For most small businesses where several people share the chat, Tidio is the better value: ten seats are included from $29 a month and its Lyro AI is sold in conversation blocks. Intercom suits a one-to-three-person team that wants stronger workflows and pays per result, at $29-$39 a seat plus $0.99 per AI outcome.
The AI bill is where that answer can flip. Tidio counts a Lyro conversation whenever its bot replies in a new chat, whether it solves anything or not, and sells those in blocks: 50 a month for $39 on monthly billing. Intercom charges only when Fin produces an outcome. Unless your bot fully closes more than roughly 70-79% of the chats it touches, Fin is the cheaper AI per conversation, and Tidio's saving comes from seats instead.
So the honest answer depends on three numbers you can pull from last month's inbox: how many conversations arrived, how many people answered them, and how many an AI could have closed without a human. Plug those into each vendor's price sheet and you get two monthly bills you can compare like for like. Pull them before you open either free trial, because both trials are designed to impress on the easy questions.
Price sheet for Tidio and Intercom, side by side
These are list prices in USD from each vendor's own pricing page as of September 2026. Both vendors revise plans often, so confirm them on the Tidio pricing page and the Intercom pricing page on the day you buy.
| Tidio | Intercom | |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter: $29 a month billed monthly, or $290 a year billed annually | Essential: $39 per seat a month billed monthly, or $29 per seat billed annually |
| What the plan fee covers | 100 billable conversations a month and 10 seats | One seat with live chat, shared inbox, ticketing and pre-built reports |
| Next plan up | Growth: from $59 a month for 250 billable conversations, rising to $349 for 2,000 | Advanced: $99 per seat monthly or $85 annually, adding workflows, multiple team inboxes, round-robin assignment and 20 free Lite seats |
| AI agent | Lyro AI Agent | Fin AI Agent, included on every plan |
| How the AI is billed | Monthly blocks of Lyro conversations: 50 for $39, 100 for $75, 200 for $140, 300 for $210, 1,000 for $700 (monthly billing) | $0.99 per Fin outcome |
| Free option | Free plan: 50 billable conversations a month, 10 seats, 50 Lyro conversations once for the life of the account | Free trial; no free plan on the pricing page |
| AI on a helpdesk you already use | Lyro sold stand-alone for Zendesk, Salesforce and other help desks | Fin with helpdesks such as Salesforce at $0.99 per outcome, with a minimum monthly commitment and no seat costs |
Read the table for its shape rather than its totals. Tidio prices by how many human conversations your team handles and gives everyone a seat. Intercom prices by head and by result. A business with lots of occasional helpers and a steady trickle of chats lands on Tidio's side; a business with one or two dedicated people and a bot that genuinely resolves queries lands on Intercom's.
What each vendor counts before it bills you
Tidio's pricing FAQ defines a billable conversation as any live chat, ticket, email or social media conversation that includes a message from a human agent. A thread counts once however many messages it holds, messages from visitors that nobody answers are not counted, and replies from Lyro or from Flows (Tidio's rule-based automations) don't count as agent replies. Lyro runs its own meter: a Lyro conversation is counted the first time Lyro responds in a new conversation.
Intercom counts a Fin outcome when a customer confirms the issue is resolved, when they don't ask for more help after Fin responds, or when Fin completes a workflow it calls a Procedure, including one that ends in a handoff to your team. You're charged once per conversation even if Fin answers several questions in it. The "didn't ask for more help" route is an assumed resolution: the customer goes quiet for 24 hours after Fin's last answer. Silence is not the same as satisfaction, and on this meter that matters for the bill.
Here is how five ordinary chats at a bicycle repair shop would be metered by each tool:
| The chat | Tidio meters | Intercom meters |
|---|---|---|
| "How much is a full service?" The bot quotes the price list and the customer replies "great, thanks". | 1 Lyro conversation, 0 billable | 1 outcome: $0.99 |
| "Is my bike ready? It's job 4471." The bot can't see the workshop board and passes the chat to staff. | 1 Lyro conversation plus 1 billable conversation | No outcome, unless the handover runs through a Procedure; staff time on a paid seat |
| "Do you fit tubeless tyres on hybrids?" The bot wrongly says no, and the customer books elsewhere. | 1 Lyro conversation | Probably 1 assumed resolution after 24 quiet hours: $0.99 for a lost booking |
| Three questions in one chat (opening hours, parking, e-bike servicing), all answered well. | 1 Lyro conversation | 1 outcome: $0.99 |
| A message at 9pm while the bot is switched off, and nobody replies. | Nothing | Nothing |
The third row is the one to remember. Under Intercom you can pay for a wrong answer; under Tidio you pay for every conversation the bot opens, right or wrong. Neither meter tells you whether the customer left happy, so whichever tool you choose, read a sample of AI-closed chats every week. The routine in how to measure whether your AI chatbot is actually working takes about twenty minutes and catches the tubeless-tyre kind of error before it repeats fifty times.
