We Pulled Five Years of Support Tool Pricing From the Archives. The Seat Price Is a Decoy

How much have support tools actually raised their prices? We went into the Internet Archive and pulled five years of pricing pages to find out, every major vendor, 2021 to 2026. The short answer: the seat price barely moved for most of them, and that's the trick. The real increases happened somewhere else, in metered AI fees, conversation quotas, seat minimums, and free plans that quietly vanished. This page lays out the receipts: who raised prices, who changed the model instead, and what a team actually pays now.

This chart only includes vendors whose pricing can be drawn as one honest per-seat line across five years. Intercom, Gorgias, Tidio, Trengo, Crisp, and the per-resolution AI tools can't be, their models changed too much. That's a finding in itself, and they're covered below.

The chart above starts with the four lines that tell the story on their own: Drag, Hiver, Front, and Freshdesk, against a dashed line showing what inflation alone would have done to a typical 2021 price. Turn on the rest with the chips. Every figure traces to a dated capture of the vendor's own pricing page; the full table sits under the chart, and the raw data is downloadable below.

The ceiling: entry price versus the top of the range

The entry price is where you start. The ceiling is where the sales process wants you. The chart below shows both ends of every vendor's published range. Some ranges have no top at all, the meter decides. Drag's runs from twelve to twenty-four dollars, and that's the whole of it: there is no higher tier to be upgraded into.

Who raised prices, and by how much

Some seats really did get more expensive, and the archives show it capture by capture.

Hiver: $7 to $25

Yes, Hiver raised its prices: the entry tier more than tripled, from $7 per user in 2021 to $25 in 2026. The cheapest paid plan was $7 a seat in January 2021, $15 by 2022, $19 by 2024, and by January 2026 the old Lite tier was gone and Growth had become the $25 floor. Hiver also runs against the trend on free: it had no free plan for years, then launched one in 2025, and a $20-per-seat AI add-on now sits on top of the tiers.

Front: $9 (late 2020) to $25

Yes: Front's Starter seat was $9 in 2020, doubled to $19 by 2021, and reached $25 in 2026. The $9 figure comes from the old frontapp.com page in December 2020; after the move to front.com the Starter seat sat at $19 from 2021 through 2025, then the whole ladder was renamed and repriced in January 2026 to Starter $25, Professional $65, Enterprise $105. Front also carries seat minimums, so the sticker is a floor, not the bill.

Gmelius: $19 to $25, and free gone early

Modestly: Gmelius's stable Growth tier rose from $19 to $25 per user, and its free plan disappeared back in 2021. Gmelius renamed its cheapest plan almost every year (Plus, Starter, Growth, Flex, Meli), so the clean line to watch is Growth, which held near $24 from 2022 to 2025 and ticked to $25 in 2026. The genuinely free "Forever Free" plan visible in early 2021 was gone within months.

The modest movers

Not every climb was dramatic. Missive's Starter went from $10 to $14 (2021 to 2026) while its top tier did the real climbing, $18 to $36. Keeping rose from $6 to $14 and dropped its free plan in 2022. Sortd restructured in 2026: a new, cheaper Starter tier appeared at ten dollars while the previous entry tier moved up, the restructure pattern from the playbook section, caught in the wild. And Drag, our own tool, went from $8 to $12; more on that below. (Drag's entry price briefly dropped in 2022 before returning; the line shows what the archives show.)

The prices that held still while the bill went up

A flat seat price is not a flat bill. The vendors below held their sticker steady while the cost moved somewhere the chart cannot see: into a meter.

The meter is spreading: even vendors whose seat pricing stayed clean, Front and Zendesk among them, now attach per-resolution AI fees on top of it.

• Intercom is the whole thesis in one vendor. Its entry seat actually fell, from around $39 in 2021 to $29 by 2026, while Fin, its AI agent, added $0.99 for every resolution from 2024 on. The seat got cheaper and the bill got bigger.
• Gorgias and Tidio priced by volume, not seats. Gorgias bills a base fee for a bucket of tickets plus roughly $0.40 per ticket over it, so a busy month is a bigger invoice; its Basic base held near $60 from 2021 to 2026. Tidio moved from per-seat to a billable-conversation quota, with a Growth-to-Plus jump from $59 straight to $749.
• Trengo broke its own model. It sold per-seat in euros (about €15 a user) through 2023, then switched in 2024 to a flat platform fee with bundled seats and conversation caps; today the entry point is a flat €299 a month, with no per-seat plan at all. (Prices in euros, as published.)
• The per-outcome AI tools (Fin, Kayako's Kay, eesel, and the rest) charge per resolution or per conversation, so there is no seat line to plot; the meter is the price.
• Help Scout is the clearest picture of how unstable support pricing has become. It charged about $20 a seat through November 2024; then, in December 2024, it abandoned per-seat pricing entirely for a per-contact model, unlimited users, priced by how many customers you have. Within about seven months, by July 2025, it reversed course and went back to charging per user, $25 a seat. Two pricing models in under two years isn't iteration. It's a category still working out how much it can charge, and how. It's also exactly why a five-year price chart needs event markers, not just lines.

What a 5-person team actually pays

Sticker prices compare seats; teams pay bills. Here is the same five-person support team costed in 2021 and in 2026, with the metered pieces turned on at a typical volume. Every figure traces to the dataset; assumptions are footnoted.

