Intercom Pricing: No-BS Breakdown for Every Company Size

Intercom is a customer service software that was released in 2011 at a time when CS software was just starting to gain its legs. It gained a huge market share due to features that weren’t widely available on other platforms, like live chat and email marketing functions.  

That being said, there’s always been one point of contention amongst users since Intercom’s inception –  its pricing. Not only is it expensive, but there are so many different aspects to the pricing that it can become incredibly confusing to users. 

Thankfully, we here at Customerly are here to help! We’ve developed this guide to take you through the ins and outs of Intercom’s pricing structure, ensuring that you know what you’ll be paying for and what you’ll get for your money. 

And if you’re looking for a simpler pricing model, You can calculate your fees right here on our pricing page before paying a penny. We’re all about transparency, and we know our SaaS customers appreciate that about us. Without further ado, let’s take a look at Intercom pricing! 

In this article, we’ll delve into Intercom’s pricing, including:

• Breakdown of the plans and main feature-sets
• How Intercom calculates its pricing
• What factors can affect the price
• Pricing add-ons
• Costs and company size pricing

This is going to be a long one. Let’s go!

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a comprehensive customer service software that unifies customer interactions with consistent and automated messaging. It comes with a variety of tools and add-ons to streamline customer communications, allowing you to talk to users through various channels like SMS, WhatsApp, automated chatbots, and more. 

Intercom Solutions

An important aspect of Intercom’s pricing is understanding its solutions. These act almost as an add-on package, and choosing one or more will incur additional costs. Let’s break each of them down:

• Support: Intercom’s Support solution allows businesses to deliver exceptional in-context support to their customers for faster resolutions.

• Engage: This solution lets you automatically reach out to your customers whenever they’re most likely to engage with you. The onboarding process, for example, can be tailored to each individual.

• Convert: This facilitates fast communication with website visitors and ensures their questions are answered accurately. Intercom’s Convert uses intelligent bots to route customers based on a set of rules.

Fin: Advanced AI

Another add-on that can incur an additional cost but can be essential to customer support teams is Fin, one of the more sophisticated AIs on the market. Its main purpose is to resolve the more simple customer queries, creating more time for support teams to deal with more pressing issues. 

Intercom Pricing Overview

Intercom comes with three plans:

• Essential – $29 per seat/month (if billed annually)
• Advanced – $85 per seat/month 
• Expert – $132 per seat/month 

On the face of it, it looks simple enough, but don’t be fooled! There are multiple factors that can affect the overall price, even on the starter plan, so even that $79 per month isn’t exactly concrete! 

Let’s break down these factors in a little more detail: 

• Intercom Solutions – These are essentially three sets of features that focus on customer support, engagement, and conversions. Generally, one of these packs will add around $100 to your monthly bill. 
• Seats – The number of customer service agents who can use Intercom. Prices for seats depend on the plan you choose and are also affected by your choice of Intercom solutions. 
• People Reached – The number of people reached with your outbound messages. For the Starter plan, you can reach 1,000 people. Keep in mind that if you go over that limit (even by one), you’ll be charged for another 1,000 reaches (usually around $50 per). 
• Customer Resolutions – If you’re using Intercom’s AI, Fin, you’ll be charged $0.99 for each resolution. 
• Add-ons – Aside from the Intercom Solutions, there’re also individual add-ons you can include in your plan. You’ll either be charged a flat rate or based on the number of agents using an add-on. Prices can range anywhere from $9 to $200 based on the kinds of add-ons your business requires. 

As you can see, nailing down a concrete estimate of prices is almost impossible, as there are so many options to choose from that can affect the price. Even if you’ve got a quote from Intercom on your monthly charge, resolutions and going over your people-reached limit can drastically change what you’d have to pay. 

How Does Intercom Calculate Price?