A bicycle repair shop costed on both tools
Take an illustrative two-person bike shop: the owner and one front-of-shop assistant answer everything. Last month brought 350 conversations, 250 through the website chat and 100 by email. The owner wants AI on the website chat only, because the emails are mostly job updates and supplier queries that need a person anyway.
Two resolution rates bracket what a small shop might see early on: a cautious 35% while the knowledge base is thin, and 60% once prices, opening hours and booking rules are written up properly. On 250 AI-handled chats, that means 88 or 150 closed by the bot. All prices below use monthly billing.
| Monthly cost | Bot closes 35% (88 chats) | Bot closes 60% (150 chats) |
|---|---|---|
| Tidio: human conversations left | 350 - 88 = 262, so the Growth 400 tier at $89 | 350 - 150 = 200, so the Growth 250 tier at $59 |
| Tidio: Lyro block covering 250 chats | 300 block at $210 | 300 block at $210 |
| Tidio total | $299 | $269 |
| Intercom: two Essential seats | $78 | $78 |
| Intercom: Fin outcomes at $0.99 | $87.12 | $148.50 |
| Intercom total | $165.12 | $226.50 |
For this shop Intercom is cheaper in both cases: by about $134 a month while the bot is weak and $42 once it is good. Two details drive that. With only two people, Intercom's per-head charge stays small. And 250 AI chats fall awkwardly between Tidio's 200 and 300 blocks, so the shop pays for 50 Lyro conversations it never uses. Notice too that at 35% the human conversations (262) tip over Tidio's 250 tier by just twelve, which adds $30 to the bill.
Now change one number. The shop takes on two Saturday staff who also pick up chat, so four people need access. Tidio's bill doesn't move, because its Free, Starter and Growth plans all include ten seats. Intercom's seat line doubles to $156, making $243.12 at 35% and $304.50 at 60%. At the higher resolution rate Tidio is now $35.50 a month cheaper, and the gap widens with every extra person. How many people touch the inbox decides more small-business cases than any AI feature does.
Annual billing narrows both bills. Tidio's annual prices work out at two months free, and Intercom's Essential seat drops from $39 to $29. Run the sums both ways, but commit to a year only after a quarter of real usage, when you know your true resolution rate instead of the one the sales demo implied.
The break-even between Lyro blocks and Fin outcomes
Strip out seats and look at the AI alone. Each Lyro block has a cost per conversation; Fin has a flat $0.99 per outcome. Fin is cheaper whenever its resolution rate multiplied by $0.99 comes to less than Lyro's cost per conversation. Divide one by the other and you get the resolution rate your bot would have to beat before Tidio's AI becomes the cheaper of the two:
| Lyro block (monthly billing) | Price a month | Cost per AI conversation | Resolution rate where the two cost the same |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 conversations | $39 | $0.78 | about 79% |
| 100 conversations | $75 | $0.75 | about 76% |
| 150 conversations | $110 | $0.73 | about 74% |
| 200 to 1,000 conversations | $140 to $700 | $0.70 | about 71% |
Those break-evens assume you use every conversation in the block. Unused ones still cost money: the bike shop buys 300 and uses 250, so each Lyro conversation really costs $0.84, and Fin stays cheaper unless it resolves about 85% of chats, a rate few small businesses reach. Annual billing helps Tidio here, because two months free takes the 50-conversation block to $32.50 a month, or $0.65 per conversation, and the break-even down to about 66%.
A quick sum for a one-person business shows the other end of the scale. An illustrative photography studio gets 45 enquiries a month and the owner answers them all. Tidio's Free plan covers up to 50 human conversations and includes 50 Lyro conversations once. When those run out, keeping the AI means a paid Lyro block (from $39 for 50 on monthly billing), and more than 50 human conversations a month would also need Starter at $29. So the studio pays somewhere between $39 and $68 a month on Tidio with AI, against $53.85 on Intercom for one Essential seat plus, say, 15 outcomes. If the owner is content to drop the AI after the free allowance, Tidio's Free plan costs nothing at all.
Where Intercom's higher price buys something
Cost isn't the only axis. Intercom's plans carry features that matter once a shop has more than one kind of enquiry:
- Routing between inboxes. Advanced adds multiple team inboxes, a workflows builder and round-robin assignment. The bike shop could send anything mentioning "warranty" or "crash damage" to the owner and every booking request to the assistant, without anyone triaging by hand.
