Intercom Pricing: Is the Platform Worth It?

You can’t possibly know about customer messaging platforms without knowing about Intercom. And you can’t know about Intercom without hearing about how confusing Intercom pricing is and how expensive it can be.

Intercom is a customer success platform that provides useful tools, data and apps for your customer and team. Its features help you:

• Capture more leads, convert them faster and chat with them in real-time
• Segment customers by various criteria (activity, location, social, etc.)
• View everything about your customer in one place
• Monitor your campaign metrics in real-time
• Set up behavior triggered campaigns
• Drive sales growth by positioning yourself as an always-available brand

Even though Intercom is used everywhere and the platform constantly receives positive feedback, truth be told — Intercom pricing and plan isn’t the simplest to understand. That is why we’ll cover everything you need to know about it here.

A comparison of Intercom pricing plans

The first problem you’ll encounter when it comes to Intercom pricing is that the plans available can be pretty difficult to understand and pick from.

Intercom has 4 different plans for different purposes:

• Lead generation — starting at $87/month
• Customer engagement — starting at $49/month
• Customer support — starting at $38/month
• All-in-one (combines the previous 3) — starting at $87/month

All of these plans are available in different sizes:

• Essential
• Pro
• Premium

Of course, the bigger the size of the plan the more benefits you get.

Let’s break down every Intercom pricing plan one by one.

First Intercom pricing plan: Lead generation

The first plan available when you look at Intercom pricing plan is the lead generation package which helps you acquire leads by using live chat and setting up automated chatbots. It provides you with the necessary tools to encourage your leads to take action. It also helps your team solve problems faster with the shared inbox.

With a starting price of $87/month, this package from Intercom offers some amazing sales tools, which are often the reason why people choose Intercom instead of any other messaging platform.

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If you opt-out for the Pro lead generation plan you will get the A/B testing feature. This feature is an efficient method for determining which message converts better.

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Every feature and complete pricing for this plan is fully explained here:

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Second Intercom pricing plan: Customer engagement

If you’re looking for tools that help you keep your customers engaged — this Intercom plan is for you. This plan encourages customers to take action with features like in-app and push messages.

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The customer engagement plan starts at $49/month and it’s much cheaper than the previously mentioned Intercom pricing plan. It’s ideal for companies looking to get their customers more engaged and not looking to deal with other parts of the customer relationship.

All features for this plan are described in the picture below.:

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Third Intercom pricing plan: Customer support

This plan provides customers with real-time support. You’ll be able to solve your customers’ problems faster with the built-in help center and self-service bots.

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This is the cheapest Intercom pricing plan — starting at $38/month. A lot of competitors provide this exact service for an even cheaper price, so consider choosing them instead of Intercom to save money. We will explain the differences between Intercom and some other platforms later in the article.

You can see the features and benefits of the customer service package in full detail below.

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Fourth Intercom pricing plan: All-in-one

The biggest plan available includes everything from previous plans. The all-in-one plan helps you understand your users better.

To be precise, it helps you send outbound messages, encourage customers to take action and solve their problems quickly. Simply put — you’ll be able to manage every step of customer communication in one place.

The all-in-one and lead generation plan both start at $87/month.

You can see everything included in this Intercom pricing plan in the pictures below.

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Custom Intercom pricing plans

If you’re serious about investing in a customer success platforms like intercom, Intercom offers enterprise pricing options available.

Pricing for these plans varies greatly depending on your needs, resources and contract length. Simply message the Intercom team through their platform and they’ll talk with you about your options.

If you’re also working at an early-age startup you might be eligible for a discounted plan. The discounted Intercom pricing plan offers you all of Intercom’s Pro products for one entire year for only $49/month.

