7 Best Fin AI Alternatives in 2026 (Compared on Price)

Why teams are shopping for Fin alternatives in 2026

Three things changed this year, and all three send small teams looking.

• Intercom renamed itself to Fin in May 2026. If you have been searching for “Intercom alternatives,” you have been searching for the same company, which is why the two names now return different results. See the Hacker News discussion of the rename.
• Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin for roughly $3.6 billion on 15 June 2026, with the deal expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal Q4 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Fin’s models and team are slated to fold into Agentforce. Reported by TechCrunch and CNBC.
• The per-outcome price keeps coming up. Practitioners in the thread on the acquisition put it at about a dollar per resolved conversation, and the recurring objection is structural: the model bills you more as the agent gets better at its job.

That last point is the one that matters if you are small. Deflection going from thirty percent to sixty percent is the outcome you were paying for, and it doubles the line item. Cost shows up more often in small-business reviews than in enterprise ones, which you can read for yourself on Fin’s G2 reviews.

How we picked these seven

Every tool below had to clear four bars.

• Published self-serve pricing you can read without booking a sales call.
• Answers grounded in your own content, not just a scripted flow builder.
• No seat minimum that prices out a team of one or two.
• Usable before you have a support operation.

We compared seven tools against those bars. The order is by fit, not by sticker price, because the cheapest headline rate rarely survives contact with your real volume. Every figure below is a published self-serve rate checked in August 2026; prices move, so confirm on the vendor’s own page before you sign anything. The pricing model is the part that rarely changes, and it matters more than the sticker.

The seven at a glance

For reference, Fin charges $0.99 per outcome. Pointed at another helpdesk it adds no seat fees but sets a 50-outcome monthly minimum; on Intercom’s own inbox the outcomes sit on top of seats at $29, $85 or $132 per person per month on annual billing. Either way the comparison below is against a bill with two moving parts, not one.

1. Rinhelp

Rinhelp crawls the site you already have, answers from those pages, and cites the page it used.

• How it bills: $29 a month flat, with 300 resolutions included and $0.10 per resolution after that. No seats, and unresolved conversations are not billed.
• Best for: a founder or small team whose answers already exist on a marketing site or docs, and who wants coverage before hiring support.
• The catch: it is deliberately narrow. No ticketing, no human handoff, no order lookup.

2. My AskAI

The bluntest answer to per-resolution pricing: buy conversations in bulk and pay cents for the ones past your allowance.

• How it bills: $199/mo for 1,000 conversations with $0.12 overage, $499/mo for 2,000 with $0.10 overage, Enterprise from $999. An annual commitment takes roughly a third off, putting the entry plan near $133/mo. Fill the Pro plan and you are paying about $0.20 a conversation against Fin’s $0.99 an outcome.
• Best for: teams that want deflection in front of an existing helpdesk and nothing more.
• The catch: thin outside answer-and-deflect, and it bills per conversation handled whether or not the issue was resolved. The $199 floor is the price that actually applies to you: at 200 conversations a month that is about a dollar each, which is Fin’s rate with fewer features. Branding removal and API access are $49/mo each on Pro.

3. eesel AI

Pay-as-you-go per ticket with no seat charges, aimed at teams that already have a helpdesk.

• How it bills: $0.40 per ticket or chat session, with dashboard questions free and heavy generation like a blog draft at $4.00. No platform fee, no seats, no minimum; prepaying a year of usage takes 25% off. Enterprise adds a $1,000/mo flat fee.
• Best for: established support teams layering AI onto Zendesk, Freshdesk, or similar.
• The catch: $0.40 is a marginal cost bolted onto a helpdesk you are already paying for, so it is never the whole bill. Zendesk or Freshdesk seats underneath can easily outweigh the AI line item.

4. Chatbase

One of the cheapest ways to get a real AI chatbot on a site, if you can live with credit metering.

• How it bills: monthly tiers granting message credits — Free (50), Hobby $40 (700), Standard $150 (4,000), Pro $500 (15,000), around 20% less on annual billing. A single reply burns 1 to 6 credits depending on the model, auto-recharge credits run $40 per 1,000, and extra agents are $25 each per month.
• Best for: simple site chatbots where volume is low and predictable.
• The catch: credits are the ceiling, not a soft limit. When they run out the agent stops answering, which is a bad failure mode for support. Removing the “Powered by Chatbase” badge is a further $99/mo, more than twice the Hobby plan most small sites start on.

