Shopify Inbox is free, has a 4.6 rating across 5,505 reviews, and is genuinely good at what it does. It also cannot be your support inbox, and that isn't a maturity problem — it's the result of deliberate contraction.

The Facebook and Instagram Messenger integration is gone; its help page now redirects to the Inbox index and the Meta sales channel documentation says nothing about messaging. Shop app chat was retired on February 19, 2025, per Shopify's own changelog, taking access to existing Shop-originated conversations with it. What remains is one channel: the chat widget on your storefront.

Email doesn't come in either. The help center is explicit about this in an unexpected place — describing what happens when the AI agent can't hand off to a human, it says Inbox surfaces your store's sender email address and notes that Inbox agent cannot send email on your behalf; the customer has to initiate it. Inbox is an exit for email. It is not an entrance.

Below: what Inbox actually does, the language asymmetry that hits non-English stores hardest, and break-even math across five helpdesk apps that meter on five genuinely different units. Research date: September 1, 2026.

The short version

If chat on your own site is your only channel, stay on Inbox. Volume is not the deciding factor. One or two agents handling under 100 conversations a month have no reason to pay for anything.

If email is in the mix, the problem is structural, not volumetric. You will run two inboxes indefinitely. The cost is context-switching time, not license fees.

Under ~300 conversations/month, the cheapest credible options are Chatty's free plan or Re:amaze Starter at $59/month. Chatty's free tier includes unlimited human conversations and email — a genuinely unusual combination.

The trap is AI billing, and the apps disagree fundamentally about how it should work. Gorgias charges $0.90 per AI resolution as pure usage. At 3,000 tickets a month with 50% AI resolution, that's $1,350 on top of the $720 plan. Tidio caps and stops. Chatty meters AI conversations only and leaves human conversations unlimited. "Add AI, save money" is not automatic.

What Inbox actually does

Inbox is a strong chat tool. Product links (unpublished products grey out), discount codes that auto-apply to the cart and persist to checkout, images and video, customer profiles, live cart add/remove events in the conversation, business hours with separate in-hours and after-hours auto-replies, and Instant answers — unlimited saved FAQs, up to 100 shown to a customer.

Inbox agent, the AI, is more capable than most free tools. It draws on your product catalog, store policies, knowledge base, and published pages and blog posts; it can recommend products, add items to the cart, and look up orders (with customer sign-in). For products specifically it can cite web search results to surface reviews.

Three conditions gate it. It's early access, available to a subset of merchants only. It requires new customer accounts — stores on legacy accounts can't use it. And Shopify Inbox itself is limited to Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus; Starter plans are excluded. Check all three before deciding to stay on Inbox because of the free AI.

What it doesn't do

Capability	Status
Receiving email at your support address	No setup path documented; the help center states the customer must initiate email
Instagram DM / Facebook Messenger	Discontinued; help page redirects
Shop app messages	Retired February 19, 2025
WhatsApp, LINE, SMS, phone	Not documented
Deleting a conversation	Explicitly not possible
Statuses beyond Open/Closed, priorities, SLAs	Not documented

Note that the App Store listing carries an "Email chat" feature tag. That's a category taxonomy label, not evidence of an inbound email channel. The help documentation contains no email-receiving setup and says the opposite.

The language asymmetry

The Inbox app itself supports Japanese and other locales. Its AI features largely do not, and the split is worth understanding because it runs in an unexpected direction.

AI suggested replies for staff (Shopify Magic) are English only — and require that your online store and admin are set to English, with under 200,000 products. Instant answers' AI suggestions are English only, defaulting to US English. Automatic conversation topic labels are English only, all ten of them.

Meanwhile Inbox agent, the customer-facing AI, is documented as replying "in the language the customer used."

So: the AI that talks to your customers works in your language; the AI that reduces your team's workload doesn't. For any store not operating in English, most of Inbox's productivity tooling is unavailable.

What changed in mid-2026

Inbox sits at 4.6 overall, but recent one-star reviews cluster tightly around the July–August 2026 update. Two complaints: messaging staff now required sign-in, which killed lead capture; and unauthenticated visitors show as "Shop visitor" with no name, email, cart, or order attached. Per the help center, the sign-in requirement applies at the point a conversation moves to staff — customers can start and continue a chat with the Inbox agent without signing in.

