The Freshchat alternative that does not sell AI by the block

miniDesk is a Freshchat alternative that includes the AI in the plan instead of selling it in blocks of sessions. Freshchat is free for up to ten agents without AI; once their AI answers, you pay for seats plus every 100 AI sessions. miniDesk is one flat price per workspace, from $39 a month for 5 seats with 375 AI conversations.

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  • Free plan, no card
  • AI on every plan
  • One flat price per workspace

Begin with the element that settles it for many teams: Freshchat is free for up to ten agents, and if you want a shared inbox with no AI, accept it. We cannot beat free and will not attempt to. The comparison begins when you want the AI. Freddy AI Agent starts on Growth, $23 an agent monthly, and meters at $49 per 100 sessions, which is $0.49 a session where a session is "any unique interaction between an end-user and an AI agent" and not merely one it resolved. Sessions are sold in blocks of a hundred and expire with your billing cycle. A copilot for your own agents is absent from Growth entirely: it is $29 a seat on Pro and above. Ours is flat per workspace with AI and copilot on every plan, free one included.

Ten agents free is a superior free tier to ours, and we will not pretend otherwise

Freshchat's free plan admits up to ten agents. Ours admits one. If your requirement is a shared inbox that a whole compact team can access without a card, theirs is the straightforward answer and nothing below this point on the page alters that. What the free tier excludes is Freddy AI Agent, so nothing on it responds to a customer for you. That is the dividing line the comparison rests on: their free plan outperforms ours at equipping a team with an inbox, and ours outperforms theirs at responding to customers, because our free plan runs AI on 75 conversations monthly sourced from your own documents. Also worth noting: Freshchat is one product in a suite. If you want ticketing plus chat together, Freshworks sells Freshdesk Omni and that is a separate page with separate pricing from what this comparison is based on.

The full comparison

Arranged in four groups, following the sequence a buyer follows. Capabilities come before costs, because cheaper than what is the first question a pricing comparison must settle.

Channels

  • Live chat widget on your site

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included

  • Shared email inbox

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included

  • Web form, separate from the chat widget

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Not available

AI

  • AI that answers customers on its own

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included

  • Answers drawn from your own documents

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included

  • Agent-assist copilot in the inbox

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included, on a higher planhigher plan

Developer

  • REST API

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included

  • MCP server, published and supported

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Not available

What the price covers

  • The AI costs nothing beyond the plan price

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included, then billed by usebilled by use

  • A free plan with the AI on it

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Not available

  • Unlimited free conversations

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Included

  • Adding a teammate costs nothing

    miniDesk
    Included
    Freshchat
    Not available
  • included
  • costs more than the plan
  • not available

Checked against each vendor's own published documentation, September 2026.

What you actually pay at scale

Three actual teams, priced from each vendor's own published page. Freshchat is quoted on Growth, the cheapest tier carrying Freddy AI Agent, plus $49 for every 100 AI sessions at their own printed rate. Their first 500 sessions are free once per account rather than monthly, so a first month lands $245 under these figures and no month after does. Drag the sliders to plug in your own figures.

Your numbers

$39miniDesk$0.104 each$299Freshchat$0.797 each

miniDesk Starter, one flat price per workspace, sized by the 375 AI conversations you set above. Freshchat is priced on the cheapest tier that fits these seats and has an AI agent answering customers, at their month-to-month rate wherever they publish one, because we sell no annual plan to hold an annual rate against. Freshchat is cheaper on a yearly commitment, so this is the dearer of their two rates and the only one comparable to ours.

Three real teams

Startup

5 seats, 375 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Starter, all in
$39
Freshchat
~$299
+665%

Growing team

8 seats, 2,250 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Growth, all in
$99
Freshchat
~$1,287
+1,200%

Large support team

25 seats, 12,000 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Scale, all in
$349
Freshchat
~$6,455
+1,750%

Each vendor's own list prices, September 2026, in USD, on the cheapest plan that fits the seats and includes an AI agent. Monthly rates where published, so no annual discount. Volumes count the conversations the AI handles. Freshchat bills every session, AI or not, so their figure is understated. Check their pricing pages before you decide.

Checked against: Freshchat pricing

Which one should you actually buy?

