templates that you can launch immediately.
• Integrated knowledge base with built-in SEO features, which is included in ALL pricing plans.
• Email marketing tools for automated trigger-based and manual campaigns.
• Popups for capturing more leads on your website.

HelpCrunch pricing options at a glance

HelpCrunch offers three pricing plans, with no unpredictable or hidden payments. You will know the final bill at the beginning of the month.

The Basic plan is just $15/mo/team member if billed monthly. You’ll get a live chat, a knowledge base, and an AI-powered shared inbox for this price. If you need email functionality, you can choose the limit (1,000, 5,000, etc.) ahead of time and know how much you will pay. That’s it, really.

If you’re looking for a premium all-in-one solution for your marketing, support, and sales team, it’s better to go with the Pro subscription, which costs $25/mo/team member if billed monthly. 

Ten team members will cost only $250/mo in total. Now, the HelpCrunch vs Intercom comparison gets even more vivid: compare the prices to those $999999/mo (to eternity) for the latter. 

This plan gives you access to 5 AI agents and 50 AI conversations already included in the plan. How amazing is that? Say you need more AI agent resolutions, you can get as many as 100 for $29.00 or 500 for $125.00. Now compare this to the staggering $99.00 for 100 and $495.00 for 500 from Intercom! That’s way more than a few bucks saved for you, huh?

The Unlimited pricing plan costs $620/month (if billed monthly), and with it, you get the whole nine yards — unlimited team members, auto messages, popups, and chatbot flows, to name a few. Plus 50, 000 emails and unlimited AI agents included!

Bottom line: Is Intercom worth it for customer service?

Despite its complicated, unpredictable, and often impractical prices, Intercom can significantly help your business. But so can other similar customer service platforms, like HelpCrunch. The only difference is that with HelpCrunch, you can be sure you will pay exactly what’s stated on their pricing, not a cent more. That is why, before rushing into anything with Intercom, just sign up for a 14-day free trial and try it.

FAQs

How does Intercom pricing work?

Intercom uses a subscription-based pricing model. The total cost depends on your chosen plan, the number of seats, and the add-ons you use. Core plans cover messaging and support features, while advanced capabilities like an AI assistant, Fin, are priced separately or scale with usage.

Are there any additional charges in the Intercom cost?

Yes. In addition to the base subscription, Intercom applies usage-based charges. Costs can increase depending on how much you use certain features, such as Intercom Fin AI resolutions, outbound messages, or other activity-based tools. 

Does Intercom offer discounts?

Yes, there is a special program for early-stage startups. In the first year, startups get a 90% discount and 300 free Intercom Fin resolutions per month. The discount drops to 50% in year two with 150 free Fin resolutions, and to 25% in year three with 75 free resolutions included monthly.

Are there free plans for business in Intercom?

All the Intercom plans are paid. You can get a free trial for 14 days.