Gorgias alternatives for small stores: what to look for

Your actual ticket volume

Not your busiest week. Your normal month. Nearly every support product is banded or metered somewhere, and the bands are where the surprises live. Count a real month before you shop.

Whether the AI is included

This is the one that catches people out. Plenty of tools price the helpdesk and the AI separately, so the plan you compared is not the plan you end up on. Always add the AI line before you compare two quotes, or you are comparing different things.

Whether you need a helpdesk at all

A helpdesk is for teams: a shared queue, assignment, macros, reporting, integrations. If one person answers everything from one inbox, most of that machinery is overhead. If three people do, it is the whole point.

Team size, now and in six months

Per-seat pricing turns a low-cost tool into an expensive one the moment you add help. Worth knowing which way your tool scales before you commit to it.

Credit where it is due: Gorgias is a serious product and the pricing is public. The wrinkle is that the helpdesk and the AI Agent are separate paid products, so the number you pay with AI switched on is the two added together.

Deliberately no prices for anything below. We have not verified them, and a confidently wrong number about somebody else’s product is worse than no number — check each vendor’s own pricing page.

1. A simple inbox, or what your platform already gives you

Your ecommerce platform may already include a basic customer conversation tool, and a plain shared inbox handles a surprising amount. Lightest in effort as well as in cost, and genuinely enough for a solo store at modest volume. What you give up is reporting, automation and anything resembling a workflow.

2. Another full helpdesk

Several mature products do roughly what Gorgias does with different emphases, pricing shapes and integration depth. Worth a look if you need the helpdesk machinery but the commercial terms do not fit. Compare on seats, ticket bands and whether AI is extra.

3. AI-first support tools

These start from “answer the message” rather than “organise the queue”. The right question for this category is what happens to the tickets the AI cannot close: does it hand them over cleanly, with the conversation, to somebody who can decide? An AI tool without a good escalation path just moves the problem later.

4. Managed support

Instead of buying software, you buy the work being done. Someone else answers the tickets. The thing to pin down is who trains them on your policies and who manages them day to day — that is the difference between a service and a staffing referral. We went through how to evaluate this in where to hire a customer support VA.

We are in categories three and four, so read this as a description rather than a recommendation.

Starter is $100/month for 2,000+ tickets. It is AI-only: the AI answers around the clock, and anything complex is routed to the owner’s inbox with the conversation attached rather than guessed at.

Growth is a dedicated VA plus 24/7 AI support, from $1,400+/month. We source the VA, train them on the policies, FAQs and materials the client provides, and manage them. Hours and rates are explained on the call.

What neither is: a helpdesk. There is no agent queue, no macro library, no reporting suite. If that is what you came for, we are not it.

Three cases, plainly:

You have a support team. More than one person answering means you need assignment, collision detection and a shared view of who said what. That is a helpdesk’s core job and it does it properly.

You need deep integrations and reporting. If your workflow depends on acting on orders, subscriptions and returns from inside the ticket, or on reporting somebody actually reads, a full helpdesk earns the line item.

Your volume makes per-ticket efficiency the whole game. At high volume, shaving seconds off each reply with macros and automation is worth more than anything else on this page.

If none of those describe you, the question is less “which helpdesk” and more “why am I getting this many tickets”. We worked through all four ways to cover support, with the arithmetic, in what customer support really costs a small online store — and if the alternative you are weighing is a hire, the true cost of hiring calculator prices that from your own figures. For where AI fits in all of this, what AI can and cannot answer draws the line.