If your store is doing fewer than 30 or 40 tickets a month, you probably don’t need any of these yet. Gmail with a shared label and a Shopify sidebar extension will carry you until the queue starts eating into real time. The reason to put a line in the P&L for a helpdesk is sustained volume: back-to-back WISMO questions, returns that stack up during a sale, Instagram DMs that go unanswered for a day and turn into chargebacks. That’s the problem these four tools solve.
Who this is for
This guide is for owner-operators and small teams running a Shopify DTC store (two to about fifteen people) whose support work has outgrown an inbox. If most of your inbound is pre-sale chat on the storefront, skip to Tidio; the Starter plan is the easiest place to start, and Lyro will handle the FAQ layer. If you do more order volume than chat volume (hundreds of orders a week, meaningful refund and address-change work), skip to Gorgias; it’s the Shopify-first option. If you run more than one Shopify store from the same team, Re:amaze’s Pro plan is the only option here with real multi-brand support at $49/user. And if your work looks more like email support than live chat, Help Scout is the cleanest inbox in the category.
Our pick: Gorgias
Gorgias is the right answer for a clear reason in the category: it’s the Shopify-first helpdesk, with the pricing page noting that Gorgias powers customer conversations for 40% of Shopify brands.
Pricing is ticket-based rather than purely per-seat. The pricing page shows four published tiers: Starter at $10/mo (50 tickets, 30 automated interactions), Basic at $90/mo monthly or $77/mo annual (300 tickets, 30 automated interactions), Pro at $550/mo monthly or $471/mo annual (2,000 tickets, 190 automated interactions), and Advanced at $1,430/mo monthly or $1,227/mo annual (5,000 tickets, 530 automated interactions), with Enterprise custom above that.
Annual billing brings the price down. Gorgias discounts annual plans by roughly 14%, so Basic drops from $90 to $77, Pro from $550 to $471, and Advanced from $1,430 to $1,227 per month. For a two- or three-person store adding a holiday-season hire, that’s the correct structure: you pay for the work you do, not for who logs in to do it.
The honest trade-off is the AI meter. Every paid plan breaks out the AI Agent as a separate line on top of the helpdesk: $30/mo on Starter, $27/mo on Basic, $171/mo on Pro, and $477/mo on Advanced on the pricing page, with a bundle of automated interactions at each tier (30 on Starter and Basic, 190 on Pro, 530 on Advanced). Per the AI Agent FAQ, you’re not charged an automated interaction for conversations handed over to a human. The thing to watch is that AI-resolved conversations still consume your ticket allowance, so the AI line sits on top of the ticket line rather than replacing it.
For a small store, the right play is to turn the AI Agent on cautiously, start with a tight automation rule set, and watch both meters weekly. The ticket economics are reasonable; the AI economics need discipline.
The free starting point: Tidio
If you want to find out whether AI deflection is going to work on your store before you commit real money, Tidio is where to start. Tidio’s Starter plan is $24.17/month billed annually and includes 100 billable conversations, up to 10 seats, and a one-time pool of 50 Lyro AI conversations so you can trial the AI agent without a separate purchase. The paid Lyro add-on starts at $32.50/month annually for 50 Lyro conversations and scales up through conversation packs. The Starter plan doesn’t charge per seat, which is unusually honest for the price band.
The AI piece is Lyro. Tidio reports Lyro can resolve up to 67 percent of common questions on an FAQ-heavy knowledge base, which lines up with what independent reviewers see on small stores whose top tickets are sizing, shipping ETAs, and “do you ship to Canada.”
The thing to know going in is the three-meter structure. Cost runs on two meters: billable conversations and Lyro AI conversations. Flows (the automation builder) is a third add-on if you want it, starting at $24.17/month annually for 2,000 visitors reached. A realistic starting point is the Starter plan plus a Lyro quota, landing around $55 to $60 per month on annual billing. Just know that if your traffic grows, Tidio will push you up tiers on conversation volume, not on seat count.
Shopify depth is lighter than Gorgias’s. Tidio surfaces order context in chat but isn’t a Shopify-first product. For a store doing serious refund and address-change work, Tidio is the cheapest way to pressure-test AI deflection before migrating to Gorgias, not the long-term home.
