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Help Desk & Ticketing
Help Scout
Shared-inbox help desk focused on simple, human customer support for small teams.
✓ Source-checked profile2 sources cited
Spec sheet
All-in India price
₹2,448/user/mo
For a registered business, billed yearly, $25/user/mo sticker
- Free plan
- Available
- Free trial
- Available
- Status
- Source checked 29 Jul 2026
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Claim this listingFindThatSoftware verdictEditorial ruling
A great fit for small teams that want straightforward, email-style support without the complexity of enterprise help desks. It's lighter on advanced ticketing/omnichannel and priced per user in USD.
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FindThatSoftware has source-checked this listing and keeps 2 public sources visible for buyer verification.
In short
Help Scout is listed under Help Desk & Ticketing, reviewed for Indian buyers. All-in it runs about ₹2,448/user/mo for a GST-registered business ($25/user/mo sticker plus about 3.5% card forex). It does not issue an India GST invoice, so a registered business reclaims the GST via reverse charge. FindThatSoftware rates it best for small teams wanting simple support; a poor fit for Indian support teams optimising for cost, since 25 dollars per user per month lands well above rupee-priced desks with similar channel coverage.
What Help Scout costs in India
The rupee price a business actually pays, after the card forex markup, with GST shown both ways.
True India price
Registered business, per user per month, billed yearly
₹2,448
Help Scout advertises $25/user/mo. A GST-registered business in India pays about ₹2,448 a month (₹29,380/yr) once the roughly 3.5% card forex markup is added, with GST reclaimed as input credit. If you cannot reclaim GST, it is about ₹2,889 a month.
- Sticker price
- $25/user/mo
- Card forex markup
- about 3.5% over mid-market
- GST
- 18%, reclaimable if registered
- Registered per user per month
- ₹2,448
- Registered per user per year
- ₹29,380
- If you can't reclaim GST
- ₹2,889
- Try first
- Has a free plan, so you can start without a card.
- Watch for
- Free (5 users, 1 inbox).
More
Paid plans from $25/user/mo, scaling to higher tiers (~16% off annual). AI Answers billed per resolution. USD. Confirm on vendor site.
Indicative, not a bill. The exchange rate is a single mid-market reference, not a live feed, and GST-registered businesses may reclaim input credit. Confirm current pricing on the vendor site.
Full India pricing breakdownPaying for more than Help Scout? See your whole stack's real India cost and where you could switch to save.
Audit your spendWho Help Scout fits
What it is, what you gain, what you give up, and who should look elsewhere.
What is Help Scout?
Help Scout is a help desk built around a shared inbox, with a knowledge base, live chat (Beacon), and light automation. It emphasizes simple, personal support and is popular with small and mid-sized teams that find enterprise tools too heavy.
What you gain, and what you give up.
The case for
- A 30 day money back guarantee applies to both monthly and annual purchases, so a full year prepayment is recoverable in the first month.
- Live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger are all included from the 25 dollar Standard seat with no per-channel surcharge.
- The free plan gives five users, one shared inbox and one Docs knowledge base site, enough for a founding team before volume grows.
The catch
- Billing is in US dollars only with no rupee price list, so Indian buyers absorb the conversion and card charges on every renewal.
- You cannot reduce seat count mid-term, the terms bar decreasing authorized users during the current subscription term and only allow it at renewal.
- Outside the 30 day window there are no refunds or credits for partial months, annual payments, or unused months on an open account.
- The Pro plan carries a 10 user minimum at 75 dollars each, so the real floor is 750 dollars a month before add-ons.
Best for
- Small teams wanting simple support
- Businesses preferring email-style help
- Teams finding enterprise tools too heavy
Who should avoid it
- Indian support teams optimising for cost, since 25 dollars per user per month lands well above rupee-priced desks with similar channel coverage.
- Teams with seasonal headcount, because seats bought for a term cannot be given back until the renewal date arrives.
India readiness
How well Help Scout fits an Indian business operationally, from the verified pricing and company facts we hold.
- ✗GST invoice
No Indian GST invoice, so a registered business cannot claim input tax credit on the bill.
- ✗Bills in INR
Priced in a foreign currency, so your card or bank adds forex conversion on top.
- ✗India HQ
Headquartered outside India, so check support hours and India-specific features.
Compare Help Scout
How it stacks up on what we verified, the tools buyers weigh it against, and where it appears in our guides.