In a review reply dated August 25, 2026, Shopify described a Collect customer details setting under Sales channels, Inbox, Chat settings, offering three modes — require sign-in, require name and email, or allow anonymous chats — and said it was rolling out to all stores. Note that as of September 1, 2026 the help center still documents the older Require customer sign-in and Customer pre-chat form wording, not the three-way choice. If you're staying on Inbox, check what your admin actually shows.

Five helpdesks, five billing units

	Shopify Inbox	Gorgias	Tidio	Re:amaze	Channel Talk	Chatty
Billing unit	Free	Tickets (no seat charge)	Conversations + AI conversations (two sliders)	Seats (plus a volume-based Starter)	Plan + seats + usage	AI conversations only (human unlimited)
Entry price	—	$10/mo	$29/mo	$29/seat/mo, or Starter $59/mo	$36/mo (App Store); ¥2,700+/mo on the JP list, annual billing	$19.99/mo
Free plan	Fully free	None (7-day trial)	Yes	None (14-day trial)	Yes (30-day history limit)	Yes (50 AI convos + unlimited human)
AI billing	Free but early-access only	$0.90–$1.00 per resolution	Prepaid blocks; stops at the cap	$0.85 per extra resolution	~$0.50 per AI engagement	$0.40 per extra AI conversation
Inbound email	No	Yes	Yes	Yes (unlimited inboxes)	Yes	Yes, even on free
Instagram	Discontinued	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
LINE	No	Not verifiable	Not verifiable	Not verifiable	Yes (listed)	Not verifiable
Order editing / refunds	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not verifiable	Partial
Built for Shopify	—	—	—	—	—	Yes
Rating / reviews	4.6 / 5,505	4.3 / 633	4.8 / 1,256	4.3 / 143	4.8 / 41	4.9 / 1,803
1-star share	3%	9%	4%	8%	2%	1%

Reading the table

"Seat-based pricing punishes growing teams" is wrong about Gorgias. Gorgias doesn't charge for seats at all — Basic and up are unlimited agents. What scales its bill is ticket count and AI resolutions. The seat-based ones here are Re:amaze ($29–$69 per team member) and Channel Talk's operator seats. Five agents on Re:amaze Basic is $145/month before anything else.

AI billing philosophies are opposites, and this is the real selection criterion. Gorgias, Re:amaze, and Channel Talk meter AI usage with no ceiling. Tidio states on its listing that Lyro stops at the cap so bills don't balloon unexpectedly. Chatty leaves human conversations unlimited and meters only AI. Pick based on whether you're optimizing for predictable invoices or for headcount reduction — they're not the same goal.

Order editing inside the helpdesk is a bigger deal than it reads. Gorgias, Tidio, and Re:amaze all request or document the ability to edit orders and issue refunds from the support view. Inbox doesn't. Count how many times a day someone copies an order number and switches to the admin.

Don't select on rating. Chatty's 4.9 across 1,803 reviews is 96% five stars against 11 one-stars — a distribution skewed far enough that the average tells you nothing useful about day-to-day fit. Gorgias's 4.3 with 9% one-star (55 reviews) looks worse, but those 55 aren't one complaint. One of them, from a store of roughly seven years' tenure, reports support quality declining over that period — different information from first-week impressions. Channel Talk's 4.8 rests on 41 reviews with nothing since October 2022. Read the negative reviews yourself rather than counting them.

Break-even by volume

Approximate, from published pricing on September 1, 2026; excludes tax, annual discounts, and AI charges. Note that "conversation" means different things per vendor — Gorgias counts tickets, Tidio counts billable conversations from any source, Re:amaze Starter counts responded conversations, Chatty counts AI conversations only. Because Chatty leaves human conversations unlimited, its figures below are the ceiling case where AI handles every conversation. Re:amaze at 3,000 assumes the documented $15 per 100-conversation pack scales linearly, which the vendor only publishes up to a point.

Monthly volume	Gorgias	Tidio	Re:amaze	Chatty	Channel Talk
300	Basic $60	~$59	Starter $59	Pro $68.99	Early + seats
1,000	Basic $340 / Pro $360	~$59	Starter $134	Plus $199	Growth + seats
3,000	Pro $720	Custom quote required	$434	$999	Growth + seats

Gorgias's tier crossovers are computable. Basic ($60 + $0.40/ticket over 300) equals Pro ($360) at about 1,050 tickets/month. Pro ($360 + $0.36/ticket over 2,000) equals Advanced ($900) at about 3,500.