5. Tidio with Lyro

A live chat product with the Lyro AI agent sold as a separate conversation pack.

• How it bills: a base chat plan — Starter at $24.17/mo for 100 billable conversations, Growth from $49.17/mo starting at 250 and scaling to 2,000, both on annual billing, which works out to $29 and $59 month to month — plus Lyro packs bought separately, from $32.50/mo for 50 AI conversations and stepping up to 1,000. The free plan includes 50 Lyro conversations once, not monthly.
• Best for: SMB and ecommerce teams that want chat, AI, and a shared inbox from one vendor.
• The catch: Lyro is a separate line item that stacks on whichever chat plan you are on, so the advertised price is never the bill. Past 2,000 billable conversations or 1,000 Lyro conversations there is no self-serve tier left: you are on Plus, which starts at $300/mo plus usage, or on a sales call.

6. Chatwoot with Captain AI

The open-source option, and the cheapest on this list if you are willing to operate it.

• How it bills: the self-hosted community edition is free apart from infrastructure and your time. Cloud runs $19 per agent/mo (Startups), $39 (Business) or $99 (Enterprise) on annual billing, including 300, 500 and 800 Captain AI credits a month respectively, with extra credits at $20 per 1,000. A free Hacker tier covers 2 agents and 500 conversations a month.
• Best for: technical teams that already run services and want no per-conversation meter at all.
• The catch: self-hosting is real work. On cloud, per-agent seats reintroduce exactly the scaling cost you left Fin to avoid — four agents on Business is $156/mo before any extra AI credits.

7. Crisp

An all-in-one inbox, chat, and AI bundle priced per workspace rather than per person.

• How it bills: a flat fee per workspace with seats included — Free for 2 seats, Mini $45/mo for 4, Essentials $95/mo for 10, Plus $295/mo for 20. Extra agents are $10 each, but only on Plus; Mini and Essentials cap at the included seats. Conversations are unlimited; the AI is not, arriving as a credit allowance worth roughly $5, $25 and $75 a month, or about 90, 450 and 1,350 automated conversations.
• Best for: small teams that would rather buy one tool than assemble three.
• The catch: it is cheap because it bundles, not because the AI is strong. Grounded, cited answers are not the focus.

What we left out and why

Four obvious names are missing, all for the same reason.

• Zendesk AI undercuts nobody: the commonly cited committed rate is $1.50 per automated resolution, more on pay-as-you-go, which is above Fin’s $0.99. Zendesk does not publish a public self-serve rate card. Since May 2026 resolutions are also tiered, so the complicated ones cost more than the headline rate.
• Freshdesk Freddy includes a one-time pool of 500 AI Agent sessions then charges $49 per 100, which is $0.49 a session, with Copilot a further $29/agent/mo on annual billing. It bills per session rather than per resolution, so you pay whether or not the customer was helped.
• Gorgias is competitive at $0.90 per resolved interaction on annual billing, $1 on Starter, with 30 to 530 automated interactions bundled on the public plans and $1.50 overage after that. You are not charged the AI fee when it hands off to a human, though a successful AI resolution also counts as a helpdesk ticket. It is built for ecommerce, and the helpdesk underneath is priced by ticket volume on top.
• HubSpot Breeze has the lowest rate of the four: 50 HubSpot credits per resolved conversation, about $0.50 at $10 per 1,000 credits, or about $0.45 at the $9 annual rate. It only makes sense if you are already buying the Service Hub suite around it.

Only Zendesk sits above Fin on the headline unit; Gorgias overage at $1.50 does too. The rest undercut it, and Freddy’s cheaper unit is a session rather than a resolution. None of them is cheap if you are not already paying for the platform underneath, which is the actual reason they are not on the list.

How Rinhelp is different from these alternatives

Most of the six above compete with Fin on rate. Rinhelp competes on what the agent is allowed to do.

• Grounded only in your own pages. It answers from what it indexed on your site, not from general model knowledge about your industry.
• A citation on every supported answer. The visitor gets a link to the page the answer came from, so a wrong answer is traceable rather than mysterious.
• An explicit refusal threshold. Below a confidence score it says it cannot answer instead of producing something plausible. A support bot that never says “I don’t know” eventually makes a promise you have to keep.
• Unresolved conversations cost nothing. You are not billed for the chats it declined, so the refusal behaviour above is not quietly working against your invoice.
• One plan, no seats. $29 a month whether you are one person or six; adding a teammate does not change the bill.
• The inbox doubles as a content backlog. Every flagged unanswered question is a page you have not written yet.