Before diving into an in-depth overview of the pricing, it’s important to understand how Intercom calculates its costs. Prices are highly personalized, taking into account not only the size of your business but also several key factors:

• Fin AI Resolutions – Resolutions are charged at $0.99 each. Unlike traditional models that charge per answer or deflection, Intercom only charges you for successful resolutions, meaning you pay for actual results. While this ensures you get value for what you pay, it can also make it challenging to predict monthly costs in advance, especially as your support volume fluctuates.
• Seats – Seats refer to the number of individuals within your team who use Intercom. Each plan charges differently per seat, and the cost can increase depending on the features and add-ons you choose. For instance:
  • The Essential plan costs $29 per seat per month.
  • The Advanced plan is priced at $85 per seat per month.
  • The Expert plan charges $132 per seat per month.
  • Additional seats in specialized add-ons, such as Fin AI Copilot, can cost $29 per agent per month for unlimited usage.
• Proactive Support Plus – Adding advanced in-app and outbound support features costs $99 per month. This includes tools like product tours, surveys, and other customer engagement features, which can drive up your total cost depending on your usage.
• Usage-Based Channels – Charges for channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Phone are based on actual usage, with rates varying by channel:
  • Email campaigns range from $0.00025 to $0.045 per email sent.
  • SMS costs $0.01 to $0.09 per SMS sent/received.
  • WhatsApp charges $0.03 to $0.10 per conversation.
  • Phone services (including voice and video calls) are billed at $0.0035 per minute.

As you can see, several factors influence Intercom’s pricing, making it challenging to provide a one-size-fits-all estimate. Costs can fluctuate based on your company’s specific requirements, usage levels, and the number of seats or add-ons you choose.

How Intercom’s Plans Work

Another slightly confusing aspect of Intercom is its plan structure. 

As explained above, there are three plans. 

There are also three products, which we discussed at the beginning of the article: Support, Engage, and Convert. Each product has its own selection of tools and features. But the features you get with each product will vary based on the plan you go with. Each product also has a set of add-ons you can include in your plans. 

For example, the banner messaging feature belongs to Intercom’s Engage solution. It’s available as an add-on for the Pro and Premium plans only. 

Intercom Messenger, on the other hand, is included in all plans and is part of Intercom Support.

Intercom Plans and Pricing Structure

Now that we’ve broken down how prices are calculated, we can start discussing the actual prices! It’s important to note that prices can vary depending on your company’s requirements. Generally, you should expect to pay anywhere between $29 and $1,584 per month per seat, depending on the plan and additional features you choose.

Essential Plan

Intercom’s Essential plan is designed for individuals, startups, and small businesses looking for a straightforward and affordable customer support solution. It’s the most basic plan, making it accessible for those who need essential customer support features without the complexity or cost of more advanced plans.

Key Features

• Fin AI Copilot for customer service – Get rapid responses to customer queries with the Fin AI Copilot, included with limited usage.
• Intercom Messenger – Send branded messages to customers for a personalized experience throughout the customer journey.
• Shared Inbox – Combine messages from all your channels into one inbox to streamline customer support.
• Basic help center – Create a public help center where customers can find answers to their queries.
• Ticketing system – Manage and track customer issues efficiently with a robust ticketing system.
• Saved replies – Store and reuse responses to common customer queries.
• Company and behavioral data – Track customers and personalize experiences based on their actions.

The Essential plan costs $29 per seat per month, or $348 per year when billed annually. This includes access to core features, and additional usage can be managed via optional add-ons.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Affordable starting costs
• Good selection of essential features
• Easy to set up and use for small teams
• Free trial available

Cons:

• Limited advanced automation and AI features
• No access to multiple team inboxes
• Some features like custom reports and SSO are unavailable

Advanced Plan

The Advanced plan is tailored for growing support teams that require more powerful automation tools and AI-driven features. This plan offers a balance of cost and advanced functionality, making it ideal for medium-sized businesses looking to scale their customer support operations.

Key Features

• Advanced chatbots and automations – Create personalized and detailed workflows to enhance customer interactions.
• Multiple team inboxes – Manage multiple inboxes for different teams to improve collaboration.
• Workflows for advanced automations – Design complex workflows to automate repetitive tasks.
• Proactive Support – Send automated, in-context messages to customers before they reach out.
• Fin AI Copilot – Unlimited usage included, providing AI assistance across all customer interactions.
• Salesforce integration – Integrate with Salesforce to streamline customer relationship management.

