tiny.help
$113 a month for three people.
That's Plus at $37.80 a seat billed annually, the cheapest tier where AI Drafts live. Ours is $29 flat for three sites and three people, with the drafting on the Claude account you already pay for.
Standard is $75 for the same three, without the drafting. Help Scout is good, and this page says so.
Two numbers and a tier
Help Scout price honestly and publish everything, which makes this an easy comparison to do fairly. The whole difference is that their number is per person and ours isn't.
Per user, per month
Standard, billed annually - $30 month to month. Two Inboxes, five Beacons, Docs, live chat, workflows and reporting. Up to 25 people, each at $25.
helpscout.com/pricingPer user, to get AI Drafts
Drafting starts at Plus, not Standard - $54 month to month. Unlimited there, and it's the tier that also removes “Powered by Help Scout” from the widget.
helpscout.com/pricingEverything, all in
Three sites, three people, every feature, each site branded as itself. Drafting runs on the Claude or ChatGPT plan you already pay for, so there's no AI line at all.
tiny.help/pricingTheir third meter is the fairest one in this market, and we'll say so: AI Answers is $0.75 a resolution, it only counts when the customer doesn't escalate, and you can set a hard monthly cap. Nobody else does it that cleanly.
The difference is the third person, and the tenth
Help Scout charge per user. We charge per plan, and from Studio up we stop counting people entirely. Same tiers, same annual rates, three team sizes.
Standard is genuinely cheap here, and it does more than we do. Plus is the like-for-like, because that's where the AI drafts your replies. Ours is $29, and it covers three sites.
Nothing has changed about the product - you've just hired. Ours is $79 on Studio for ten people, or fifty, and six sites with them.
Standard tops out at exactly 25 users, so this is its ceiling. Ours is $199 on Agency, with 25 client sites, and the head count still isn't a line on the invoice.
Per-user rates at annual billing, before any extra Inboxes. A part-timer who answers four tickets a week is a full seat on Help Scout - Plus and Pro include five and fifteen “light users” who can read and collaborate but not reply.
What it actually comes to
Help Scout at the cheapest tier that genuinely does the job, billed annually, with extra Inboxes where branded sites need them. We've led with Standard wherever Standard can do it.
| Them Help Scout | Per month |
|---|---|
| Standard × 3 users$25 a user billed annually, $30 month to month. One site needs one Inbox and one Beacon, both well inside Standard. | $63 |
| Help Scout Standard, with AI Assist but no AI Drafts | $63 |
| Them Or: Plus × 3 usersAI Drafts and AI Summarize start at Plus, $45 a user. This is the honest like-for-like against what we do, and it's unlimited. | $113 |
| Us tiny.help FreelancerThree sites and three people, every feature. Your own Claude or ChatGPT plan does the drafting. | $29 |
| Them Help Scout | Per month |
|---|---|
| Standard × 3 usersFive Beacons are included, so three branded widgets are fine. | $63 |
| One extra InboxStandard includes two. A third site with its own support address needs a third Inbox - $10 a month annually, $12 monthly. | $10 |
| Help Scout Standard, three branded sites | $73 |
| Them Or: Plus × 3 usersAI Drafts, and the tier that lets you take “Powered by Help Scout” off a client's widget. Five Inboxes included, so no extras. | $113 |
| Us tiny.help FreelancerThree sites included, each with its own name, colour and widget face. One inbox behind all of them, and no badge on any of them. | $29 |
| Them Help Scout | Per month |
|---|---|
| Plus × 10 usersStandard stops at five Beacons, so the sixth site's widget is what forces Plus here - not the head count. Standard for ten would have been $290 all in. | $378 |
| One extra InboxPlus includes five; six branded support addresses need a sixth. | $10 |
| Help Scout Plus, six branded sites | $388 |
| Us tiny.help StudioSix sites - and this is the plan where you stop counting people. Ten of them, or fifty. Same $79. | $79 |
| Them Help Scout | Per month |
|---|---|
| Plus × 25 usersStandard can hold 25 users but not 25 Beacons, so an agency at this size is on Plus whatever its head count. | $945 |
| Twenty extra InboxesFive included, twenty more at $10 each - one per client that wants its own support address. | $200 |
| Help Scout Plus, 25 clients branded as themselves | $1,145 |
| Them And Docs, if the clients want help centresPlus includes three Docs sites; the other 22 are $20 each. That's another $440 a month, and it's the one thing on this page we cannot do at any price. | +$440 |
| Us tiny.help AgencyTwenty-five sites, twenty-five people, each client branded as themselves. No knowledge base. More than 25 sites? Email John. | $199 |
Nothing here is a trick on their part. Help Scout publish every number, including the add-on prices, and at one or two people they are cheaper than we are. The gap opens because seats multiply and our plans don't - and it opens fastest for the studio with several client sites and a couple of part-timers.
