Help Scout Now Includes Unlimited Seats

2025 marks 14 years in business for Help Scout, and we recently made the most radical decision in our history: Help Scout no longer charges per seat. 

In fact, every plan we offer today — including the new free plan — includes unlimited seats (aka users) and access to all of our AI features.

Why make the change?

What businesses need from their customer support platforms has fundamentally changed.

For a long time, customer support teams have operated like cost centers, and the software followed suit. Companies developed what we call a “deflection mindset.” It was all about fewer tickets, higher automation, and lower costs. As long as CSAT is good, the team is doing its job.

However, the world’s most successful companies no longer operate that way. Companies with higher NPS scores grow more than 2x faster and have 40% higher retention (source). Word-of-mouth recommendations influence a staggering 74% of purchase decisions (source). In other words, delight drives growth. Your customer support platform should be in service of growth, not cost cutting.

Advances in AI have only widened the gap between what the market offers and what customers want. For the first time in 20+ years, the table stakes are changing.

This moment prompted "day one" thinking from our leadership team: What would we do differently if we were founding the company today? Answering that question compelled us to transform our business.

Delight is now a team sport

Charging per seat made sense in the deflection/cost-center era because it rewarded businesses for connecting fewer employees to the voice of the customer. But delight is now a team sport. Everyone has a role to play in customer happiness. By democratizing access to customer feedback, businesses can make better decisions and ultimately deliver better customer experiences.

We’ve experienced this firsthand at Help Scout. Since we don’t pay for our own product, every employee in the company has always had a login. Enabling folks across sales, product, and operations to collaborate and connect with customers is priceless, yet we were taxing any of our customers who wanted to experience the same benefits. 

So we went back to first principles. How can we empower our customers to embrace the delight mindset? We came up with three principles:

• Price on value instead of cost.

• Integrate AI at no extra charge.

• Offer a great free plan.

In November, we introduced a new pricing model that replaces seats with what we call “contacts helped.” At a high level, it's the number of people your team helps in a month. It’s not based on “tickets” or message counts. Multiple conversations with the same person still count as one contact.

Since usage-based billing can be tricky for a support team with seasonal periods, we also determine the contact tier based on your three-month trailing average instead of solely the last month. As a result, our new pricing is 34% less variable than our old, per-seat pricing.

Finally, the new metric enabled us to launch an industry-best free plan with unlimited seats and a ton of features included. It’s limited to 50 contacts, which is ideal for smaller teams.  We're very excited to have a great free plan again.

Customer migration

There are good reasons why companies don't change their business models after 14 years. It's the hardest thing we've ever done, and the most complicated part will be helping existing customers navigate the change. In short, it will be a multi-year process, and we'll do everything possible to ease any pressure it will cause.

We don't have a migration plan finalized yet — a post for another day — but as we've always done, existing customers will receive six months' notice before any changes are made to their plans. Customers with outsized increases can also expect increases to be capped.

Change is uncomfortable, especially when you’ve been doing things one way for so many years. However, we feel it’s necessary in this case and that it will enable us to better serve customers in the long term. We’re excited to see what the future holds.