Tidio's 250-to-1,000 conversation band is flat at $59, so the per-conversation cost falls the closer you get to 1,000 — where it's the cheapest of the five. At 300 it's effectively tied with Chatty's free plan, Re:amaze Starter at $59, and Gorgias Basic at $60, so the band alone isn't a reason to pick it. Above 2,000 it moves to a custom quote, which makes internal budgeting harder.

What AI adds on top

Assuming 50% AI resolution, and added on top of the plan price. Assumptions: Gorgias at $0.90 per resolution; Re:amaze on Basic with one seat (5 resolutions included), $0.85 per extra; Channel Talk's chat ALF at ¥50 per engagement less the 30,000 AU (¥3,000, roughly 60 engagements) included with paid plans; Chatty on Plus as above ($199, 1,000 AI conversations included), $0.40 per extra.

Monthly volume	AI resolutions	Gorgias	Re:amaze	Channel Talk	Chatty
300	150	+$135	+~$123	+~¥4,500	Within plan
1,000	500	+$450	+~$421	+~¥22,000	Within plan
3,000	1,500	+$1,350	+~$1,271	+~¥72,000	+$200

This is the number to take into a budget meeting. Gorgias markets unlimited seats as the fair model, and it is — but AI Agent is straight usage at $0.90 per resolution. At 3,000 tickets with half resolved by AI, AI costs almost twice the plan itself.

Gorgias's own argument is that $0.90 per resolution beats the cost of a human handling the same ticket. Whether that's true for you is arithmetic you have to do first: what does one ticket cost you in labor today? An agent at $25/hour spending six minutes per ticket costs $2.50 — AI wins easily. The same agent at two minutes costs $0.83, and it doesn't.

One design detail in Gorgias's favor: AI Agent bills only when AI fully resolves a conversation alone. If a human steps in, it isn't counted.

Selection rules

Chat only? Stay on Inbox. Confirm plan eligibility and that you're not on legacy customer accounts.

Email in the mix? Move, regardless of volume. The metric is switching time times hourly cost, not license price.

Under 300/month, start with Chatty's free plan. Unlimited human conversations, email on the free tier, and the only Built for Shopify badge in this group. One caveat with evidence behind it: reinstalling does not re-trigger the free trial — the vendor confirmed in a review reply that a returning store is billed in full at plan activation.

Need a specific locale in the UI, or LINE? Channel Talk (listed as "Channel Sales Chat Bot CRM" on the App Store, from Tokyo-based Channel Corp.) is the only app here listing Japanese UI and LINE. Its free plan restricts message search and viewing to the last 30 days, so archive value requires a paid tier. Its AI agent documents support for 32 languages. For the other four, LINE is not verifiable from the listing — not the same as unsupported. Ask the vendor.

Over 1,000/month with three or more agents: Gorgias or Tidio. Unlimited seats compound in Gorgias's favor as the team grows.

Over 3,000/month: choose by AI billing philosophy, because that line item will exceed the plan.

Before you switch

• Does your store meet all three Inbox agent conditions (early access, new customer accounts, Basic or above)?
• How many emails per month actually arrive at your support address? Count them.
• What does one ticket cost you in labor? Without this, no AI pricing decision is possible.
• What does "conversation" mean on the plan you're pricing — ticket, any-channel conversation, or AI only?
• Have you read the free-plan restrictions (Channel Talk's 30-day history, Chatty's reinstall billing)?
• Do you need order editing and refunds inside the support view?
• What happens to your existing conversation history? Inbox's data retention, export path, and uninstall behavior are not documented in the help center's Inbox section.

Bottom line

Diagnose the gap before shopping. Inbox's missing channels are the result of retirements, not roadmap. If chat alone covers you, free is the right answer and no comparison table changes that.

Compare billing units, not monthly minimums. Tickets, seats, AI resolutions, AI conversations — two apps at "$100/month" today will diverge wildly as you grow. Growing team points to Gorgias. Unpredictable volume points to Chatty or Tidio. Small team, high volume points to Re:amaze Starter.

Do the per-ticket labor math before you believe any AI pricing claim. It's the only number that determines whether usage-based AI is a saving or a second subscription.

Helpdesk pricing changes faster than almost any other app category. Every figure here reflects the Shopify App Store and vendor pricing pages as of September 1, 2026 — verify before you commit budget.