You want a shared inbox for up to ten people with no AI

Freshchat is free for ten agents and we are one. No math on this page beats that. Accept their free tier, and return if the day comes when you want something responding to customers while nobody monitors the inbox.

Pick Freshchat

You are already within the Freshworks suite

If your team runs Freshdesk, Freshsales, or Freshservice, Freshchat sits alongside them with one login and one invoice, and their AI spans the suite. We are a support inbox with AI and an API, and we do not integrate with any of that. Remaining in one suite saves real admin time, and that is a legitimate reason to pick theirs.

Pick Freshchat

The AI is handling meaningful volume

Freddy charges $0.49 a session and a session is any interaction, so a customer who poses a question the AI cannot resolve costs the same as one it does. Eight agents on 2,250 AI conversations monthly is $1,287 on Growth versus $99 on ours, and ours does not fluctuate if the AI has a busy month. That gap is not a discount, it is two distinct billing units.

Pick miniDesk

You want a copilot assisting your own agents

Freddy AI Copilot is $29 an agent monthly on top of the seat, and it begins on Pro rather than Growth, so an agent with a copilot is $59 plus $29 monthly before a single AI session is charged. Ours is on every plan including the free one, at no additional cost, and so is the MCP server that lets Claude or Cursor operate the inbox directly. Freshchat publishes an API and no MCP server.

Pick miniDesk

Questions, answered honestly

Yes, for up to ten agents, and it is the most generous free tier of any vendor on this site. What it does not carry is Freddy AI Agent, which begins on Growth. So the free plan is a genuinely free shared inbox for a compact team, and it is not a free AI agent. Ours is the reverse: one seat, unlimited conversations, and AI handling 75 of them monthly from your own documents.

Their own wording is "any unique interaction between an end-user and an AI agent". For chat, everything one customer does within a 24-hour window from opening the session rolls into one billable session. The part worth a second read is that it does not have to be resolved. Intercom and Zendesk charge for the outcome, at $0.99 and $1.50 a resolution; Freshchat charges for the attempt. A customer the AI cannot assist costs the same as one it resolves.

$49 per 100 sessions, printed on their pricing page, which is $0.49 apiece. The first 500 are free but that grant is once per account rather than monthly, so it reduces $245 from your first month and zero from any month after. Packs are purchased in blocks of a hundred and expire with your payment cycle, so on monthly billing anything unused at month-end is lost. Buying ahead and buying short both penalize you.

No. They publish a REST API, which is sufficient to build against, and there is no first-party MCP server, so an AI client cannot operate a Freshchat inbox without you writing the integration. Ours ships on every plan including the free one, with no call quota, so you can aim Claude or Cursor at the workspace and request it to triage today's conversations in natural language.

Ours, at every volume in the chart above, and the cause is the AI rather than the seats. Five agents on 375 AI conversations is $299 on Growth versus $39 on our Starter. Eight on 2,250 is $1,287 versus $99. Twenty-five on 12,000 is $6,455 versus $349. Below that, at zero AI and up to ten agents, Freshchat is free and we are not, which is the one scenario where they prevail outright and it is a frequent one.

Because $19 is their annual commitment and we sell none. Every vendor on this site is priced month to month so the terms align, and Freshchat's monthly rate for Growth is $23. It is the one figure in this comparison you cannot read directly off their page, because their pricing table displays annual rates and conceals monthly ones behind a toggle. Click Monthly on their page and you should see $23, $59, and $95. If you discover otherwise, let us know and we will fix it, which is what occurred the last two times someone verified our math against a vendor's own page.

There is no one-click importer and we will not claim there is. The piece that counts is the knowledge base, and ours is constructed from your own documents rather than imported, which takes an afternoon. Conversation history remains on Freshchat, which for most teams switching turns out to be acceptable.

Other comparisons we have written

Alternativevs IntercomFin bills $0.99 every time it resolves something. Ours is in the plan.Compare
Alternativevs ZendeskPer agent, plus add-ons, plus $1.50 to $2.00 for every AI resolution.Compare
Alternativevs CrispThe closest on price. The difference is the MCP server and the free plan.Compare
Alternativevs tawk.toFree platform, but the AI agent is a $29 a month add-on billed per message.Compare
Alternativevs ChatwootOpen source and free to self-host. Their cloud bills per agent and per AI credit.Compare

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