Help Scout figures from helpscout.com/pricing, fetched 31 August 2026, at annual per-user rates - the cheapest way to buy it. We may have got some of this wrong.
Line by line
Help Scout wins a lot of these, and we've not hidden the ones they win. Read the bottom half before you read the top.
| tiny.help | Help Scout | |
|---|---|---|
| Price for 1 person | $29/mo, everything | $25/mo on Standard - cheaper than us |
| Price for 3 people | $29/mo, everything | $63/mo Standard, $113/mo Plus |
| Price for 10 people | $79/mo - head count isn't a line | $210/mo Standard, $378/mo Plus |
| Free plan | No - 14-day trial, card up front | Yes - 5 users, 100 contacts/mo, no live chat |
| Free trial | 14 days, card up front, cancel in one click | 15 days, no card, Standard and Plus |
| Three branded websites | Included on the $29 plan | Standard covers it - 3rd Inbox is +$10/mo |
| Six or more branded sites | Yes - Studio $79, Agency $199 | Beacons cap at 5 on Standard - needs Plus |
| Widget with no vendor badge | Yes - every plan | Plus and Pro only |
| Live chat widget | Yes - one script tag, 10 KB gzipped | Yes - Beacon, and it's good |
| Shared inbox | Yes - one across all sites | Yes - 2 to 10 Inboxes by tier |
| Email in and out | Yes - reply from your own inbox, it lands in their chat | Yes |
| Private notes, @mentions | Yes | Yes |
| Saved replies | Yes | Yes - unlimited on paid tiers |
| Assign to a teammate | Yes | Yes - plus round robin on Plus |
| See them typing before they send | Yes | Yes - in Beacon chat |
| Push notifications, phone app | Yes - installs as a PWA | Yes - iOS and Android apps |
| AI drafts a reply in your voice | Yes - every plan, your own Claude or ChatGPT | Yes - AI Drafts, Plus and up, unlimited |
| Whose AI, and what it can read | Yours - and via Claude Code it can read the codebase | Theirs - your past conversations and Docs |
| Answer from your terminal or phone AI | Yes - an MCP connector built for it | No - the Inbox is where you work |
| AI answering customers unattended | No - by design, a human approves every send | Yes - AI Answers, $0.75 a resolution, capped |
| Help centre / knowledge base | No - none, at any price | Yes - Docs, 2 to 5 branded sites |
| Workflows and automation | No | Yes - 150 basic to unlimited advanced |
| SLAs, office hours, routing | No | Yes - 1 basic policy on Standard up |
| Reporting and analytics | No | Yes - 2-year history, all-time on Plus |
| Tags, custom fields, snooze | No - starred, archive and block is the lot | Yes |
| CSAT and NPS surveys | No | Yes |
| Search and export your history | No full-text search, no export | Yes - search, CSV and Excel exports |
| WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger | No | Yes - Standard and up |
| Phone and SMS | No | Via Aircall integration |
| Public API and webhooks | No | Yes - 200 to 800 calls a minute |
| SSO/SAML, HIPAA | No | Yes - add-on, or included on Pro |
Help Scout plans, limits and capabilities as published on helpscout.com/pricing and their Docs, 31 August 2026.