The Advanced plan costs $85 per seat per month, or $1,020 per year when billed annually. This includes more robust automation and AI features, with additional functionality available through add-ons.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Tailored for scaling businesses with growing customer support needs
• Access to advanced workflow automation
• Proactive support features to enhance customer engagement
• Free trial and demo available

Cons:

• Higher cost per seat compared to the Essential plan
• Additional fees for certain messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp
• Some enterprise-grade features still unavailable

Expert Plan

The Expert plan is designed for large support teams that need advanced collaboration, security, and reporting tools. While this plan offers the most features, it is also the most expensive, catering to businesses that require extensive customization and security measures.

Key Features

• Workload management – Automatically adjust team workloads based on the volume of conversations.
• Multiple help centers – Create multiple help centers to serve different customer segments.
• Custom and real-time reporting – Access detailed insights into customer behavior and support performance.
• 2-factor authentication & Google SSO – Enhance security with enterprise-grade identity management.
• Private help center – Create private help centers with content restricted to specific audiences.
• Fin AI Agent – Automate a significant portion of customer support with AI-driven responses at $0.99 per resolution.

The Expert plan costs $132 per seat per month, or $1,584 per year when billed annually. This plan includes the most advanced features, ideal for large, security-conscious support teams.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Comprehensive suite of enterprise-grade tools
• Enhanced security features like SSO and 2-factor authentication
• Advanced reporting and analytics capabilities
• Free trial and demo available

Cons:

• Higher cost per seat
• Advanced features may be overkill for smaller teams
• Additional costs for certain proactive messaging features and external communication channels

Intercom Add-on Price

This is the factor that can drastically increase the cost of your plan. Intercom offers a variety of add-ons, each with its own pricing structure. These add-ons range from advanced AI features to enhanced messaging and communication tools, allowing you to customize your Intercom plan to fit your business needs.

Keep in mind that while some add-ons are billed at a flat rate, others, particularly those related to customer support, may have usage-based pricing. Below are some examples of the add-ons available:

• Fin AI Agent – Automate customer support responses with AI-driven resolutions. Pricing is $0.99 per resolution.
• Fin AI Copilot – Enhance agent efficiency with AI assistance in the inbox.
  • Included usage: Free for up to 10 tickets or conversations per agent per month.
  • Upgrade to unlimited usage for $29 per agent per month.
• Proactive Support Plus – Add advanced in-app and outbound support features to any plan for $99 per month. This includes:
  • Product tours, surveys, posts, mobile carousels, push notifications: 500 sends per month included, with additional usage priced per message sent.
  • Unlimited use of customer engagement and automation tools like checklists, news items, webhooks, Series, A/B testing, and more.
• Email campaigns – Billed based on usage, ranging from $0.00025 to $0.045 per email sent.
• SMS – Billed based on usage, ranging from $0.01 to $0.09 per SMS sent/received.
• WhatsApp Integration – Billed based on usage, ranging from $0.03 to $0.10 per conversation.
• Phone – Includes phone calls, voice/video calls, and screen sharing, priced from $0.0035 per minute.

These add-ons provide flexibility in scaling your customer support and engagement efforts, allowing you to only pay for what you need and use. Be sure to carefully evaluate your requirements to optimize costs while maximizing the value you get from Intercom’s suite of tools.

How SMS Pricing Works

SMS is an optional add-on solution for Intercom customers. It allows you to send personalized two-way SMS messages for a range of purposes, like promoting products, scheduling appointments, and notifying customers about account changes. 

Intercom users can send automated targeted SMS messages that are triggered by predetermined events, such as signing up for a trial.  

Intercom’s SMS tool is incredibly useful for increasing engagement. In fact, the company claims the messages have a 98% open rate. This is considerably more than the average email open rate across B2C and B2B, which is, according to SmartInsights,  just 16.97%. 

