Help Scout Pricing Plans and What Round Robin and Balanced Routing Cost per User
October 2026 · Assigner
Help Scout pricing is per user. Standard is $25 per user per month billed annually ($30 monthly), Plus is $45 ($54 monthly), and Pro is $75 ($90 monthly) with a 10 user minimum. Automatic routing starts at Plus with round robin. Balanced routing, which sends each conversation to whoever has the fewest active assignments, is Pro only, so a support team that wants work shared by load pays $75 a seat and at least $9,000 a year, whatever its size.
Every figure below was read from the plan data on Help Scout's public pricing page in October 2026, in USD. The routing rules come from Help Scout's own help article on using routing to assign conversations. Help Scout also has a Free plan for up to 5 users, 1 inbox and 100 contacts a month. It has no routing, so it is out of scope for anyone pricing automatic assignment.
Help Scout pricing plans in 2026
A user in Help Scout is a teammate with a full seat in the inbox. Paid plans have no contact limit, which is the main difference from Free, but each plan caps how many users you can have. That cap matters more than the price when a team is growing.
| Plan | Billed annually, per user per month | Billed monthly, per user per month | Users | Routing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $25 | $30 | Up to 25 | None, assignment by hand or by workflow |
| Plus | $45 | $54 | Up to 50 | Round robin |
| Pro | $75 | $90 | Unlimited, minimum 10 | Round robin and balanced |
Annual billing is about 16 percent cheaper on every plan, a flat $5, $9 or $15 per user per month. Plus also includes 5 light users, who can read conversations and collaborate without a full seat, and Pro includes 15. Standard includes none.
What else lands on the Help Scout bill
Seats are the biggest line, but four add-ons show up on real invoices.
- AI Answers costs $0.75 per resolution, charged only when the AI resolves a conversation without handing it to a person, at most once per conversation. There is a 3 month trial and prepaid discounts.
- Extra inboxes are $10 per month billed annually ($12 monthly). Standard includes 2, Plus 5 and Pro 10.
- Extra Docs sites are $20 per month billed annually ($24 monthly).
- SSO, HIPAA and a higher API rate limit are listed at $100 per month each where they are sold as add-ons. Teams handling protected health information usually end up on Pro, and they tend to track that requirement in their wider regulatory compliance software rather than in the help desk.
Which Help Scout plan includes round robin and balanced routing
Routing is a per inbox setting, under Settings, Inboxes, the inbox, Routing, and it needs the Manage Routing permission. Help Scout offers two methods.
- Round robin, on Plus and Pro, assigns conversations one by one in alphabetical order.
- Balanced, on Pro only, assigns each conversation to whoever has the fewest active assignments.
Both work the same way underneath. Routing picks up every active conversation in the Unassigned folder, including the ones that were there before you turned it on, and assigns the longest waiting first. A teammate is eligible only when their status is Active and they are below their assignment limit, which you can set up to 100. Away teammates are skipped. If nobody is eligible, conversations stay unassigned until someone becomes eligible again.
Two details decide whether routing actually does what a support lead expects. First, alphabetical round robin ignores load. The agent who closes quickly and the agent with 40 open threads get the same share, which is fair in count and unfair in effort. Second, Help Scout says routing rules apply only to automatic assignments. Manual assignments and assignments made by workflows ignore eligibility, so an old workflow that assigns VIP conversations to a named person keeps doing that when the person is Away or far above the limit.
What routing costs on Help Scout for 6, 12 and 25 agents
Here is the annual seat cost for three common team sizes, billed annually, before add-ons. The Pro column applies the 10 user minimum, which is what makes balanced routing expensive for small teams.
| Agents | Standard, no routing | Plus, round robin | Pro, balanced | Plus to Pro step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | $1,800 | $3,240 | $9,000 (billed as 10) | $5,760 |
| 12 | $3,600 | $6,480 | $10,800 | $4,320 |
| 25 | $7,500 | $13,500 | $22,500 | $9,000 |
Read it as two separate decisions. Moving from Standard to Plus costs $20 per user per month, $240 a year per agent, and buys round robin plus everything else on Plus: advanced workflows, two advanced SLA policies, the Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot integrations and internal teams. Moving from Plus to Pro costs another $30 per user per month and buys balanced routing, unlimited workflows and SLA policies, SSO and HIPAA eligibility, and a dedicated onboarding specialist. If balanced routing is the only reason for Pro, a 6 person team is paying $5,760 a year for one routing option.
