Tidio vs Help Scout: billed by conversation, or by person

What the record says

The unit is the whole story here, so start there. Help Scout's ladder is $25, $45 and $75 per user per month billed annually — Standard, Plus and Pro. Add a person and the bill goes up by that amount whether or not the volume changes. Tidio's ladder counts conversations instead: Starter is €24.17 a month with 100 billable conversations, Growth starts at €49.17 from 250. Add a person and nothing happens to the bill; add customers and it moves.

That produces two opposite failure modes. A five-person shop where everyone answers the occasional message pays $125 a month on Help Scout Standard and €24.17 on Tidio Starter — a difference of roughly five to one, for identical work. A single-person business fielding 400 conversations a month pays $25 on Help Scout and has already climbed past Tidio Starter's 100-conversation allowance into Growth territory. Neither model is more honest; they are priced for different shapes of business, and the crossover depends on your conversations-per-agent ratio rather than on either company's marketing.

The annual discounts are, unusually, identical and both accurately labelled. Tidio's switch says '2 MONTHS FREE' and delivers exactly that: €290.04 a year against €348 paid monthly, which is 16.65%. Help Scout's says '-16%' and delivers 16.67% — $300 against $360, $540 against $648, $900 against $1,080 — so it rounds the number down rather than up. After a run of vendors whose discount labels overstated their arithmetic, both of these check out.

AI is metered separately on both, in two different currencies of usage. Help Scout charges $0.75 per resolution for AI Answers — you pay when the bot actually closes something, which is at least an outcome you can audit. Tidio includes 50 Lyro AI Agent conversations on Starter, and the page describes that as a one-off allowance rather than a monthly one, so it is a sample rather than a running budget. Neither headline price includes meaningful AI capacity.

Help Scout's extras are the ones most likely to surprise you, because they are structural rather than optional. Inboxes are capped by tier — 2 on Standard, 5 on Plus, 10 on Pro — with additional inboxes at $10 a month each, and additional sites at $20. If you support three brands from one account, you are paying for inboxes on top of agents, and that cost scales with your business rather than your team.

Tidio's equivalent uncertainty is that half its ladder is not a fixed price at all. Growth is published as 'Starts at €49.17' and Plus as 'Starts at €300', both rising with conversation volume. We can tell you the floor and we cannot tell you the rate, because the page does not print one. For a site built on quoting exact numbers that is a real limitation, and it is worth saying plainly: if your volume is high, the only way to know what Tidio costs is to ask them.

On free access the two differ completely. Tidio publishes a standing free tier at €0 in the same table as its paid plans, plus a 7-day trial on the paid ones. Help Scout's pricing page publishes no free tier — the entry is a trial, and its top Pro tier does not even offer that, replacing 'Try for Free' with 'Book a Demo'. If you want to run a small volume of support at no cost indefinitely, only one of these two lets you.

One currency caveat that limits the headline comparison. Tidio returned euros to us and Help Scout returned dollars, from the same connection, both localising by visitor. We have not converted between them. The €24.17 against $25 comparison is directional rather than exact — but the structural point, that one bills per conversation and the other per person, holds in any currency and is the thing that will actually decide your bill.