What 7 helpdesks cost a small team
We priced miniDesk and 6 other helpdesks for three team sizes, from each vendor's published month-to-month rates in September 2026. For 5 seats and 375 AI conversations a month, miniDesk Starter costs $39. The cheapest of the others is Crisp at $95, and the most expensive is Zendesk at $870.
What the numbers show
- Startup, 5 seats and 375 AI conversations a month: miniDesk Starter costs $39. The cheapest alternative is Crisp at $95 (+145% against miniDesk), and the most expensive is Zendesk at $870 (+2,130% against miniDesk).
- Growing team, 8 seats and 2,250 AI conversations a month: miniDesk Growth costs $99. The cheapest alternative is Crisp at $333 (+235% against miniDesk), and the most expensive is Zendesk at $3,867 (+3,810% against miniDesk).
- Large support team, 25 seats and 12,000 AI conversations a month: miniDesk Scale costs $349. The cheapest alternative is tawk.to at $758 (+115% against miniDesk), and the most expensive is Zendesk at $19,538 (+5,500% against miniDesk).
Monthly cost for each team
USD per month at list price, with no annual discount. The line under each figure is the cost per AI conversation, which is the only way to read 7 different billing models against each other.
| Vendor | Startup5 seats, 375 AI conversations a month | Growing team8 seats, 2,250 AI conversations a month | Large support team25 seats, 12,000 AI conversations a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| miniDesk | $39$0.104 per AI conversation | $99$0.044 per AI conversation | $349$0.029 per AI conversation |
| Intercom | $566$1.509 per AI conversation | $2,540$1.129 per AI conversation | $12,855$1.071 per AI conversation |
| Zendesk | $870$2.320 per AI conversation | $3,867$1.719 per AI conversation | $19,538$1.628 per AI conversation |
| Crisp | $95$0.253 per AI conversation | $333$0.148 per AI conversation | $870$0.073 per AI conversation |
| Freshchat | $299$0.797 per AI conversation | $1,287$0.572 per AI conversation | $6,455$0.538 per AI conversation |
| tawk.to | $138$0.368 per AI conversation | $438$0.195 per AI conversation | $758$0.063 per AI conversation |
| Chatwoot | $208$0.555 per AI conversation | $437$0.194 per AI conversation | $3,179$0.265 per AI conversation |
How each figure was built
Every figure is arithmetic on the vendor's own published rates. Each line names the plan priced and how its AI is billed, so any one of them can be checked on its own.
Startup: 5 seats, 375 AI conversations a month
- miniDesk Starter, $39 a month per workspace, with every feature included and no charge per seat or per resolution.
- Crisp, about $95 a month: priced as Crisp Essentials at $95 a month, whose 500 included conversations cover all 375 Hugo handles. The rate is Crisp's own, printed beside the slider on their AI calculator as "Estimation based on $0.05 per conversation", and their help centre calls a full Hugo-handled conversation $0.05 to $0.10, so this is the bottom of that band too.
- tawk.to, about $138 a month: priced as tawk.to AI Assist Business at $99 a month for 5,000 message completions, plus $39 a month to remove their badge, with no per-agent charge at any size. Monthly rather than annual because we do not sell an annual plan, and their annual rate against our list price is not the same month. Counted at 3 completions per conversation, which is an assumption rather than a published rate and the one figure here you cannot check at source: their help centre counts a completion every time AI Assist generates a response, so a thread settled in four turns is four. Nobody in this category publishes turns per conversation, so 3 is triangulated from the vendors who bill on it and from the largest measured conversation corpora, and it deliberately leaves out the AI Commands and Smart Reply suggestions that draw on the same allowance. The tier prices and allowances are published in tawk.to's help centre, read September 2026; their pricing page states only the $29 entry price. The per-credit overage above each tier is the exception, taken from the plan picker inside their dashboard, and the only rate they publish is $30 per 1,000, which reads their bill higher. Every add-on is charged per property, so a second website is a second subscription.
