I just made the most radical decision in my company’s 14-year history—eliminating seat-based pricing. Now, every plan Help Scout offers, including our new free plan, comes with unlimited seats. Why? Because seat-based pricing prevents teams from delivering the optimal customer experience. At a moment when AI is resetting the table stakes for customer support platforms, it’s time for a future-facing business model. For a long time, customer support teams embraced what I call a “deflection” mindset: more automation, lower costs, and fewer people talking with customers. Support operated like a cost center: as long as CSAT was good, the team was doing its job. But winning companies don't operate that way today. Beloved brands still invest in AI and automation for customer support, but never at the expense of customer happiness. Instead, they prioritize *delight* over deflection. They see support as a growth driver; a channel for boosting referrals and retention that’s best measured by NPS, not CSAT. Charging per seat made sense in the deflection/cost-center era because it rewarded businesses for connecting fewer employees to customers. But delight is a team sport. By democratizing access to customer feedback, businesses can make better decisions, and ultimately deliver better customer experiences. We’ve experienced this first-hand at Help Scout. Since we don’t pay for our own product, every employee in the company has always had a login. Enabling folks across sales, product, and operations to collaborate and connect with customers is priceless. Yet we were taxing any of our customers who wanted to experience the same benefits. So we went back to first principles. How can we empower our customers to embrace the *delight* mindset? We came up with three principles: ✅ Price on value instead of cost. ✅ Integrate AI at no extra charge. ✅ Offer a great free plan. In November, we introduced a new pricing model that replaces seats with what we call “contacts helped.” At a high level, it's the number of people your team helps in a month. It’s not based on “ticket” count. Multiple conversations with the same person still count as one contact. When we researched new pricing metrics, we learned how much the market values predictability. So, we decided to use contacts and calculate the price based on a three-month trailing average of usage. As a result, the new pricing is 34% less variable than our old per-seat pricing. There are many great reasons NOT to move away from an industry-standard pricing model. For example, migrating existing customers will be a multi-year process — a post for another day. But if our mission is to empower teams to delight customers, and our pricing ultimately makes that difficult, it's a risk worth taking. I’ll post more about how it’s going in a few months, but in the meantime, I’m curious if others have considered moving away from seat-based pricing. What’s been your thought process?
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