How Help Scout compares
Against the 5 other help desk tools we list, from what we verified on each vendor’s own pages.
Less common among the other help desk tools
Recorded for Help Scout and for at most a third of the 5 others we list.
- AI conversation summaries
- Custom reports
- Instagram dm channel
- Mobile app
- Saved replies
- Custom fields
- Prebuilt reports
- REST API
This compares only the capabilities enough rival tools share for a comparison to mean anything, roughly a quarter of what we verified. The full list is under “What we verified” below, and anything absent from both is something we did not record rather than something the product lacks.
Similar tools to Help Scout
Compare practical options in the same category by price, fit, and caveats.
Featured in our buying guides
See how Help Scout stacks up against the best options for a specific kind of business.
Where Help Scout fits in a workflow
These stacks show when to use this tool, what comes before it, and what should be handled manually first.
What we verified about Help Scout
Read from Help Scout’s own pages. Each line is a finding and what it was based on, so you can check any of it yourself.
What Help Scout does
Features we confirmed38
- WhatsApp channel
- WhatsApp conversations are handled in the Inbox from the Standard plan
- SSO SAML
- SSO/SAML is included on Pro and an add-on on Standard and Plus
- Shared team inbox
- Product is built around a shared inbox for collaborating on customer email
- Saved replies
- Saved replies library is searchable and insertable in two clicks
- REST API
- API access with tiered rate limits of 200 to 800 calls per minute
- Prebuilt reports
- Pre-built reports cover volume, responses and happiness by channel
- Mobile app
- Product menu has a Mobile entry for supporting customers on the go
- Live chat
- Live chat is included from the Standard plan anywhere on your site or app
- Knowledge base
- Docs sites build a searchable branded help centre, 1 to 5 by plan
- Instagram dm channel
- Instagram conversations are handled in the Inbox from Standard
- Email ticketing
- Email is the core channel managed as a team in the Inbox
- Custom reports
- Custom reports filter by conversation type, inbox, tag, folder or custom field
- Custom fields
- Track up to 10 custom data points per conversation for reporting and workflows
- AI conversation summaries
- AI Summarize condenses back-and-forth threads into bullet points
- AI answers chatbot
- AI Answers autonomously resolves customer questions from knowledge base content
- AI drafts
- AI Drafts writes replies based on past conversations and help content
- AI text rewriting
- AI Assist expands, shortens, edits or translates text and is unlimited on all plans
- Company level grouping
- Organise contacts and conversations by company for account-level view
- Contextual help articles
- Beacon suggests different help content depending on the page URL
- Conversation tagging
- Tags label conversations, monitor trends and trigger automations
- Csat and NPS surveys
- Surveys, CSAT and NPS can be collected anywhere on your site or app
- Csv excel export
- Reporting data can be exported to CSV or Excel for custom analysis
- Custom css help centre
- Docs sites support preset options or custom CSS branding
- Customer properties
- Collect and display up to 50 additional customer data points
- Custom sidebar apps
- Custom apps pull third-party customer data into the conversation sidebar
- Embeddable support widget
- Beacon is a customisable help widget placed anywhere in your site or app
- Facebook messenger channel
- Messenger conversations are handled in the Inbox from Standard
- IP restrictions
- Access can be limited to predefined IP ranges as an add-on
- Light users
- Light users view and collaborate without consuming a full paid seat
- Multiple inboxes
- Plans include 1 to 10 inboxes with extras at $10 a month
- Proactive messages
- Messages sends targeted messages to visitors on your website or app
- Restricted knowledge base
- Restricted Docs sites control who can view your help centre via API
- Round robin routing
- Round robin assignment is available from Plus, load balanced on Pro
- Send later scheduling
- Send later schedules emails to arrive at a chosen time
- Sla policies
- SLAs range from one basic policy on Standard to unlimited on Pro
- Snooze conversations
- Snooze returns a conversation to the top of the inbox at a set time
- Webhooks and oauth apps
- Webhooks and OAuth apps are listed in the integrations feature row
- Workflow automation
- Workflows organise, assign or reply automatically, 150 basic to unlimited advanced
What people use it for3
- Support customers on WhatsApp
- WhatsApp is included with no per-channel surcharge from Standard
- Run a help desk
- Footer comparison pages target Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias and Front
- Deflect support tickets
- AI Answers is bought to resolve questions without a human touching them
