Is Help Scout Free? The $0 Plan, Its Limits and the 15-Day Trial

Yes: Help Scout Free costs $0, with firm limits

Help Scout does have a free plan. Help Scout Free costs $0 for up to 5 users, with no time limit stated and no payment method needed.^[1] In exchange you get one shared Inbox, one Docs site capped at 10 articles, one Beacon widget and 100 contacts a month. That last number is the real ceiling. Free suits a founder and a few teammates answering email at low volume. It does not suit a team that needs live chat, social channels, automation or AI Assist. Those start on Standard, the first paid plan.

The rest of the allowance is small but usable. Free includes 10 saved replies, 10 tags, 30 days of report history and one integration. The everyday inbox tools are all there: Inbox auto reply, snooze, send later, collision detection so two people do not answer the same customer, customer profiles and two-factor authentication. The iOS and Android apps work on Free as well. The Beacon on Free gives you a contact form plus Docs search, which is enough for a basic help widget on your site. One cosmetic cost remains. Every outgoing email carries a Help Scout footer that you cannot remove on this plan.

The 100-contact ceiling is the limit that bites

A contact is a person who got a reply from your team during the month. Repeat conversations with the same person in that month count once, and auto-replies do not count. Phone conversations created in Help Scout count too, so a team that logs calls burns through the allowance faster.^[2] When the account reaches 100 contacts, nobody on the team can reply by email, chat or any other channel until the next cycle starts or the account upgrades. Incoming email keeps arriving. Nothing is lost. Customers simply wait.

Put the number in daily terms. Over a 30-day month, 100 contacts is about 3 new people a day, by our arithmetic, and five users sharing the cap get 20 people each. A side project or a small consultancy can live inside that. A store with a launch, a seasonal spike or a busy support week cannot, because the cap stops replies in the middle of the cycle rather than slowing them down. Only the Account Owner can upgrade Free to a paid plan, on monthly or annual billing. If that person is away when the cap hits, replies stay blocked.

What the Free plan leaves out

Free is email only. It has no live chat, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp or SMS, and no phone integrations. The organizing tools that make a shared inbox scale are missing too: Views, custom fields, customer properties, company management, routing, SLAs, workflows and office hours. Without workflows, every tag and every assignment is manual. That is fine for a few dozen conversations a week. It becomes tedious once several people share a queue and you need rules that file, assign and escalate conversations without anyone touching them.

The AI writing tools and the technical layer are absent as well. AI Assist starts on Standard, while AI Drafts and AI Summarize start on Plus. Free also lacks Messages and surveys, custom reports, exports, API access, webhooks, the Docs API, custom Docs branding and Restricted Docs. The Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira and Linear apps need Plus or Pro. HIPAA, SSO/SAML and IP restrictions are not offered on Free at all. If any of these is a requirement on day one, skip Free and go straight to a trial of the plan that has it.

Read the legal status too. Help Scout's Terms provide free and trial accounts as is, with no support obligation, and allow Help Scout to terminate free accounts at its discretion.^[3] In practice the pricing matrix still lists standard email support on Free, and the weekly live classes are open to everyone. Even so, a team whose revenue depends on its support inbox should not rest that inbox on an account the vendor owes nothing. Treat Free as a starting point, not a contract.

The 15-day trial is a separate offer

The trial and the free plan do different jobs. The trial runs 15 days on Standard or Plus, with every feature of that plan and no credit card. Pro trials go through Help Scout's sales team instead. Use the trial to test what Free cannot show you: live chat in the Beacon, workflows, Views, and on Plus, custom fields, round-robin routing, AI Drafts and AI Summarize. Help Scout does not publish what happens to a trial that ends without a card. Decide before day 15 which plan you will pay for, and with how many logins.

AI agents follow their own clock. Scout (formerly AI Answers), Help Scout's AI agent, is billed at $0.75 per resolution on Standard, Plus and Pro, on top of the per-user price and in arrears. New accounts get three months of free, unlimited resolutions, counted from the day the account is created. Existing customers who switch Scout on later get no trial. The practical consequence is timing. If AI deflection matters to you, test it early, because the three months run whether or not you use them.

Moving up: what Standard costs and how to pay

Standard costs $25 per user per month billed annually, or $30 per user per month billed monthly. Cost grows with headcount, because every person with a login is a billable user, the Account Owner included; the full plan math sits in our Help Scout pricing guide. By our arithmetic, five users on Standard come to $125 a month billed annually ($1,500 a year) or $150 a month billed monthly. Annual billing is about 17% less than monthly, and monthly is 20% more.

The billing choice is a break-even question. One annual Standard seat costs $300 a year, the same as ten months at $30. If you might stop or switch plans before month ten, monthly costs less. If you will stay the full year, annual wins. Annual also locks you in: refunds come only under the 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment, the plan cannot be reduced mid-term, and renewal is automatic unless written notice is given at least 30 days before the term ends.

Standard unlocks the main gaps: live chat, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Views, customer properties, 150 workflows, AI Assist, Messages, custom reports, exports and API access at 200 calls a minute. Plus costs $45 per user per month billed annually or $54 billed monthly. It adds custom fields, Teams, round-robin routing, AI Drafts, AI Summarize, CRM and issue-tracker apps, and light users who view conversations and collaborate without a full seat.

Two programs can cut the bill. Help Scout for Good gives non-profits and B Corporations a 10% lifetime discount, with proof of status, and cause-based organizations working on human rights, environmental sustainability or underrepresentation in tech can apply for up to 100% off. The startup program gives six months free, Scout included, to new customers that are incorporated tech startups under two years old with under $1 million in ARR.^[4] Check both before paying list price.

How the other help desks handle free

Among the help desks in our catalog, free access varies widely. Zoho Desk has a Free plan at $0 for 3 users with no time limit, and its 15-day trial needs no card and moves the account to Free automatically when it ends. Freshdesk has no self-serve free plan; it can move a small account into its Free program, up to 2 agents, through Customer Success, and its 14-day trial with Enterprise features needs no card. Zendesk has no free plan and offers a 14-day trial with no card.

Gorgias has no free plan either. Its lowest plan, Starter, costs $10 a month billed monthly for the whole account, with 50 tickets and 3 user seats, after a 7-day trial with no card. Gorgias prices by tickets per account, so headcount works differently there. LiveChat has no free plan either; its 14-day trial of the Text Essential or Growth plan needs no card (LiveChat pricing). Measured by seats, then, Help Scout Free allows the most users of any free option in this group. Zoho Desk's Free plan is the only other one you can sign up for yourself. Our Help Scout alternatives guide compares paid plans, and our Zoho Desk alternatives piece covers Zoho's free tier in context.

The bottom line

Help Scout is free in a real, usable sense: $0 for up to 5 users, one Inbox, one Docs site and 100 contacts a month, with no stated time limit. That is enough for low-volume email support and a small knowledge base. The 100-contact cap is the deciding number, because at the limit replies stop until the next cycle. Teams that need chat, social channels, workflows or AI Assist should run the 15-day Standard or Plus trial instead, then pay monthly unless they expect to stay at least ten months.