Help Scout Buyer's Checklist: What to Check Before You Sign

Before you sign for Help Scout, check six things that change the bill or rule the product out. Count every login, the Account Owner included, against the user caps: 25 on Standard, 50 on Plus, and a 10-user minimum on Pro. Confirm that your channels, CRM and routing needs do not push you to Plus. Put a monthly cap on Scout, the AI agent billed per resolution. Get written quotes for HIPAA, SSO and IP restrictions, which carry no published price. Then read the renewal clause. For most teams the checklist ends at Standard or Plus. The surprises sit in headcount jumps and contract terms.

This list covers the current per-user plans: Free, Standard, Plus and Pro. Help articles written for legacy contact-based plans describe accounts that are no longer sold, so a rule found there, such as unlimited light users, may not apply to a new account. Tick each check against your own numbers, then take the open items into the 15-day trial of Standard or Plus, which needs no card (Pro trials go through sales).

Headcount: count every login before you choose a plan

Help Scout bills per user, and every person with a login is a billable user, the Account Owner too. Customers never count. Standard costs $25 per user per month billed annually or $30 per user per month billed monthly, Plus $45 or $54, and Pro $75 or $90 ^[1]. Annual billing is about 17% cheaper, and paying monthly costs 20% more, by our arithmetic. The bill grows with every hire, so model next year's headcount rather than today's; the full pricing breakdown covers every add-on.

• Check the caps. Standard stops at 25 users and Plus at 50. At 25 users Standard costs $625 a month billed annually; a 26th user moves the whole team to Plus at $1,170 a month, by our arithmetic.
• Check the Pro floor. Pro needs at least 10 users, so a six-person team on Pro still pays for 10: $750 a month billed annually or $900 billed monthly, by our arithmetic.
• Check who only reads. Light users exist only on Plus (5 included, up to 25) and Pro (15 included, up to 50), and each extra one is $10 per light user per month billed annually or $12 billed monthly. They view conversations and collaborate, but cannot reply, be assigned, join teams, or use the API or the mobile app.
• Check the Free ceiling. Free is $0 for up to 5 users, 1 Inbox and 100 contacts a month, and at that limit the team cannot reply until the next cycle. Logged phone conversations count as contacts too.

Channels and workflows: find the plan your routine needs

The second check is whether your daily routine fits Standard or needs Plus. The step between them is $20 per user per month billed annually, or $100 a month for five users by our arithmetic, so list the features that would force the move before you compare anything else. Most teams find the trigger in one of three places: a Salesforce or HubSpot sidebar, custom fields for order or account data, or round-robin routing. None of those is on Standard.

• Live chat in Beacon, Messenger, Instagram DMs and WhatsApp start on Standard, while Free has email only.
• Native SMS, through your own Twilio account and number, starts on Plus; Standard connects SMS through an integration.
• Phone works only through integrations, and Aircall is a paid add-on on Standard and Plus.
• Custom fields (up to 10 per Inbox), Teams, company management and round-robin routing start on Plus. Load-balanced routing needs Pro.
• The Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Linear and GitHub integrations start on Plus.
• SLAs run from one basic policy on Standard to two policies with conditions on Plus and unlimited on Pro; workflows run 150, 500 and unlimited.
• Statuses are fixed at Active, Pending and Closed, with no custom statuses or ticket types, so plan tags or custom fields instead.
• Standard includes 2 Inboxes, Plus 5 and Pro 10; an extra Inbox is $10 per Inbox per month billed annually or $12 billed monthly.

Do not upgrade for Inboxes alone. Three extra Inboxes on Standard add $30 a month, while Plus adds $20 per user per month billed annually. From two users up, the extras cost less: five users pay $155 a month on Standard with three extra Inboxes against $225 on Plus, by our arithmetic. Upgrade when a feature from the list above is a daily need rather than a nice-to-have, and price the step for the whole team.

AI: decide what you will pay per answer

AI comes in two forms with two billing models. Agent-side tools are included in the plan: AI Assist, which rewrites, shortens or translates a reply, from Standard; AI Drafts and AI Summarize from Plus with no usage fee; and AI Topics, still in beta, on Plus and Pro. Scout (formerly AI Answers), the agent that answers customers, is metered through the Envoy add-on at $0.75 per resolution on Standard, Plus and Pro, on top of the per-user price and billed in arrears.