Intercom add-ons

Intercom offers you 4 add-ons for each plan:

1. Custom bots — allows you to see your bot’s performance insights and create your own bots for faster conversions and — starts at 99$/month
2. Product tours — helps you create guided tours that highlight every feature you want your customers to know about your product or service — starts at 119$/month
3. Answer bot — a chatbot that answers questions 24/7 so you don’t have to — starts at 99$/month
4. Help Center articles — helps your customers help themselves through pre-made articles and collects their feedback — starts at 49$/month

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Be aware of users and seats

The problem people face with Intercom pricing is when your “Active people” and “Seats” starts to increase exponentially. If you buy the Lead Generation Essential plan for 87$/month, your plan will only support a certain number of active people and a certain number of seats. To be exact your plan will only support up to 200 active people and 2 seats.

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What does this actually mean when it comes to Intercom pricing? Well…

Active people are all the users who have sent or received a message from you in the last 90 days. They’re also all users who’ve logged in during the last 90 days.

If you need a platform for more than 500 users you’d have to pay extra $15/month. If you need it for more than 1,000 users you’d have to pay another $15/month for each additional 1,000 users. This is how Intercom pricing works.

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A seat is a dedicated login for each user from the company who uses Intercom to manage conversations with customers.

Every additional seat in the Lead Generation plan would cost an additional $19/month.

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The formula for Intercom pricing looks like this:

Starting price + active people + seats = your monthly fee for Intercom pricing

All in all, if you’re a company which needs to generate more leads, you expect to have more than 500 active users in 90 days and you want 3 people from your team to have dedicated access to the Intercom platform, your final pricing would like like this:

$87 + $15 + $19 = $121/month

Intercom pricing vs other platforms

Even though Intercom is one of the most popular messaging platforms it still has its weaknesses. Users often have big issues with Intercom pricing.

Two main reasons why users choose other platforms are:

• Intercom pricing can be very unpredictable since it’s based on the number of users and user acquisition can scale quickly
• Higher prices than most of its competitors

In this article, we will focus on introducing the main three alternatives.

Zendesk — This platform is more customer support oriented while Intercom covers marketing, customer success and sales as well. If you’re looking for an all-around tool that supports your marketing, sales and customer success processes, you’re better off with Intercom.

Helpcrunch – Pricing is the biggest difference between Helpcrunch and Intercom. Unlike Intercom’s pricing, Helpcrunch’s pricing offers you an unlimited number of users in all of their available plans.

Drift – A sales-oriented platform suitable for companies that have a long sales process. Drift is one of the more expensive platforms and its pricing is very similar to Intercom pricing.

Here’s a comparative look at all 4 mentioned platforms:

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Customer experiences with Intercom

It’s safe to say that people who’ve bought the platform regardless of its complicated pricing are very satisfied in the end.

Intercom has proven to be easy to use for both companies and users. The platform helps potential or existing customers easily get in touch with you.

Users also reported great functionality of live chat and email automation features. Intercom is great for cross-functional teams providing them with a common platform to help each other.

People value the customizability they have when creating a customer support system for their users. Intercom also has well-functioning support which solves your issues fast.

On the other hand, when we look at the negative reviews of Intercom we see that a lot of people don’t like how unpredictable Intercom pricing can be. Users need to be on the lookout for changing prices all the time. Official announcements for Intercom pricing rising have happened in the past.

Here’s a tip — if you don’t want to switch to a bigger plan with more users you can remove your inactive users.

Payment methods

Intercom pricing at least isn’t a hassle pay-wise. They accept all kinds of major credit or debit cards like Visa, MasterCard, American Express, JCB and Discover. Wire transfers, PayPal and postal offers.

Recap: Is Intercom worth it?

Intercom combines a lot of tools and processes into one platform. With it, companies don’t have to worry about sales, marketing and customer service processes because they’ll be automated. Instead, companies can focus on developing their product or service.

This platform helps you easily and professionally acquire, engage and support your customers. If you’re looking for an all-around support platform — confusing Intercom pricing is outweighed by Intercom’s great functionality.

The good news is that you can always sign up for the 14 day trial period and test out the platform before buying it.

Let us know what you think about their service if you do!