Works with8
- WhatsApp is a supported inbox channel from the Standard plan
- Salesforce
- Pulls customer activity details from Salesforce, available from Plus
- Linear
- Link, track and create Linear issues from any conversation
- Jira
- Create a new Jira issue directly from a Help Scout conversation
- Instagram DMs are handled inside the Help Scout inbox
- Hubspot
- Brings contextual customer information into Help Scout, available from Plus
- Facebook messenger
- Facebook Messenger conversations route into the shared inbox
- Aircall
- Aircall manages calls and texts alongside email, with preferred pricing on Pro
Terms, compliance and how you buy35
- Partner program
- Company menu links a Partner Program to grow with Help Scout
- No mid term seat reduction
- Terms bar decreasing authorised users during the current subscription term
- No card required
- Free trial explicitly requires no credit card
- Free plan
- Free plan gives 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site
- Money back guarantee
- A 30-day money back guarantee applies to monthly and annual purchases
- 99 99 uptime published
- Footer publishes a 99.99 percent status figure
- AI resolution only charged if solved
- No charge if the customer escalates or says they still need help
- AI spend cap available
- FAQ confirms a monthly cap that auto-disables AI Answers when hit
- Annual billing saves 16 percent
- Pricing toggle shows a 16 percent discount for annual billing
- Credit card and ach payments
- Accepts Visa, Amex, Mastercard, Discover and wire or ACH on some annual payments
- Free plan contact cap
- Free plan is limited to 100 contacts a month, 10 tags and 10 saved replies
- Free trial 15 days
- FAQ says Standard or Plus trials run 15 days
- HIPAA compliance top tier
- HIPAA is included on Pro and an add-on on lower plans
- Integration limit on free plan
- Free plan is limited to one integration out of 100+ apps
- Key integrations gated to plus
- Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot integrations start at the Plus tier
- Light on omnichannel ticketing
- Our verdict notes it is lighter on advanced ticketing and omnichannel than rivals
- No INR pricing
- Indian buyers absorb conversion and card charges on every renewal
- No native voice channel
- Phone and SMS are marked available only via integration on every plan
- Nonprofit and bcorp discount
- Help Scout for Good offers discounts to non-profits and B Corporations
- No refund after 30 days
- Outside the window there are no refunds or credits for unused months
- Paid inbox add ons
- Extra inboxes cost $10 a month annually or $12 monthly
- Paid knowledge base add ons
- Extra Docs sites cost $20 a month annually or $24 monthly
- Per seat pricing
- Every tier is priced per user per month
- Pro tier trial requires sales
- FAQ says trialling Pro means talking to the sales team
- Published pricing
- Standard, Plus and Pro seat rates and the full feature matrix are printed
- Reporting history tiered
- Report history goes 30 days on free, 2 years on Standard, all-time above
- Seat caps per tier
- Standard caps at 25 users and Plus at 50 before you must move up
- Simple onboarding
- Marketing claims learning the platform in under an hour
- Smb focused
- Positioned for small and mid-sized teams that find enterprise tools too heavy
- Startup plan
- FAQ mentions a startup plan for early-stage companies
- Ten seat minimum on top tier
- Pro is unlimited users with a stated minimum of 10 seats
- Three month free AI trial
- New accounts get three months of unlimited free AI Answers resolutions
- Tiered API rate limits
- API limits rise from 200 to 800 calls per minute with the plan
- Usage based AI pricing
- AI Answers bills $0.75 per resolution on top of seat cost
- Usd billed
- All prices are US dollars with no rupee price list
Source trail
Pricing and free-plan claims can change. FindThatSoftware keeps source URLs visible so users can verify before buying.
Verified against the sources above. How we research & rate software →
Help Scout questions
Does Help Scout give a GST invoice in India?
- Help Scout does not issue an India GST invoice. A GST-registered business can still reclaim the 18% through the reverse-charge route by raising a self-invoice, but there is no vendor GST invoice to claim against directly.
Is Help Scout good for Indian small businesses?
- It suits small teams wanting simple support. It bills in a foreign currency with no India GST invoice, so expect the card forex markup and reverse-charge GST paperwork. It is not the right pick for Indian support teams optimising for cost, since 25 dollars per user per month lands well above rupee-priced desks with similar channel coverage.
Does Help Scout have a free plan?
- Help Scout lists a free plan, but check the official pricing page for current usage limits before choosing it.
What users say
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