The flat-rate option: Re:amaze
Re:amaze is the pick when you want a predictable per-seat bill and no runaway AI meter. Monthly: Basic $29/user, Pro $49/user, Plus $69/user; annual (10% off): Basic $26.10/user, Pro $44.10/user, Plus $62.10/user. There’s also a flat option. The Starter plan is an interesting option for very small operations. At $59 flat per month for unlimited agents, it’s cheaper than Basic if you have more than two team members. You’re limited to 500 responded conversations per month. Go over that, and you’ll need to upgrade.
The specific reason a small Shopify owner picks Re:amaze over Gorgias is multi-brand support. The Pro plan at $49 per user per month adds multi-brand capabilities, SMS and voice channels, and advanced reporting. You can manage multiple storefronts in one account, which is useful for agencies and holding companies. That’s unusual at $49/user; Gorgias puts multi-store on its own ladder. If you run two or three Shopify stores from the same team, Pro is often the cheapest honest answer.
Two caveats to budget for. First, the AI story is lighter than Gorgias’s or Tidio’s. Re:amaze AI Agent resolutions are bundled per user per month at 5 on Basic, 10 on Pro, and 20 on Plus, with additional resolutions billed at $0.85 each on the pricing page. Heavy AI deflection shows up as an overage line rather than forcing a plan upgrade, which is predictable but can add up. Second, SMS and voice are listed as channels on Pro and Plus, but you’ll want to confirm how messaging and call usage is priced before you turn them on.
The clean-inbox option: Help Scout
Help Scout is the right pick for a service-leaning Shopify brand (subscriptions, bespoke orders, high-touch support) whose work looks more like email than live chat. Help Scout pricing is built around four plans: Free ($0, up to 5 users, 1 Inbox, 100 contacts/mo), Standard ($25/user/mo), Plus ($45/user/mo), and Pro ($75/user/mo) on annual billing, or $30, $54, and $90 if you pay monthly. The free plan is real: five users, one inbox, and 100 contacts a month, enough for a solo founder to run their support out of until volume forces the move to Standard.
The AI meter is the clearest in this guide. AI Answers is Help Scout’s autonomous, customer-facing chatbot, and it’s priced as a usage add-on at $0.75 per resolution, billed monthly on top of your seats. It’s available on Standard, Plus, and Pro, all at the same rate. And it bills honestly: per Help Scout’s FAQ, a resolution is only counted when the customer receives an AI response and doesn’t escalate, search the knowledge base, ask more questions, or select “I still need help.” You’ll only be charged for one resolution per conversation, even if AI Answers responds to multiple questions. You can set monthly spending caps to prevent runaway costs, and new accounts get a three-month free trial of unlimited AI Answers resolutions.
The sticker-vs-real-bill gap is still real. Five Plus seats cost $225/mo. Resolve 1,000 chats a month with AI Answers and that’s another $750, for a real bill near $975/mo. The AI line, not the seat line, is now the bigger half of the invoice. Set the spending cap on day one. The bigger limitation for ecommerce specifically is that Help Scout is a general-purpose shared inbox, not a Shopify-first product. If your tickets are mostly conversational and policy-driven (returns within window, exchange questions, product care), Help Scout is a cleaner reading experience than any of the others. If your tickets are heavily order-driven, Gorgias is the better fit.
How to choose between them
The decision tree is shorter than the comparison tables make it look.
- If your store does enough order volume that refund, address-change, and cancellation work is the top of your queue, pick Gorgias, start on Basic, and keep the AI Agent off until you have at least 300 tickets of knowledge-base data to train against.
- If you’re a chat-first store with a thin FAQ layer and you want to find out whether AI deflection pays before spending real money, start on Tidio’s Starter plan, burn the 50 Lyro trial conversations, and only add the paid Lyro pack if deflection sticks.
- If you run two or more Shopify stores from the same team and want one flat per-seat bill, pick Re:amaze Pro at $49/user.
- If your support looks more like email than live chat and you want the simplest AI meter in the category, pick Help Scout, set the AI Answers spending cap on day one, and leave the Shopify-specific workflows for an app in the sidebar.
Only one of these should sit in your stack. We also wouldn’t stand up a helpdesk in isolation. Pair it with the other post-purchase tools small Shopify stores lean on: a dedicated AI returns management app to keep refund work out of the ticket queue entirely, an AI SMS platform for transactional and recovery messages that your helpdesk shouldn’t be writing, and an AI post-purchase survey app to catch the “I had a problem but didn’t bother to email” cohort before it churns silently.