- Chatwoot, about $208 a month: priced as Chatwoot Business at $39 an agent for 5 seats, with 500 Captain AI credits included, then $20 per 1,000 for the other 625. Business rather than their cheaper Startups because Startups keeps conversations for one year and the plan it is being compared with keeps them for 2, so pricing them there would be quoting a shorter-lived product than ours. Retention is the only feature the tier is matched on: their Business and Enterprise tiers also add voice, teams, automation rules, SSO and audit logs, and none of those is counted for, because we do not sell them either. The counter is worth stating, because it is a real one: a team that does not want the longer window can buy Startups at $19 an agent and pay a great deal less than this. What that team cannot do is buy it and keep 2 years of history, which is what the plan on the other side of this comparison includes. Counted at 3 credits per conversation, which is an assumption rather than a rate they publish: Chatwoot's own help centre says every action costs "1 credit per message", so a credit buys one AI reply and not one conversation, and the ratio between the two is the same one tawk.to's meter needs. That ratio covers the assistant's replies to a customer and nothing else. Their help centre bills copilot lookups, rephrase, summarise, suggest-a-reply, label suggestions, workflow model calls and audio transcription from the same pool, which is five of the six features Chatwoot's own Captain page advertises, and every one of them is counted at zero here because they publish no rate for it. Their $39 an agent is billed annually and they publish no month-to-month rate anywhere, so it is the one price in this comparison carrying a twelve-month commitment against plans of ours that carry none.
- Freshchat, about $299 a month: priced as Freshchat Growth at $23 a seat a month for 5 seats, the cheapest tier carrying Freddy AI Agent, which is their month-to-month rate rather than the $19 their page leads with on a yearly commitment. That $23 is the rate behind the monthly toggle on their pricing page rather than a figure printed in the table itself, which makes it the one number in this column a reader cannot read straight off the page. Plus $49 per 100 AI sessions, which is their own printed rate, where a session is "any unique interaction between an end-user and an AI agent" and not only a resolved one, and a day of chat with one customer rolls up into a single session. Their first 500 sessions are free, once per account rather than every month, so a first month is $245 cheaper than this and no month after it is. Session packs expire with the billing cycle and do not carry over.
- Intercom, about $566 a month: priced as Intercom Essential at $39 a seat a month for 5 seats, which is their month-to-month rate rather than the $29 their page leads with on a yearly commitment, plus $0.99 for each conversation Fin resolves, counted here as all 375 the AI handles. Resolutions are the subset Intercom charges for: a conversation Fin opens and hands to your team costs nothing beyond the seat, so counting every one of them as resolved is the dearest their bill can honestly be made to look.
- Zendesk, about $870 a month: priced as Zendesk Suite Team at $69 an agent month to month for 5 seats, the cheapest edition carrying both live chat and an AI agent, plus $1.50 for each of the 350 automated resolutions past the 25 Suite Team includes, counted here as all 375 the AI handles. Both figures are Zendesk's own: the seat price is in their pricing page's plan data and the resolution rate is in the "Compare all plan features" table, $1.50 committed and $2.00 pay as you go, on every plan. The committed rate is the one used, which means pre-buying 100 or more; a team that does not commit pays a third more. Resolutions are the subset Zendesk charges for, and they define it as a request "successfully resolved by the AI agent, without any escalation to a human agent", which is the same thing the resolved count means: since 18 May 2026 an escalated conversation is graded Assisted escalation and one the model cannot verify is graded Contained resolution, and Zendesk says neither draws down your allowance. The allowance itself is 5 per agent a month against an account-wide ceiling of 10,000 a year. Copilot is a further $50 an agent, Professional and up, and is not counted.
Growing team: 8 seats, 2,250 AI conversations a month
- miniDesk Growth, $99 a month per workspace, with every feature included and no charge per seat or per resolution.
- Crisp, about $333 a month: priced as Crisp Plus at $295 a month, which includes 1,500 of the 2,250 conversations Hugo handles, then $0.05 for each of the other 750. The rate is Crisp's own, printed beside the slider on their AI calculator as "Estimation based on $0.05 per conversation", and their help centre calls a full Hugo-handled conversation $0.05 to $0.10, so this is the bottom of that band too. Plus rather than the cheaper Essentials because Crisp's own AI calculator caps Essentials at 1,000 AI conversations a month and quotes Plus above it, whatever the seat count. Their help centre puts pay-as-you-go behind no plan gate, so Essentials with metered overage may be buyable in the product; it is not a quote Crisp's own page will give you at this volume, so this takes the one it does.