Assumptions: 5 seats at the entry tier, annual billing where a toggle exists; seat minimums applied (Front); metered AI costed at 500 AI resolutions or conversations per month where a tool charges for it (Zendesk $1.50, Intercom Fin $0.99); per-ticket and per-workspace tools noted rather than seat-multiplied; opaque 2026 tiers shown as quote-only, never guessed. Help Scout is now the counter-example that flips: its December 2024 per-contact plan (unlimited users, ~$50/mo) undercut a small team, but after it reverted to per-user in mid-2025 a five-person team pays 5 × $25 = $125, back in line with the field. Its free plan (5 users, 1 inbox) remains the $0 edge case if one shared inbox is enough. The point stands either way: the seat price alone never settled the bill, the model did.

¹ Five seats at each year's verified entry seat price, times twelve, summed 2021 through 2026. Metered AI, per-ticket overages, and seat minimums are excluded from this figure and noted per row. ² Drag has no 2025 archive capture; the 2025 seat is bridged at ~$10 between the verified $8 (2024) and $12 (2026). ³ Base seat only; metered AI (Freshdesk Copilot, Zendesk per-resolution) and Gorgias ticket overages are not included. ⁴ Help Scout per-user years; the Dec 2024–Jul 2025 per-contact interlude (flat ~$50/mo) is not seat-comparable and is approximated at the reverted $25. ⁵ Intercom is excluded from the 5-year total: its 2022–2023 entry prices were quote-gated and opaque, so a full series cannot be verified.

How to read a pricing page in 2026

Four moves show up again and again in the captures. Once you can name them, the page stops hiding the bill.

• The plan rename. When a tier is renamed, the price comparison resets. Crisp's "Pro" became "Mini" and the entry price went from $25 to $45 across the 2024 redesign; Kayako collapsed its ladder into "Kayako One." A new name is often a new number wearing old branding.
• The seat minimum. A "$19 a seat" plan with a two-seat minimum starts at $38, and Front's higher tiers carried minimums of five, twenty, even fifty seats. The headline is a per-unit price; the floor is what you pay.
• The metered add-on. The seat looks normal and the AI is a separate line: Freshdesk's Copilot and session packs, Zendesk's per-resolution fee, Intercom's Fin. The seat is bait; the meter is the catch.
• Annual-only framing. The big number on the card is usually the annual-billed rate; the month-to-month price is higher and often one toggle away. When a page shows only "billed annually," the monthly bill is not the number you are reading.
• Watch for percentage framing. A cheap tool that adds four dollars shows a scarier percentage than an expensive one that adds eighteen. Whenever a comparison leads with percentages, check the dollars, and the reverse.

The free tier tells its own story

The free tier tells its own story. Six of the tools on this page removed their free plans since 2021, us included, while two launched new ones in the last eighteen months, not out of generosity but as acquisition strategy. If a list you are reading calls a tool free, check the date.

For the routes that are still genuinely free, and where each one breaks, see our guide to free shared inbox options.

What Drag costs

Our line is on every chart above, and it is not flat: eight dollars became twelve over five years, a fifty percent rise that ran ahead of inflation's twenty-three, and we removed our free plan in 2024 because we could not serve teams properly on it. Those are the concessions, and they are all of them. Here is the other side. Twelve dollars is the whole price. AI drafting and triage are included in flat tiers, not metered per resolution. There's no seat minimum, no conversation quota, and no usage bill after a busy month. The twenty-four dollar plan is the top of the entire range, there is no higher tier the product is holding features for. To put that in team terms: five people on our most expensive plan cost $120 a month, less than two seats on Hiver's top tier. Five years of receipts on this page say most vendors moved the cost somewhere harder to see. Ours is exactly where it was: on the sticker.

One more piece of honesty the chart cannot show on its own: our plan lineup also restructured over those years; today's $12 Starter is not the 2021 product either.

The same ranges, one more way: sorted by how high they go, with our whole range marked.

Read the guide line against the bars above it: our ceiling sits below the point where most of these ranges are just getting started. Striped bars have no published ceiling; the meter decides.

The questions a buyer actually asks, answered from the data above, including the ones we don't win.

Methodology

Every price on this page traces to a dated capture of the vendor's own pricing page in the Internet Archive, or to the live page for current figures. All figures are the per-user monthly rate on annual billing, the price vendors advertise. Month-to-month billing typically runs higher; where a historical capture shows only the month-to-month rate, the cell says so. Where the archives have a gap, the chart shows a gap; nothing is interpolated. Where a single year's capture is missing between two verified points, the chart shows a dotted bridge and says so; trends are never invented across longer gaps. Model changes that make a price non-comparable are shown as events, not smoothed into lines.

Corrections welcome: if a vendor believes a figure is wrong, we will check the capture and fix it.

Two deliberate choices. The vertical axis starts at $0, always; truncating it would exaggerate the very changes we are measuring, and we would rather the increases speak for themselves. And the inflation line is not decoration: it is the 2021 median entry price of the tools shown, carried forward year by year using US CPI (BLS series CUUR0000SA0, about 23% cumulative over the window), so "did it beat inflation" is a line you can see rather than a claim you have to trust.

The full dataset behind every chart on this page is downloadable below, free to reuse with attribution. We would rather you check our numbers than trust them.

• Download the data: CSV · JSON (CC BY 4.0, attribution Drag)

Price changes since publication

This page is maintained: when a vendor changes pricing or model, the charts, the table, and this log update together.

• July 2026: page published. Every figure current as of the capture dates shown.

For the current cost of running a team inbox at your exact size, try the shared inbox cost calculator; for how AI support is billed model by model, see the state of AI support pricing; and for what a shared inbox really costs across seventeen tools, see what a shared inbox really costs.