Is Gorgias Free? No Free Plan, a 7-Day Trial and Starter Costs

No. Gorgias has no free plan and no zero-cost tier. What it offers instead is a 7-day free trial that asks for no payment details and opens every feature.^[1] After the trial, the cheapest step is Starter at $10 a month for the whole account, billed monthly only, with 50 tickets and 3 user seats. So Gorgias is cheap to start but never free to run. If you need a help desk that costs nothing for good, it is the wrong tool. If you sell on Shopify and can judge a help desk in one busy week, the trial is enough to decide.

What the 7-day trial actually lets you do

Signing up starts the trial at once, with no card on file and every feature switched on. The help center adds two limits that shape the week.^[2] Outbound email ticket messages are capped at 20 a day, 150 a week and 600 for the whole trial. And you cannot create a help center until the trial ends, even though the Help Center comes at no extra cost on every paid plan. Everything else is open: the unified inbox, chat, Facebook and Instagram, rules, macros, views and statistics.

Those caps matter more than the seven days. A store that answers 100 emails a day would hit the daily cap after 20 of them. You cannot load-test email during the trial. Use the week for what the trial measures well: connect your store, see order data next to each conversation, build the rules and macros you would run every day, and route chat and social messages into one inbox. Judge how fast your team works in it. Leave volume questions for the pricing math below, where the real bill gets decided.

When the week ends: what you keep

Setup made during the trial is preserved until you upgrade to a paid plan. Rules, macros, views and integrations do not vanish on day eight. That gives a team room to finish a buying decision without rebuilding from scratch. The clock that matters is longer: an account that never upgrades is permanently deleted, with its data, after 90 days. Waiting is fine. Waiting forever is not.

Once you pay, the terms change shape. Plans renew automatically, annual plans need written notice at least 30 days before the term ends, fees are non-refundable under the Master Subscription Agreement except where the law requires or at Gorgias's discretion, and uninstalling the Shopify app does not cancel anything; our Gorgias pricing guide covers each rule. If you go annual, set a reminder 45 to 60 days before renewal.

The cheapest paid step: Starter at $10 a month

The account is priced by billable tickets, not by people. A billable ticket is a conversation with at least one message sent from the helpdesk by a human agent, a Rule or AI Agent, and it counts once however long the thread runs. Seats are a cap. They are not a price: Starter allows 3 user seats, Basic and higher allow 500. Adding a fourth teammate means moving to Basic. Volume drives the bill, not headcount, so the first question for any small store is how many conversations it answers each month.

Starter plus overage reaches Basic's $60 monthly price at 175 tickets a month, by our arithmetic. Below that line, Starter is the cheaper choice. Above it, Basic wins, and Basic at 400 tickets costs $100 a month on monthly billing. Starter has no annual option. Annual billing begins on Basic and costs about 17% less than paying monthly. Gorgias publishes no pause at the ticket limit, so overage simply accrues. Basic also unlocks BigCommerce, business hours and email-history import, which Starter lacks.

What stays free once you pay

Several pieces carry no extra fee, and one costs nothing even without a plan. Gorgias Academy is completely free and runs on its own account, separate from the helpdesk, even with no active Gorgias plan.^[3] Its courses are self-paced and certification programs end with a shareable certificate. Inside a paid account, the native Help Center, Gorgias MCP and Gaia add nothing to the bill, though Gaia is in open beta and may not yet be available to every account. MCP connects outside assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT, works without AI Agent, and Gorgias calls it open beta. Gaia, the assistant inside Gorgias, is also in open beta on every plan and may not yet reach every account.

Two channel extras cost money later, even when they look free at first. The WhatsApp app is free to install on every Helpdesk plan, and a WhatsApp ticket becomes billable once an agent sends a public reply. Proactive chat campaigns are a separate line on the bill: Convert is the paid campaigns product, billed per click, so budget for it on top of the Helpdesk plan if campaigns are part of how you sell.

Plenty of traffic never touches the bill. Conversations with no reply from the helpdesk, tags and internal notes, spam, newsletters and auto-responders (filtered automatically), imported emails you do not answer, and test conversations in the AI Agent Playground all stay unbilled. One exception catches teams: a Rule auto-reply makes the ticket billable. Replies after a quiet spell also open a new ticket, after 10 days on email and 3 days on chat, SMS and voice.

AI Agent: free to try, metered after

Gorgias's Fall 2026 release says AI Agent can be tried free, and it publishes no length for that trial. Test conversations in the Playground are not billed either. After that, AI Agent is its own line on the bill, and it works only with a connected Shopify store. Starter with AI Agent costs $40 a month billed monthly and includes 30 automated interactions. Basic with AI Agent costs $90 a month billed monthly or $77 a month billed annually. Included interactions work out to $1.00 each on monthly billing and $0.90 on annual billing.

Past the included amount, every plan pays $1.50 per automated interaction. Each AI Agent resolution also counts as a billable helpdesk ticket, so it uses one of the plan's tickets as well. An interaction counts as automated only if the shopper does not reach a human within 72 hours. Starter can buy AI Agent but gets neither Actions nor brand voice and guardrails; both start on Basic with AI Agent. For a store on Starter, that matters. The cheapest AI setup can answer questions but cannot cancel or edit an order.

Where a free help desk actually exists

If zero cost is the hard requirement, Help Scout is the clearest option. It keeps a real free tier. Its Free plan covers 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site, with 100 contacts a month and 30 days of reporting history.^[4] Help Scout's paid Standard plan is listed at $25 per user a month, with a 15-day trial and no card. Freshdesk has no self-serve free plan; new buyers get a 14-day trial with Enterprise features and no card, and Customer Success can move a small account into its Free program for up to 2 agents, as our Freshdesk free plan guide explains.

Zendesk has no free plan either and runs a 14-day trial with no card for up to 5 people. Re:amaze and eDesk also offer 14-day trials without a card. Gorgias's week is half that. Seven days is tight. What the shorter trial buys is a help desk built around store data: Shopify orders sit next to every conversation on every plan. Our Gorgias alternatives roundup weighs these tools by billing model, since tickets, agents and outcomes reward very different teams.

The bottom line

Gorgias is not free, and it never claims to be. You get one week with every feature, no card and an outbound email cap, then Starter at $10 a month, billed monthly only, which suits a Shopify store answering fewer than 175 tickets a month. Above that, Basic is cheaper. AI Agent can be tried free, but once it runs, each resolution carries an automation fee and a ticket. Use the trial to test workflow, not volume. If a permanent free tier matters more than store data in the inbox, Help Scout's Free plan is the honest alternative.