- Chatwoot, about $437 a month: priced as Chatwoot Business at $39 an agent for 8 seats, with 500 Captain AI credits included, then $20 per 1,000 for the other 6,250. Business rather than their cheaper Startups because Startups keeps conversations for one year and the plan it is being compared with keeps them for 2, so pricing them there would be quoting a shorter-lived product than ours. Retention is the only feature the tier is matched on: their Business and Enterprise tiers also add voice, teams, automation rules, SSO and audit logs, and none of those is counted for, because we do not sell them either. The counter is worth stating, because it is a real one: a team that does not want the longer window can buy Startups at $19 an agent and pay a great deal less than this. What that team cannot do is buy it and keep 2 years of history, which is what the plan on the other side of this comparison includes. Counted at 3 credits per conversation, which is an assumption rather than a rate they publish: Chatwoot's own help centre says every action costs "1 credit per message", so a credit buys one AI reply and not one conversation, and the ratio between the two is the same one tawk.to's meter needs. That ratio covers the assistant's replies to a customer and nothing else. Their help centre bills copilot lookups, rephrase, summarise, suggest-a-reply, label suggestions, workflow model calls and audio transcription from the same pool, which is five of the six features Chatwoot's own Captain page advertises, and every one of them is counted at zero here because they publish no rate for it. Their $39 an agent is billed annually and they publish no month-to-month rate anywhere, so it is the one price in this comparison carrying a twelve-month commitment against plans of ours that carry none.
- tawk.to, about $438 a month: priced as tawk.to AI Assist Enterprise at $399 a month for 20,000 message completions, plus $39 a month to remove their badge, with no per-agent charge at any size. Monthly rather than annual because we do not sell an annual plan, and their annual rate against our list price is not the same month. Counted at 3 completions per conversation, which is an assumption rather than a published rate and the one figure here you cannot check at source: their help centre counts a completion every time AI Assist generates a response, so a thread settled in four turns is four. Nobody in this category publishes turns per conversation, so 3 is triangulated from the vendors who bill on it and from the largest measured conversation corpora, and it deliberately leaves out the AI Commands and Smart Reply suggestions that draw on the same allowance. The tier prices and allowances are published in tawk.to's help centre, read September 2026; their pricing page states only the $29 entry price. The per-credit overage above each tier is the exception, taken from the plan picker inside their dashboard, and the only rate they publish is $30 per 1,000, which reads their bill higher. Every add-on is charged per property, so a second website is a second subscription.
- Freshchat, about $1,287 a month: priced as Freshchat Growth at $23 a seat a month for 8 seats, the cheapest tier carrying Freddy AI Agent, which is their month-to-month rate rather than the $19 their page leads with on a yearly commitment. That $23 is the rate behind the monthly toggle on their pricing page rather than a figure printed in the table itself, which makes it the one number in this column a reader cannot read straight off the page. Plus $49 per 100 AI sessions, which is their own printed rate, where a session is "any unique interaction between an end-user and an AI agent" and not only a resolved one, and a day of chat with one customer rolls up into a single session. Their first 500 sessions are free, once per account rather than every month, so a first month is $245 cheaper than this and no month after it is. Session packs expire with the billing cycle and do not carry over.
- Intercom, about $2,540 a month: priced as Intercom Essential at $39 a seat a month for 8 seats, which is their month-to-month rate rather than the $29 their page leads with on a yearly commitment, plus $0.99 for each conversation Fin resolves, counted here as all 2,250 the AI handles. Resolutions are the subset Intercom charges for: a conversation Fin opens and hands to your team costs nothing beyond the seat, so counting every one of them as resolved is the dearest their bill can honestly be made to look.