When the Help Scout upgrade is worth it, and when it is not
The upgrade is the right call in a few clear cases. If you also need HIPAA, SSO or unlimited SLA policies, Pro pays for itself on those alone and balanced routing comes along. If your team is 15 or more and every agent works the same kind of conversation, Pro's balanced method is a reasonable default and keeps everything in one tool. And if round robin by name is good enough, Plus at $45 is a modest step over Standard.
It is a poor deal in three situations we see often:
- A small team that only wants load balancing. Under 10 agents you pay for seats nobody uses.
- A team that needs skills. Neither Help Scout method matches conversations to the agent who knows billing, a product line or a language. You can approximate it with workflows into separate inboxes, but those assignments skip eligibility, so the Away and limit checks no longer protect anyone.
- A team that needs to explain assignments. Help Scout records who got a conversation, not why. When a manager asks why one agent had twice the load last week, there is no reason to point to.
A cheaper way to get balanced and skills based routing
The alternative is to keep Help Scout for what it does well, the inbox, Docs, Beacon and reporting, and buy routing separately. Assigner sits beside the help desk and decides who gets each conversation. It assigns by round robin or by current load, skips people who are out or at their cap, matches skills where you define them, and writes the reason on every assignment, such as skill match, lowest load and available. Round robin ticket assignment that respects availability is on every plan, and our page on support ticket routing walks through the rule set.
Load balanced routing is on the Assigner Team plan at $18 per user per month billed yearly. For 12 agents that is $2,592 a year. Standard plus Assigner Team comes to $6,192, against $10,800 for Help Scout Pro, and adds skills and a recorded reason that Pro does not have. For 6 agents the gap is wider: $3,096 against $9,000. Assigner does not replace Help Scout's inbox, AI Answers or SLA policies, and it does not guarantee response times.
If you are comparing help desks rather than routing, the same pattern shows up elsewhere. Our breakdown of Intercom pricing per seat finds balanced assignment only on Intercom's top plan, and Freshdesk pricing per user keeps skill based assignment on Enterprise. If you need load balancing in Help Scout, Intercom or Freshdesk, the routing feature usually costs more than the inbox.
Help Scout pricing FAQ
How much does Help Scout cost per user?
Standard is $25 per user per month billed annually or $30 monthly, Plus is $45 or $54, and Pro is $75 or $90 with a 10 user minimum. Add-ons such as AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution and extra inboxes at $10 a month are on top.
Does Help Scout have round robin assignment?
Yes, on Plus and Pro. Round robin assigns conversations from the Unassigned folder one by one in alphabetical order to teammates who are Active and below their assignment limit. Standard and Free have no automatic routing.
Which Help Scout plan has load balancing?
Only Pro. Help Scout calls it Balanced routing, and it assigns each conversation to the teammate with the fewest active assignments. Pro starts at 10 users, so the minimum cost is $9,000 a year billed annually.
Is Help Scout cheaper than Zendesk or Intercom?
At the routing level, usually yes. Intercom puts balanced assignment on Expert at $132 per seat billed annually, and Zendesk puts skills based routing on Suite Professional at $115 (our Zendesk pricing per agent breakdown has the full plan table). Help Scout Pro is $75. None of the three includes skills and load together with a recorded reason below its top plans.
How many users can I have on Help Scout Standard?
Up to 25 users. Plus allows up to 50 and Pro is unlimited with a minimum of 10. A team that grows past 25 on Standard has to move to Plus even if it does not want routing.
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