Help Scout is a help desk priced per seat with per-resolution AI. MCPmailer gives your own agent an address and charges for mail, not seats.
Support inboxes · Help Scout claims checked July 2026
Help Scout is the friendly end of the help desk market: a shared inbox that stays close to email rather than burying it in ticket chrome, with docs, reporting, and AI features. Published pricing runs from about twenty-five dollars per seat a month, with AI resolutions charged separately.
If humans answer your support mail and you want software that keeps out of their way, Help Scout is one of the least annoying choices in the category. Its AI features are also fine if you want resolutions without building an agent yourself.
We are for the agent you build, not the assistant you buy. It gets its own address, its own key, and its own history, driven by your prompt and your tools, priced on mail rather than seats or per resolution.
Charging for AI by the resolution is honest pricing for a product that resolves things, and it means your cost scales with your support volume forever. Metered mail means a conversation costs a fraction of a cent, and an agent you improved into resolving twice as much does not cost twice as much.
A packaged AI resolver is tuned by the vendor. When it answers wrong you file a ticket about your ticketing system. Here the model, the prompt, the escalation rules, and the tools are yours, and the mailbox is just the channel it speaks through.
Help Scout is built around shared team inboxes. Ours is one address and one revocable key per agent, so "which agent sent this, under whose authority, and can I turn just that one off" always has an answer.
Every row is a claim we could defend with their documentation open beside it. Where they are ahead, the row says so.
The desk stays. The agent takes one lane and you watch it.
Pick a bounded job
Order status, scheduling, invoice reminders. Somewhere being wrong is cheap and obvious.
Give it its own address
Not a shared desk address, so attribution stays clean.
Escalate by mail
The agent forwards into your Help Scout address and the history goes with it.
Only if what you want is an agent with its own address rather than a desk for people. If humans answer the mail, keep the desk.
Help Scout publishes seat pricing from around twenty-five dollars a month plus roughly seventy-five cents per AI resolution. We charge a base plan plus metered mail, so a high-volume agent is usually much cheaper and a low-volume one is nearly free.
By emailing your desk address, which is the least brittle integration available. Signed webhooks can drive anything more involved.
Templates exist for repeated sends. There is no macro system for humans, because humans are not the operator here.
Keep the help desk as your system of record. Give the agent its own address for the lane it can genuinely handle, and let it escalate into the desk when it cannot.
The free tier is 3,000 emails a month across three agent inboxes, no card, with receiving, threading, and search included. Enough to watch a real conversation happen before you decide.
More Support inboxes