• Check the trial window. New accounts get three months of free, unlimited resolutions from the day the account is created, while existing customers who switch Scout on later get no trial.
• Check the break-even. About 33 resolutions a month cost as much as one Standard user billed annually, and 1,000 resolutions cost $750 a month, by our arithmetic.
• Set the cap. Account Owners and Administrators can set a monthly cap counted in resolutions; at the cap, Scout switches off until the next cycle and Beacon falls back to its other options.
• Check the reach. Scout works in Beacon chat and email, not on Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp or SMS, and it answers questions without taking actions such as order edits or record updates.

Security, HIPAA and where your data lives

Regulated buyers should settle this section with sales before the trial ends, because three of its add-ons have no published price. HIPAA is included on Pro and sold as an add-on on Plus; Free and Standard cannot get it. Every HIPAA account also needs a signed BAA, which Help Scout signs online and does not change per customer. AI features stay off until you also sign the AI Feature Healthcare Addendum. Docs may hold only non-sensitive content. Our healthcare guide covers inbox design for PHI.

• SSO/SAML and IP restrictions are included on Pro and sold as add-ons on Standard and Plus, while 2FA is on every plan.
• Hosting is AWS in the United States, with no EU-only data residency: the DPA allows processing wherever Help Scout or its sub-processors operate ^[2]. EU transfers rely on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, with Standard Contractual Clauses as the fallback.
• The DPA is part of the Terms and needs no signature, Help Scout does not sign custom DPAs, and its SOC 2 Type 2 report is available on request.
• Sub-processors include OpenAI and Anthropic for machine learning, both in the US, and change notices reach only customers who subscribe to the list.
• The Terms let Help Scout aggregate de-identified customer data into Training Datasets for its AI; you can opt out by email, and accounts with a signed BAA are opted out automatically.

Data in and out: migration, API and exports

Plan the exit on the same day you plan the entry. Imports run through the partner tool Import2, open to Owners and Administrators on Standard, Plus and Pro. Imports of up to 500,000 records are free; larger jobs cost $500 per 500,000 records, counting the first ^[3]. A 100-conversation sample import comes first. The import does not move users, Inbox settings, knowledge-base articles, saved replies, workflows, custom fields, ticket types or custom statuses. Budget time to rebuild them.

• Leaving Zendesk? Zendesk stopped issuing new API tokens on 27 Oct 2026, and all Support API tokens stop on 30 Apr 2027, so confirm the import method with Help Scout before you schedule the move.
• API limits are per account: 200 calls a minute on Standard, 400 on Plus, 800 on Pro and none on Free, with writes counting double. Reporting endpoints start on Plus; our API guide covers the rest.
• Exports in the app cover only some reports, as CSV or XLSX without thread contents, so conversations and Docs articles leave only through the API, and customers too apart from a CSV of names and emails that support sends the Account Owner on request.

Contract terms to read before you pay

The Terms of Service decide what an annual commitment costs when your needs change. Plans renew automatically for a term equal to the first one unless either side gives written notice of non-renewal at least 30 days before expiry ^[4]. The only refund is the 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment, monthly or annual. After that, partial months, annual payments and unused months are not refunded. Users can be added mid-term, prorated. The plan cannot shrink before renewal.

• Set a renewal reminder 45 to 60 days before an annual term ends.
• Cancellation is immediate and cannot be undone. Export first: Help Scout restores a cancelled account only on written request within 14 days.
• Liability is capped, under Help Scout's Terms of Service, at the greater of the fees paid in the preceding three months or $500, and disputes go to JAMS arbitration in Wilmington, Delaware.
• If Help Scout removes your plan or requires an upgrade, it gives at least 60 days' notice by email.

The bottom line

Help Scout clears this checklist most easily for an email-first team that stays under its plan caps and needs no Salesforce or HubSpot sidebar, custom fields or round-robin routing; Standard covers that routine. The checks that change the decision are the headcount jumps at 25 and 50 users, the 10-user floor on Pro, the per-resolution Scout meter and the unpriced security add-ons. Settle those in writing during the 15-day trial. Then calendar the 30-day renewal notice and keep an API export path ready.