But how much does it cost to get your messages in front of your customers via SMS? Take a look at the tables below. These are screenshots from Intercom’s ‘How SMS pricing works’ article. 

Intercom users get charged per phone number they have activated (the phone number they send SMS messages from), as well as the number of SMS messages they send and receive each month. The price of one activated phone number includes up to 500 SMS messages per month and costs $15 in the U.S. 

If you live in the U.S. and want to send 1000 messages per month, it will cost the price of the one-activated phone number plus an additional $15. Therefore, $30 altogether. 

Free Trial and Demo Options

In the plans detailed above, we included whether each offered a free trial, demo, or both. To recap:

• Starter: Free trial
• Pro: Free trial and demo
• Premium: Demo

To begin your free trial, simply sign up, enter your details, and you’ll begin your 14-day free trial. Once your trial period ends, your plan will continue, and you’ll be billed either monthly or annually unless you cancel first. 

If you want to access the demo with either the Pro or Premium plan, you must contact the Intercom team to arrange it. When you click on the ‘Get a demo’ button on the pricing page, a chat box will pop up asking for your email address. You’ll then go through the process of signing up for your demo. 

Billing and Payment Options

Billing cycle

Your Intercom bill is based on your products, plan, and the number of people your application’s tracking. You’ll get billed monthly for custom plans, or you can choose to be billed annually. 

Your bill is calculated every month in advance based on your usage in the previous month. 

Overages and credits

Overages and credits are Intercom’s solution for customers going over or under their monthly ‘allowance’ for people reached or tracked with the software. They may also be issued if you change your plan. For example, if you switch to a cheaper plan in the middle of the month, you might get credits because you’ve already paid in advance for the more expensive one. 

Estimating Your Invoice

You can view your bill and all your fees in the Billing Settings in your dashboard. You gain access to this after you sign up. There’s even a price calculator to work out your fees, potentially avoiding nasty billing surprises. 

Who is Intercom For?

Company Size

Intercom is ideal for companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. Let’s take a look at what it can offer at each stage:

Early Stage

Intercom’s Early Stage Program is designed to help eligible startups gain access to the full range of Intercom features at a significantly discounted rate. Launched in 2016, this program has supported over 10,000 startup customers, offering incremental pricing discounts that allow startups the time they need to scale while benefiting from comprehensive customer support tools.

Startups accepted into the Early Stage Program will be placed on the Advanced plan, which includes a robust set of features tailored to growing businesses.

Key Features Included in the Early Stage Plan:

• 6 full seats for your support team.
• 6 Fin AI Copilot seats with unlimited usage to enhance agent efficiency.
• 20 lite seats for additional team members with limited access.
• 10 Fin AI Agent resolutions per month, enabling AI-driven responses to customer inquiries.
• Proactive Support Plus features, including advanced in-app and outbound support tools.

Early Stage Pricing

In the first year, you’ll receive this comprehensive plan for just $65 per month, a significant discount from the original list price of $903. This pricing allows startups to access advanced features without the heavy upfront cost, providing a solid foundation for growth.

The discounted pricing structure extends over three years as follows:

• Year 1: 90% discount, resulting in a total monthly price of $65.
• Year 2: 50% discount, bringing the total monthly price to $451.50.
• Year 3: 25% discount, with the total monthly price at $677.25.

Note: While the Early Stage Program offers substantial discounts, some usage-based charges still apply for Fin AI Agent resolutions, SMS, WhatsApp, and Phone, which are billed at list price.

Breakdown of Pricing for Usage-Based Channels:

• Email: All bulk email prices will be discounted at the same rate as your overall plan discount (90% in year one, 50% in year two, 25% in year three).
• Messages Sent: All message prices will be similarly discounted according to the year of your program.
• Fin AI Agent: Includes 10 resolutions per month; additional resolutions are charged at $0.99 per resolution at list price.
• SMS: SMS segments can be used, but no discount will be applied; they will be charged at list price.
• WhatsApp: Bulk WhatsApp messages and inbound WhatsApp conversations are available but will also be billed at list price.
• Phone: Phone services, including calls, will be available but charged at list price without discounts.