- Zendesk, about $3,867 a month: priced as Zendesk Suite Team at $69 an agent month to month for 8 seats, the cheapest edition carrying both live chat and an AI agent, plus $1.50 for each of the 2,210 automated resolutions past the 40 Suite Team includes, counted here as all 2,250 the AI handles. Both figures are Zendesk's own: the seat price is in their pricing page's plan data and the resolution rate is in the "Compare all plan features" table, $1.50 committed and $2.00 pay as you go, on every plan. The committed rate is the one used, which means pre-buying 100 or more; a team that does not commit pays a third more. Resolutions are the subset Zendesk charges for, and they define it as a request "successfully resolved by the AI agent, without any escalation to a human agent", which is the same thing the resolved count means: since 18 May 2026 an escalated conversation is graded Assisted escalation and one the model cannot verify is graded Contained resolution, and Zendesk says neither draws down your allowance. The allowance itself is 5 per agent a month against an account-wide ceiling of 10,000 a year. Copilot is a further $50 an agent, Professional and up, and is not counted.
Large support team: 25 seats, 12,000 AI conversations a month
- miniDesk Scale, $349 a month per workspace, with every feature included and no charge per seat or per resolution.
- tawk.to, about $758 a month: priced as tawk.to AI Assist Enterprise at $399 a month for 20,000 message completions, then $0.02 for each of 16,000 above it, plus $39 a month to remove their badge, with no per-agent charge at any size. Monthly rather than annual because we do not sell an annual plan, and their annual rate against our list price is not the same month. Counted at 3 completions per conversation, which is an assumption rather than a published rate and the one figure here you cannot check at source: their help centre counts a completion every time AI Assist generates a response, so a thread settled in four turns is four. Nobody in this category publishes turns per conversation, so 3 is triangulated from the vendors who bill on it and from the largest measured conversation corpora, and it deliberately leaves out the AI Commands and Smart Reply suggestions that draw on the same allowance. The tier prices and allowances are published in tawk.to's help centre, read September 2026; their pricing page states only the $29 entry price. The per-credit overage above each tier is the exception, taken from the plan picker inside their dashboard, and the only rate they publish is $30 per 1,000, which reads their bill higher. Every add-on is charged per property, so a second website is a second subscription.
- Crisp, about $870 a month: priced as Crisp Plus at $295 a month, plus $50 for agents beyond 20, which includes 1,500 of the 12,000 conversations Hugo handles, then $0.05 for each of the other 10,500. The rate is Crisp's own, printed beside the slider on their AI calculator as "Estimation based on $0.05 per conversation", and their help centre calls a full Hugo-handled conversation $0.05 to $0.10, so this is the bottom of that band too.
- Chatwoot, about $3,179 a month: priced as Chatwoot Enterprise at $99 an agent for 25 seats, with 800 Captain AI credits included, then $20 per 1,000 for the other 35,200. Enterprise rather than their cheaper Startups because Startups keeps conversations for one year and the plan it is being compared with keeps them for 3, so pricing them there would be quoting a shorter-lived product than ours. Retention is the only feature the tier is matched on: their Business and Enterprise tiers also add voice, teams, automation rules, SSO and audit logs, and none of those is counted for, because we do not sell them either. The counter is worth stating, because it is a real one: a team that does not want the longer window can buy Startups at $19 an agent and pay a great deal less than this. What that team cannot do is buy it and keep 3 years of history, which is what the plan on the other side of this comparison includes. Counted at 3 credits per conversation, which is an assumption rather than a rate they publish: Chatwoot's own help centre says every action costs "1 credit per message", so a credit buys one AI reply and not one conversation, and the ratio between the two is the same one tawk.to's meter needs. That ratio covers the assistant's replies to a customer and nothing else. Their help centre bills copilot lookups, rephrase, summarise, suggest-a-reply, label suggestions, workflow model calls and audio transcription from the same pool, which is five of the six features Chatwoot's own Captain page advertises, and every one of them is counted at zero here because they publish no rate for it. Their $99 an agent is billed annually and they publish no month-to-month rate anywhere, so it is the one price in this comparison carrying a twelve-month commitment against plans of ours that carry none.
