What Shopify support costs a small store each month

Way 1: you answer every message yourself

The tool is free and the answers are good, because you wrote them. The cost is your time: a few minutes per question, many times a day, 50-500 orders a month.

Ten shopper questions a day at three minutes each is about three and a half hours a week. That is time taken from packing, sourcing and marketing, and it never appears on any invoice. The hidden cost is the shopper who waits four hours. Some buy somewhere else; some open a dispute because the answer came too late.

Way 2: pay per conversation

Several helpdesk tools now charge a fee for every conversation their AI answers, on top of a monthly plan. Published rates for small stores sit around these numbers:

• Tidio (Lyro AI)about $0.50-0.65 per AI conversation, on top of a plan
• Gorgiasabout $0.90-1.00 per AI answer, on top of a helpdesk plan
• eesel AIabout $0.40 per AI conversation
• Gladlyabout $1.50 per AI answer

The arithmetic is easy to run. A store whose AI handles 300 conversations in a month at $0.60 each pays about $180 for that month, before the base plan. A quiet month costs less; a store featured on TikTok costs much more.

Honest trade-offs, both ways. In a slow month this pricing is cheap, and these platforms also cover email, social channels and larger teams. But the bill moves with your traffic, which makes it hard to predict. And the AI only answers well after someone writes the answers it uses, then keeps them current. That writing is the work you had no time for in the first place.

Way 3: one flat monthly price

E_help takes a different shape. You enter your store address, it reads your own pages (FAQ, shipping, returns, contact), and it builds itself in minutes. It answers your shoppers in your store's name and can look up a real order from an order number and email. When it is unsure, or a shopper asks for a person, it hands the chat to you by email with the full context.

The price is flat, so a busy month never changes the bill: Starter at $29/month with 200 chats, Growth at $79/month with 1,000 chats. Every store starts with 14 days free, with the assistant live and no card. You never write the answers it uses; when one is wrong, you fix it in one line and it learns.

Where a flat price is the wrong choice: on a very quiet store, say fewer than 50 chats a month. There, a pay-per-conversation tool will usually cost less. A flat price also only pays off if the store actually uses the chats included. The fair comparison is your own message count, not the biggest plan.

How to choose

Three questions settle it for most small stores:

1. How many shopper questions do you actually answer in a week? Count one day and multiply.
2. Do you want a support bill that moves with traffic, or one number you can plan around?
3. Do you have an evening to write and maintain answers, or should that work not exist?

If the first number is high and the last two answers are the second option, a flat price built from your own store is the shape that fits. E_help itself is built and run by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a two-plan price like this stays small enough to keep.

See how E_help builds itself from your store in minutes, and what it costs after 14 free days.