The Early Stage Program offers startups a unique opportunity to access industry-leading customer support tools at a fraction of the cost, with the flexibility to scale as your business grows.

Mid-Market and Enterprise 

Using data pulled from a number of review websites, we discovered pricing can be anywhere in the realms of $300 to over $1,000. 

Intercom can help mid-market and enterprise businesses to scale even further. The more website visitors you have, the more possibilities at your disposal to successfully encourage customer interaction. There’s also considerably more data for you and the software to make use of to support your customer service strategies, like analyzing customer behavior and trends.

Another aspect that makes Intercom ideal for large businesses is its enterprise-level security. It is GDPR, SOC 2, ISO27001, and HIPAA compliant. The software supports authentication measures, like 2-factor authentication, and the servers also encrypt data at rest. 

Intercom is great for saving mid-market and enterprise businesses a huge amount of time. Think about how much time and manpower it takes to manually respond to all customer queries across all channels. Not to mention the communication during the onboarding process, as well as marketing communications at various stages of the customer journey. 

That being said, you’ll need to have deep pockets if you’re a mid-sized or enterprise-level company using Intercom. 

Customerly: Intercom Alternative

Even though Intercom is a comprehensive customer service software, it’s gained a bit of a reputation for its confusing pricing structure. It’s also fair to say that opting for Intercom can get expensive rather quickly, with all its add-ons and pay-per-use features. That’s where Customerly comes in as an excellent alternative.

Customerly is a powerful customer service software alternative to Intercom. We run a simple pricing structure so everyone understands how much the software will cost them each month. We have a perfect plan for all businesses, regardless of size. 

Our cheapest is just $7/month. This includes 3 teammates and 1,000 interactions. We even include a price slider, allowing you to choose the number of seats, active users, and monthly outbound emails sent in your plan and get an immediate quote right away.

With Customerly, you can automate repetitive tasks and customer communications, like emails and live chats. You can also build your own automated marketing funnels or use one of our pre-built funnel templates for goals such as recovering churn or onboarding.

A few more Free Intercom Alternatives to choose

We have selected for you a list of customer service software similar to Intercom that offers free plans or free trials.

Here are the best options according to Customerly 🙃

• Crisp: The all-in-one business messaging platform that gathers teams, conversations, data, and knowledge, around one place.
• Zendesk: Centralize support with advanced ticketing and AI-powered automation.
• Tawk.to: All your Live Chat Ticketing Knowledge Base
  CRM and Chat Pages in one, organized place.
• Freshdesk: Empower teams with powerful automation and collaboration across multiple channels
• LiveAgent: Answer more tickets with an all-in-one customer care solution.
• HelpScout: Deliver personalized service with a shared inbox that feels like a simple email platform.
• FreshChat: Serve up smiles on any channel with Freshchat—and upgrade to Customer Service Suite for advanced ticketing, knowledge bases, and more: the all-in-one toolkit for five-star support.
• Drift: Drive conversions through real-time chat and AI-driven conversational marketing.
• LiveChat: A straightforward help desk for e-commerce, enabling personalized messaging and efficient conversation management.
• HubSpot: Connect with customers through live chat while seamlessly managing relationships with its built-in CRM.

If you believe these are insufficient, you can discover more intercom alternatives.

Final Thoughts on Intercom Pricing

There are lots of avenues to the Intercom pricing structure that you’ll need to understand before diving into its world of customer service solutions. There’s no doubt this software is a key player in the industry and is used by many organizations throughout the world, both big businesses and small. We’re particularly impressed with the Early Stage program too, and believe it to be one of the more transparent options available on the website. 

However, if you’re looking for a robust, affordable, and uncomplicated alternative to Intercom, Customerly might be the customer service solution for your business. Our software is specifically designed for SaaS companies. We offer a huge range of marketing and customer interaction solutions to help you grow your business. Sign up for a free trial today and see for yourself.