Intercom pricing: seats plus Fin, and what a small store pays

Intercom charges in two parts: a monthly price for every seat, and $0.99 for each outcome Fin, its AI agent, delivers, which mostly means a resolved conversation. The seat part is easy to predict; the Fin part moves with your volume. Two Essential seats billed monthly and 1,000 Fin outcomes a month come to about $1,050.

Intercom sells under its own name, with Fin as its AI agent. Fin also has its own site, fin.ai, where it is sold to run on other helpdesks. Below are the plans, what counts as an outcome, three worked bills, and how to lower yours.

We make ChatPal, which is one of the options on this page, so weigh what we say about it accordingly. Prices were checked on Intercom's and Fin's pricing pages on 13 October 2026, in US dollars.

Plans and seats

Every plan includes unlimited live chat, support email and in-app chats. Email campaigns, SMS, WhatsApp and phone are pay-as-you-go on top.

Add-ons, per Intercom's pricing page:

• Copilot, the AI assistant for your agents: free for 10 conversations per agent a month, then $29 per agent a month billed annually or $35 billed monthly.
• Pro, for analysing and improving Fin: from $100 a month.
• Proactive Support Plus, for product tours, checklists, surveys and outbound messages: $99 a month for 500 messages.

Fin per resolution: what counts

Fin is billed per outcome, at $0.99, and only once per conversation, however many replies or actions it takes. Intercom counts an outcome when:

• the customer confirms their issue is resolved;
• the customer doesn't ask for more help after Fin responds;
• Fin completes a workflow (a Procedure), including handing the conversation to your team.

Fin's own pricing page adds two details. A qualified sales lead is a separate outcome at $9.99. And a conversation passed to your team without any outcome is free.

On the second point, Intercom's help center says a customer who leaves after Fin's answer counts as an assumed resolution and is charged, deducted if they come back for more help. Asking for a person doesn't count as an outcome. So if most customers leave after Fin's answer, outcomes sit close to the conversations Fin handles.

Fin without Intercom. On Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshworks, Gorgias and other helpdesks, Fin is $0.99 per outcome with no seat fees and a minimum of 50 outcomes a month, so at least $49.50.

Three example bills

A small store with 2 seats on Essential, billed monthly ($58 a month). We assumed every conversation Fin handles ends in one $0.99 outcome; that is ours, not Intercom's, and your rate will be a little lower if many conversations go to your team without one.

Billed annually, the seats drop to $38, saving $20 a month; Fin's price doesn't change. A team that needs Advanced for its workflow builder and team inboxes pays $198 a month for the same 2 seats billed monthly, so the 1,000-conversation month comes to $1,188, and a third agent adds $99. Copilot for both agents, past its 10 free conversations each, is another $70 a month billed monthly.

ChatPal counts each AI reply, and we assumed three replies per chat; count a week of your own chats to check. Unlike Fin, ChatPal counts replies on chats it later hands to a person, so if most of your conversations end with your team, per-outcome pricing charges less for those. At 3,000 chats a month you'd be past ChatPal's largest published plan, 4,000 replies for $120 a month, and would need an Enterprise quote, so compare both offers at that size.

When Intercom is the right fit

Intercom makes sense when the helpdesk itself does work for you:

• Your product is software. In-app chat, product tours, checklists and surveys reach users inside your product, which a store chat tool doesn't do.
• You have a support team, not one person. Multiple inboxes, round robin assignment, SLAs and workflow automation matter once three or more people answer.
• Fin's answers are good enough to pay per outcome. If Fin resolves most of what it handles, $0.99 can be less than an agent's time on the same conversation.

For a small store whose chats are mostly product, delivery and order questions, the seats include features you may not use, and Fin's bill rises with your volume.

Intercom and six alternatives

The same 1,000 conversations on other tools

Here is one month of 1,000 AI-handled conversations, the middle row above, priced on each tool's own page. Where a tool counts resolutions or interactions, we counted every conversation, the upper bound; where it counts replies, we assumed three per conversation.

• Intercom, 2 seats on Essential: $990 for Fin plus $58 of seats, $1,048 billed monthly.
• Fin on another helpdesk: $990, with no seat fees from Fin, plus whatever that helpdesk charges.
• Zendesk, 2 agents on Suite Team: $138 of seats billed monthly, with 10 automated resolutions included. The other 990 cost $1,980 pay-as-you-go or $1,485 committed. Accounts on Zendesk's newer resolution tiers pay only for Verified resolutions, so the figure can be lower.
• Gorgias, Pro with AI Agent: $550 for 2,000 tickets and 190 interactions, billed monthly. The other 810 are $810 at the $1.00 in Gorgias's FAQ or $1,215 at the $1.50 in its pricing page data, about $1,360 to $1,765 in all.
• Crisp Plus: $295 a month per workspace, with $75 of AI credits that Crisp puts at around 1,350 automated conversations. Essentials, at $95, covers around 450.
• Tidio: 1,000 Lyro conversations are $700 a month billed monthly, its largest published step.
• ChatPal: about 3,000 replies, which fits the $120 a month plan's 4,000.

At this volume the per-outcome and per-interaction tools cost the most in our list, even though they charge only for what the AI finishes. The flat-price tools charge for capacity, resolved or not, and cost less in this example as long as your month fits the plan.

Intercom or ChatPal

We'd choose Intercom if:

• your customers are users of your software, and you want in-app chat, product tours and surveys next to support;
• three or more people answer, and you need team inboxes, SLAs and assignment rules;
• you want to pay only when the AI finishes a conversation.

We'd choose ChatPal if:

• you run a store and most chats are about products, delivery and orders, on your website and on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger or Telegram;
• you sell on Shopify and want answers from your catalog, with order status for signed-in customers;
• you'd rather pay one flat monthly price than a fee per conversation. Meta bills WhatsApp replies past 1,000 a month; the assistant stops replying at 100% of monthly usage, and warns the owner and admins at 80%.

If that's you, the free plan's 100 replies a month let you put your most common questions to it before you change anything in Intercom. The plans are on the pricing page.

Lowering the bill

1. Bill annually. Essential drops from $29 to $19 a seat, Advanced from $99 to $85.
2. Use the free Lite seats. Advanced includes 20 and Expert 50. Check which colleagues can work on a Lite seat before you buy them a full one.
3. Set limits on Fin. Fin's site says it has configurable alerts and limits. Use them before a sale or a launch, when conversations spike.
4. Point Fin at fewer conversations. Keep it off chats your team must handle anyway, such as complaints or refunds, so they end without an outcome.
5. Apply for the startup program. Eligible early-stage companies get up to 93% off.
6. Run Fin on another helpdesk, or skip the seats. Fin on another helpdesk has no seat fees. If you don't need a helpdesk at all, a flat-price assistant on your website and messaging apps may cover the same chats for less: see Fin alternatives and how AI chatbot pricing models compare.