- Procedures. Fin can run a multi-step workflow, such as asking for frame size, bike type and a preferred day before passing a tidy booking request to staff. Each completed Procedure counts as an outcome, so budget $0.99 for every one, including those that end in a handoff.
- Copilot for staff. A separate add-on at $35 per agent a month billed monthly or $29 annually, which Intercom describes as a personal AI assistant in the inbox. Every agent gets 10 Copilot conversations free each month, which is enough to judge whether it earns its price. Lite seats can't use it.
- Lite seats. Advanced includes 20 and Expert 50. They're limited-access seats for colleagues who need to look in rather than work the inbox full time; check Intercom's seats article for exactly what a Lite seat can and can't do before relying on them for part-timers.
Tidio's case rests on simplicity. Ten seats means the Saturday staff and the owner's partner can all log in at no extra cost. Flows, its rule-based automations, can pop up a booking link after a visitor has spent 40 seconds on the servicing page; the first 100 visitors reached by Flows each month are free, and the add-on starts at $29 a month for 2,000 on monthly billing. And because Lyro is sold in fixed blocks, the AI line on the bill is the same every month whether the bot has a good or a bad one. For an owner who budgets to the dollar, a fixed $140 can be easier to live with than a variable $90 to $190.
| Your situation | Lean towards | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Four or more people answer chat, some part time | Tidio | Ten seats included on Free, Starter and Growth |
| One or two people, and a bot that will close a good share | Intercom Essential | Small seat bill; AI only costs when it produces an outcome |
| Enquiries need routing to different people | Intercom Advanced | Workflows, team inboxes and round robin sit on Advanced |
| The AI budget must be the same every month | Tidio | A Lyro block costs the same whatever the results |
| You already run a helpdesk your team likes | Either AI on its own | Fin at $0.99 per outcome, or Lyro stand-alone |
| Under 50 conversations a month and AI is optional | Tidio Free | 50 billable conversations a month at no cost |
Twenty questions to run through both free trials
Tidio's paid plans come with a 7-day free trial and Intercom offers a free trial too, so you can test both in the same fortnight. Load identical knowledge into each: the price list, service descriptions, opening hours, booking and cancellation rules, and the warranty policy. If those pages don't exist yet, write them first; training an AI chatbot on your FAQs, policies and prices covers the format that bots quote most reliably.
Then pull 20 real questions from last month's chats. Don't write your own: owners unconsciously write questions their FAQ already answers. A filled-in test set for the bike shop looked like this:
TEST SET: bike shop, 20 real questions from last month
Prices (5) full service cost | e-bike service cost | wheel truing price
| puncture repair while I wait? | do you price-match tyres?
Bookings (5) next free service slot | drop-off before 8am? | Sunday collection?
| how long does a service take? | can I move my booking?
Status (3) is my bike ready (job no.) | why is my repair late?
| quote for the extra parts you found
Products (4) 700c inner tube in stock? | tubeless on a hybrid?
| kids' bikes? | gift vouchers?
Awkward (3) scratched frame complaint | refund for a cancelled service
| "just let me talk to a person"Score every answer 0, 1 or 2: 2 for correct and complete, 1 for correct but vague or missing a condition, 0 for wrong, invented, or failing to hand over when it should. Keep a separate tick for "handed over at the right moment", because a bot that answers 18 questions well and traps an angry customer on the other two is worse than one that scores 15 and hands over cleanly. An illustrative score sheet, filled in for part of the set:
QUESTION TRIAL A TRIAL B NOTE
Full service cost 2 2 both quoted the list price
Wheel truing while I wait 1 1 both promised same day; list says "before noon"
Tubeless on a hybrid 0 2 A said no; answer sits under "tyres"
Is my bike ready (job 4471) 2 1 B asked for an email first, handed over late
"Let me talk to a person" 2 2 both handed over at once
Refund for cancelled service 1 0 B invented a 48-hour rule
SUBTOTAL (6 of 20) 8 8 handover ticks: A 6/6, B 5/6The wheel-truing row shows the most common failure and its fix. Asked "Can you true my wheel while I wait? How much?", an illustrative bot reply read: "Yes! Wheel truing is $25 and takes about 30 minutes, so you're welcome to wait in the shop." Three problems: the price list says "from $25", while-you-wait only runs Monday to Friday before noon, and the 30 minutes was invented. The fix is in the knowledge, not the bot: rewrite the entry as "Wheel truing: from $25 depending on damage. Same day if dropped off before 12:00, Monday to Friday. We can't do it while you wait on Saturdays. If the rim is cracked, we'll quote a new wheel before doing any work." Re-ask the same question in both trials and re-score.