It is worth being blunt about where that narrowness costs you. Rinhelp has no ticketing, no human handoff or SLA, no order status or returns lookup, and no Shopify app. If you need any of those today, pick something else on this list. More on this in why a support bot should refuse.

FAQ

What does Fin actually cost per resolution?

$0.99 per outcome, charged once per conversation rather than per message. On a non-Intercom helpdesk there are no seat fees but a 50-outcome monthly minimum; on Intercom’s own inbox the outcomes land on top of seats at $29, $85 or $132 per person per month on annual billing. Your real cost depends on volume and deflection rate, and published case study deflection rates land in the forty to fifty percent range, so forecast with that rather than with a best case.

Is there a free Fin alternative?

Not a serious one for production support. Chatwoot is free if you self-host it, but you pay in infrastructure and maintenance instead. Chatwoot’s cloud also has a free Hacker tier for 2 agents and 500 conversations. The other free tiers are evaluation-sized: Chatbase gives 50 message credits a month, Tidio gives 50 Lyro conversations once, and Crisp’s free workspace covers 2 seats with no AI credits. eesel AI starts you with $50 of usage and My AskAI with a 30-day trial.

What is the cheapest option for low volume?

At low volume the floor matters more than the rate. My AskAI’s $0.12 overage sits behind a $199 monthly plan, and the $0.10 rate sits behind Scale at $499, so either is the wrong shape below a thousand conversations. eesel AI at $0.40 with no minimum puts 200 tickets at $80, and Rinhelp is $29 for 300 resolutions with nothing billed for the conversations it could not resolve, which matters most at low volume because those sites tend to have the least complete content.

Can any of these be self-hosted?

Chatwoot, and only Chatwoot. The rest are hosted products. Self-hosting removes the per-conversation meter entirely, which is the right trade if you already run services and the wrong one if this would be your first.

What changes for Fin customers under Salesforce?

Nothing immediately. The agreement was signed in June 2026 and is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal Q4 2027, pending regulatory approval, with Fin’s technology folding into Agentforce afterwards. The open question is whether pricing and packaging survive the integration, which is a reasonable thing to weigh before signing a long contract.

What do you give up by leaving Intercom?

Mostly breadth. Intercom bundles a mature helpdesk, ticketing, workflows, phone, and a large integration catalogue around Fin. Every cheaper tool here narrows that scope somewhere. The question is whether you are paying suite prices for a suite you use.

Over to you

The right pick comes down to two things: how many conversations you handle a month, and where your answers already live.

By monthly volume

• Under a few hundred conversations, a bundled flat plan at $29 to $95 a month is almost always cheaper than any per-outcome meter. Three hundred resolutions on Fin is roughly $300 before seats.
• In the low thousands, per-ticket vendors start to look good: eesel at $0.40 a ticket, or My AskAI once volume fills the plan you are already paying $199 or $499 for.
• Above that, per-unit rates dominate. Ten thousand tickets is $4,000 a month on eesel, and about $5,000 in Fin outcomes alone at a fifty percent resolution rate, at which point self-hosted Chatwoot is the cheaper engineering problem.

By where your answers live

• Public website or docs: Rinhelp indexes what you already published.
• Inside an existing helpdesk: eesel AI and My AskAI attach to it.
• Nowhere yet: fix that first. No AI agent can cite a page you have not written.

By whether you need ticketing and handoff

• If you need tickets, SLAs, or a human queue today, look at Crisp, Tidio, or Chatwoot.
• If you only need visitors to stop asking you things your site already answers, the narrower tools are cheaper and better at it.

By billing model

• Flat and bundled if you want a bill you can forecast.
• Per outcome if your volume is genuinely spiky and you would rather pay nothing in quiet months.
• Per agent only if your team size is stable, because seats are the cost that grows quietly.

Our pick is Rinhelp, for the small team with a public site and no support staff, because the bill is predictable and the agent stops at the edge of what your content covers. If you need a helpdesk more than you need a careful answer, ignore that recommendation and buy the helpdesk.