We may well have got some of this wrong
Every Help Scout figure and feature here was read off their own pricing page and support documentation on 31 August 2026, at annual rates with the annual toggle on. Help Scout publish more of their pricing than almost anyone in this market, which makes them easy to compare honestly - but there are still per-tier caps, add-on Inboxes and Docs sites, and a Pro tier you can only buy through sales, so some of this needed a judgement about which tier honestly does a given job. This is our best effort, not gospel, and we're plainly not a neutral party.
Treat it as a guide, not a quote. Price your own case against helpscout.com/pricing before you decide anything, and note that for one or two people they may well come out cheaper than us. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, tell us - we'll correct it the same day and say what changed. This page is reviewed quarterly.
When you should stay on Help Scout
This is the longest version of this section we've written, because Help Scout is the closest thing to a product we'd have built ourselves.
Help Scout is not the villain of this page. They price without games, they publish every number, they include the AI that helps your own team instead of metering it, and they've been quietly good at this since 2011. Stay, or go there, if any of this is you:
- You're one person, or two. Standard is $25 a user. At one seat that's cheaper than our $29 and it does considerably more - Docs, reporting, workflows, CSAT, WhatsApp. Buy theirs. Our arithmetic only starts winning at the third person, and it wins properly at the tenth.
- A knowledge base is load-bearing. Docs gives you a branded, searchable help centre (two sites on Standard, five on Pro, unlimited articles, custom CSS), and it's what feeds their AI. We have nothing here. Not a smaller version: nothing. If deflecting questions with articles is part of your plan, this page ends for you here.
- You want AI Drafts on a subscription, not on your own account. Theirs is unlimited on Plus and there's nothing to connect, no key to manage, no separate bill. Ours needs you to already have Claude or ChatGPT; if you don't, that's another $20 a month and a setup step, and we'd rather say that than pretend the connector is free money.
- You want the AI to answer without you. AI Answers is the most honestly metered chatbot in this market - $0.75 a resolution, only charged when the customer doesn't escalate or ask again, with a hard monthly cap you set yourself and three months free to see what it does. Every reply on tiny.help waits for a person to press send. That is a design choice, and it's the wrong one for high volume.
- Anyone reads a report. Two years of history on Standard, all-time on Plus, custom views, CSV and Excel exports, CSAT and NPS. We have no reporting at all and no plans for any.
- You need the boring, serious things. Workflows, SLAs, office hours, tags, custom fields, snooze, round robin, a real API, SSO, HIPAA. Also: full-text search of your own history, and a way to export it. We don't have those last two either, and they matter more than people expect.
- You want to start at nothing. Their free plan is free forever - five users, 100 contacts a month, one Inbox, one Docs site. We have no free plan, and won't. If your volume genuinely fits inside 100 contacts a month, paying us anything is worse value than paying them nothing.
- Beacon is doing more than a chat bubble. It suggests help articles by page URL, carries contact forms, and drops into a site with one snippet. It's a better-thought-out widget than most, and if you're using the article suggestions we have no answer for that.
The honest summary: there are exactly two things this page is really about. Their price multiplies by the number of people on your team and ours doesn't. That's why they come out $4 cheaper than us at one person, and $371 dearer at ten on Plus. And their AI is theirs, reading your past tickets; ours is yours, and from Claude Code it can read the codebase the customer is asking about. If neither of those is your problem, stay where you are. You're on a good product and you're not being ripped off.
What moving actually looks like
No migration project. Run both for a fortnight and let the old conversations close on their own.
Swap the Beacon
Take the Beacon snippet out, put our script tag in, just before </body>. Each of your sites gets its own key, its own name and its own colour - and no badge along the bottom.
Point your support address here
Forward support@ at your desk address and email lands in the same inbox as the chat. Replies you send from your own inbox thread back into the visitor's chat window.
Connect the AI you already pay for
Paste a page of tone notes, connect Claude or ChatGPT, and every draft sounds like you. From Claude Code it can read the repo while it writes, which is the part AI Drafts can't do.
What doesn't come across: your conversation history, your saved replies, your workflows, your tags and custom fields, and, the big one, your Docs articles. We have no knowledge base to put them in, so if you have a help centre that customers actually use, moving means either killing it or hosting it somewhere else. Help Scout have a proper API and CSV exports, so the archive is genuinely yours to take; keep the account read-only until the last open conversation closes. We'd rather you noticed the Docs problem now than a fortnight in.