- Freshchat, about $6,455 a month: priced as Freshchat Growth at $23 a seat a month for 25 seats, the cheapest tier carrying Freddy AI Agent, which is their month-to-month rate rather than the $19 their page leads with on a yearly commitment. That $23 is the rate behind the monthly toggle on their pricing page rather than a figure printed in the table itself, which makes it the one number in this column a reader cannot read straight off the page. Plus $49 per 100 AI sessions, which is their own printed rate, where a session is "any unique interaction between an end-user and an AI agent" and not only a resolved one, and a day of chat with one customer rolls up into a single session. Their first 500 sessions are free, once per account rather than every month, so a first month is $245 cheaper than this and no month after it is. Session packs expire with the billing cycle and do not carry over.
- Intercom, about $12,855 a month: priced as Intercom Essential at $39 a seat a month for 25 seats, which is their month-to-month rate rather than the $29 their page leads with on a yearly commitment, plus $0.99 for each conversation Fin resolves, counted here as all 12,000 the AI handles. Resolutions are the subset Intercom charges for: a conversation Fin opens and hands to your team costs nothing beyond the seat, so counting every one of them as resolved is the dearest their bill can honestly be made to look.
- Zendesk, about $19,538 a month: priced as Zendesk Suite Team at $69 an agent month to month for 25 seats, the cheapest edition carrying both live chat and an AI agent, plus $1.50 for each of the 11,875 automated resolutions past the 125 Suite Team includes, counted here as all 12,000 the AI handles. Both figures are Zendesk's own: the seat price is in their pricing page's plan data and the resolution rate is in the "Compare all plan features" table, $1.50 committed and $2.00 pay as you go, on every plan. The committed rate is the one used, which means pre-buying 100 or more; a team that does not commit pays a third more. Resolutions are the subset Zendesk charges for, and they define it as a request "successfully resolved by the AI agent, without any escalation to a human agent", which is the same thing the resolved count means: since 18 May 2026 an escalated conversation is graded Assisted escalation and one the model cannot verify is graded Contained resolution, and Zendesk says neither draws down your allowance. The allowance itself is 5 per agent a month against an account-wide ceiling of 10,000 a year. Copilot is a further $50 an agent, Professional and up, and is not counted.
Method
Every price is the vendor's own published list price in September 2026, in USD, read from their pricing page, or from their help centre where a rate is published only there. The links are below.
Month-to-month rates throughout. miniDesk sells no annual plan, so setting a rival's annual rate against our monthly price would measure the billing term rather than the price. Chatwoot is the one exception: it publishes no monthly rate.
Each vendor is priced on its cheapest plan that fits the team's seats and includes an AI agent. Volume is counted in AI conversations, the unit most of them bill their AI on.
Where a vendor charges per resolution, every AI conversation is counted as resolved. That is the most expensive reading their pricing can honestly carry, and each line above says so.
Intercom is $0.99 a resolution, counted on every AI conversation as if Fin resolved them all, so their figure is the highest it can honestly be. Zendesk is $1.50 a resolution, their pre-buy rate rather than the $2.00 without, counted on every AI conversation less the five a month Suite Team includes. Crisp is $0.05 a conversation, from their own calculator, which caps Essentials at 1,000 before quoting Plus. Freshchat bills every session, AI or not, so their figure is understated. tawk.to's tiers and its $39 badge removal come from their help centre, not their pricing page. Credits are counted at three a conversation, our assumption. Chatwoot publishes no monthly rate, so theirs is annual. Credits are counted at three a conversation, our assumption.
Checked against: Intercom pricing, Zendesk pricing, Crisp pricing, Freshchat pricing, tawk.to pricing, Chatwoot pricing
What this study does not measure
- Features. The 7 tools do not do the same things, and a cheaper plan can be the wrong one. This page compares price only.
- Taxes, currency conversion and negotiated discounts.
- Quieter months. The scenarios assume the AI handles the stated volume. On a metered plan a quieter month costs less; on miniDesk it costs the same.
- Change. Prices move, and every figure here is dated September 2026. Check each vendor's page before you decide.
What each plan includes, side by side, is on the comparison pages, and miniDesk's own plans are on the pricing page.
Download the data
Every figure on this page as one CSV file: the team, the vendor, the monthly price, the cost per AI conversation, the plan and assumption behind it, and the source.
Cite this study
miniDesk.ai, "What 7 helpdesks cost a small team", September 2026. https://minidesk.ai/en/helpdesk-pricing-study/
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