Billing surprises in the first three months
Most overspends on either tool come from setup choices rather than prices. These are the ones to watch:
- Pointing the bot at every channel. If the AI answers on the address suppliers and couriers use, it spends Lyro conversations or Fin outcomes on messages no customer sent. Start with the website chat, add channels one at a time, and check what each one costs you in the first fortnight.
- Tier creep on Tidio. One illustrative week shows how it happens: the owner switches the bot off to rewrite the FAQ, staff handle everything, and human conversations jump past 250, moving the shop onto the $89 tier. Pause the bot on quiet days, or make the rewrite quick.
- Seats for occasional helpers on Intercom. A Saturday helper who answers 12 chats a month on a $39 seat costs $3.25 per chat before any AI. Either share the load differently or check whether a Lite seat covers what that person actually does.
- Paying for confident wrong answers. Assumed resolutions mean a customer who gives up quietly can still cost $0.99. Read 20 Fin-closed chats a week and correct the knowledge behind every wrong one. Set clear rules for when an AI chatbot should hand over to a human so frustrated customers reach a person instead of drifting away.
- Signing for a year in week one. The resolution rate in a demo is not yours. Three months on monthly billing costs a little more and gives you the only number that makes the annual decision safe.
If neither tool fits your shop
Some businesses are better served by something else entirely. A Shopify store can try Shopify Inbox first: it now includes a free AI agent that answers customers on its own (Basic plan or above, with new customer accounts), though it can fall back on web search as a secondary source, so test it on your own policy questions before trusting it. Teams whose support is mostly email may prefer a helpdesk with AI built in; Help Scout sells AI Answers as a $0.75-per-resolution add-on on its paid plans (from $25 a user a month), though its free plan for up to five users doesn't include it, and the comparison of Freshdesk and Zendesk for a small support team covers two more. If you're not sure you need AI at all yet, AI chatbot vs live chat vs help desk helps you decide what kind of tool you're buying, and the wider list of AI customer support software for small teams puts Tidio and Intercom against the field.
Whichever way you lean, the decision takes an afternoon with last month's numbers and a fortnight of parallel trials. The shop that counts its conversations, seats and realistic resolution rate before signing rarely regrets the choice; the one that picks on the demo usually finds out on the third invoice.
Tidio and Intercom questions owners ask before switching
Can I add Fin or Lyro to the helpdesk I already use?
Yes, both vendors sell their AI agent on its own. Intercom says Fin works with existing helpdesks such as Salesforce at $0.99 per outcome, with a minimum monthly commitment and no seat costs. Tidio says Lyro can sit on top of Zendesk, Salesforce or other help desks. That route makes sense if your team is happy with its inbox and only wants the AI layer.
Which tool handles Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp messages?
Tidio lists its website widget, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp as live chat channels. Intercom lists WhatsApp, SMS and phone as pay-as-you-go channels on top of its included live chat and support email. For WhatsApp, Meta's own messaging charges also apply and change from 1 October 2026, so check both vendors' channel pages and Meta's pricing before you plan around it.
Is there a discount for a new business?
Intercom's pricing page describes an Early Stage offer for startups of up to 93% off plus a year of Fin free, subject to eligibility rules you should read first. Tidio has a free plan with 50 billable conversations a month and 50 Lyro conversations once, and a 7-day free trial on paid plans. Annual billing on Tidio gives two months free.
Further reads
- How Much Does a Website AI Chatbot Cost, and Will It Pay Off? — Work out whether a chatbot pays back before choosing a vendor.
- What to Ask an AI Chatbot Vendor Before You Sign Up — The contract and data questions to put to either sales team.
- How to Test a Customer Chatbot Before It Goes Live — A fuller pre-launch test than the 20-question trial here.
- How to Build the FAQ Your AI Chatbot Needs Before Launch — Write the answers the bot will quote before the trial starts.
- How to Stop an AI Chatbot Giving Customers Wrong Answers — Cut the wrong answers that inflate an outcome-based bill.
- How Much Does Customer Service Software With AI Cost per Agent? — Per-agent costs across more helpdesks than these two.
- AI Subscription Prices Compared for Small Businesses (2026) — Every major AI subscription a small business is likely to pay for, priced side by side, with three example stacks and the costs pricing pages leave out.
- Should a Custom GPT Answer Your Customers? Limits and Safer Options — Customers must sign in to use a GPT, you can't read the chats, and there's no handover. Here are the chatbot options built for customers, with costs.
- Customer Service QA Software With AI: What to Compare — The criteria that matter when choosing AI quality assurance software for a support team, five products compared, and a worked choice for six agents.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Tidio pricing page and pricing FAQ (plans, Lyro tiers, billable and Lyro conversation definitions); Intercom pricing page and pricing FAQ (plan prices, Fin outcome definition, Copilot add-on); Intercom help article on seats. All checked September 2026.