Who actually switches
This is for you if…
- There are three or more of you, and the seat count is the whole of your bill.
- You look after several client sites and the Beacon count or the Inbox add-ons keep creeping up.
- You already pay for Claude or ChatGPT and would rather the drafting ran there.
- Your support questions are about code, and you want the AI to read the repo before it answers.
- You never built the Docs site, never wrote the workflows, and never opened the reports.
- Part-timers answering the odd ticket are costing you a full seat each.
It isn't for you if…
- You're one person - Standard is $25 and does more than we do.
- Your Docs help centre is doing real work. We have no knowledge base at all.
- You want AI Answers resolving conversations while you sleep.
- Someone reads the reports, or the CSAT score is on a wall somewhere.
- Customers reach you on WhatsApp, Instagram or the phone.
- You need to search or export years of history, or an API to hang things off.
Questions.
Isn't Help Scout basically the same idea?
Closer than anyone else in this market, yes. Help Scout is calm, well made, priced without games, and it includes AI Drafts on Plus rather than metering them. Two things genuinely differ. Theirs is per user, so three people is three times the price and ten is ten; ours is flat, and from Studio up we stop counting people at all. And their drafting runs on Help Scout's model over your past conversations and help content, where ours runs on your own Claude or ChatGPT account - which means it can read your codebase from Claude Code while it writes the reply. That is a difference in kind. Everything else on this page is detail.
How much cheaper is tiny.help than Help Scout?
It depends on how many of you there are. For one person on one site, Help Scout Standard is $21 a month billed annually against our $29, and it does more than we do - buy theirs. For three people it is $63 on Standard, or $113 on Plus where AI Drafts live, against $29 flat for us. For ten people across six sites it is $388 on Plus against $79. The gap is per-seat arithmetic, not a discount. The full pricing is here.
Can I run several websites on Help Scout?
Yes, and better than most. Standard includes five Beacons and two Inboxes, so three or four branded widgets are fine; each extra Inbox is $10 a month billed annually. Two limits catch multi-site people out: Beacons stop at five on Standard, so a sixth site means Plus at $45 a user, and the “Powered by Help Scout” mark on the widget can only be removed on Plus and Pro. tiny.help includes three separately branded sites on the $29 plan, six on Studio and 25 on Agency, all behind one inbox and all unbranded.
Does Help Scout include AI, or is it an add-on?
Both, and they are clear about which is which. AI Assist (rewrite, shorten, translate) is on every paid plan. AI Drafts and AI Summarize start at Plus, $45 a user a month billed annually, and are unlimited there. AI Answers, the chatbot that resolves without a human, is $0.75 a resolution on any paid plan, only charges when the customer doesn't escalate, and lets you set a hard monthly spending cap. That is the fairest AI meter in this market. Ours has no meter because the drafting runs on the Claude or ChatGPT plan you already pay for.
What does Help Scout do that tiny.help doesn't?
A fair amount. Docs - a branded, searchable knowledge base we have no version of at all. AI Answers resolving tickets unattended. Workflows, SLAs, office hours, round robin routing, tags, custom fields, CSAT and NPS surveys, reporting with two-year or all-time history and CSV exports, conversation export, WhatsApp and Instagram and Messenger, a public API, SSO and HIPAA on the higher tiers, and a free plan that stays free. We have none of it. The honest version is up there.
Can I import my Help Scout conversations?
Not automatically. Help Scout has a proper API and CSV exports, so your history and your Docs articles are genuinely yours to take. Most people point the widget at tiny.help, forward the support address, and leave Help Scout read-only until the last open conversation closes. If your Docs site is doing real work, that alone is a reason to stay - we cannot host it.
A help desk that doesn't count your team.
Paste one script tag, invite everyone, connect the AI you already pay for. If it isn't better in a fortnight, cancel in one click.
$29 a month, every plan is everything. If Help Scout is the better buy for you, we'll say so.