How Much Does Freshdesk Cost in 2026? Plans, Freddy AI Add-Ons and What Happened to the Free Plan

Freshdesk costs $19 (Growth), $55 (Pro) or $89 (Enterprise) per agent a month on annual billing, or $23, $66 and $107 paid monthly, and Freddy AI is extra: Copilot is $29 an agent a month on Pro and Enterprise, and the AI Agent is $49 per 100 sessions after a one-time 500. There's no free plan on the pricing page any more; the only free option left is a Free Program for up to 2 agents that lasts 6 months.

We read every price below on Freshworks' own pages on September 20, 2026, captured the screenshots the same day, and re-checked the prices and the Free Program on September 24. If a two-year-old roundup told you Freshdesk was free forever for two agents, the free-plan section is the one you want; if you need somewhere else to go, our guide to free Freshdesk alternatives prices the options that still have a $0 tier.

How much does Freshdesk cost per agent in 2026?

Freshdesk sells under two product lines, which is the first thing that trips people up. Freshdesk (sometimes called Freshdesk Support Desk) is the ticketing-first help desk. Freshdesk Omni is the broader omnichannel suite that bundles ticketing with chat, a bot, and social and messaging channels. They have separate price sheets. Here is the core Freshdesk Support Desk lineup:

Both columns are published. The annual rates are on the plan cards; the monthly rates are carried in the page's own pricing data and shown when you flip the Annually/Monthly toggle, which is why we can print them here as facts instead of the "roughly 20% more" estimate this guide used to carry. The gap is 21% on Growth, 20% on Pro and 20% on Enterprise.

Does Freshdesk have a free plan in 2026?

Not a permanent one. The plan table on Freshworks' Freshdesk pricing page has three columns, and none of them is free. The words "free plan" don't appear anywhere on it. The only free thing on the page is the trial, and the page's own FAQ defines it: "When you sign up, you instantly get access to our Enterprise plan for 14 days. We will alert you before your trial expires."

The old landing page for the free tier, freshworks.com/freshdesk/free-help-desk-software/, returns HTTP 404. We loaded it in a browser on September 20, 2026 to be sure it's gone rather than moved.

What survives is off the pricing page. Freshworks' help center describes a Freshdesk Free Program, updated September 22, 2026: up to 2 agents, free for 6 months, aimed at small businesses and startups, and not available on Freshdesk Omni. You don't sign up for it; you switch to it from inside an existing account under Admin > Account > Plans and Billing > Switch plan, then pick "Try out our free Program". After 6 months, you upgrade to a paid plan.

This is a live sore point, not a quiet deprecation. On r/sysadmin the thread is titled "Freshdesk ticketing no longer free - alternatives?", and r/msp has a thread on a 35% price increase. Reddit blocks our crawler, so we reached both through search and linked the threads rather than quoting them.

Worth naming the incentive plainly. Freshdesk's free tier was an acquisition channel back when help desks competed on seat price. Freshworks now leads every plan card with Freddy AI Agent, which bills per session on top of the seat, so the cheapest way to grow revenue is to put everyone on a paid seat and sell sessions from there. A free-forever tier gets in the way of that, so it became a 6-month program you have to go looking for.

What does each Freshdesk plan include?

The jump between tiers isn't just more of the same. Specific, often-needed features are gated to specific plans.

Growth at $19 an agent a month, annually

The entry point. Growth covers ticketing and a shared inbox, a customer portal and knowledge base, out-of-the-box analytics, threads and tasks, and roles and permissions. Freddy AI Agent is listed on the card with the first 500 sessions included. For a small team that needs organized email support with some routing, Growth is competitively priced against Zendesk's $19 Support Team seat.

Pro at $55 an agent a month, annually

The biggest price jump in the lineup, and where many table-stakes features live. Pro adds a multilingual help desk, custom dashboards and reporting, intelligent routing, multiple SLA policies and external collaborators. It is also the lowest tier where you can buy Freddy AI Copilot. Several of these are things rivals include lower down, so part of Pro's premium is paying to reach features you might consider baseline.

Enterprise at $89 an agent a month, annually

The governance and scale tier: Freddy AI Insights, skill-based routing, a sandbox, audit logs, and allowed domains and IP whitelisting. If you're a smaller team, ask whether you genuinely need audit logs and a sandbox. If not, that's $34 an agent a month over Pro for governance you will not touch.

What changed in Freshdesk pricing in 2026?

Four things moved since most roundups were written, and three of them change your bill.

The free-forever plan is gone. Covered above. A two-person team can still use the Free Program, but only for 6 months; after that you're looking at $19 an agent a month at minimum, or a move.

Day passes came back, at three prices. This guide previously said Freshworks had phased day passes out. The current pricing page lists them as an add-on on every Support Desk tier: $2 a pass on Growth, $7 on Pro, $12 on Enterprise. On Omni they are $5, $10 and $15. A day pass buys one agent one active day instead of a full monthly seat, which is the cheap way to cover a holiday spike.

Freddy AI Copilot has a published price. It is $29 an agent a month on annual billing, printed on the Pro and Enterprise cards. It used to be a number you'd only get from a sales conversation.

Two new metered units appeared. Connector app tasks bill at $80 per 5,000 tasks, and MCP actions at $15 per 1,000 actions. Both are on all three Support Desk plans. If you plan to wire Freshdesk into other systems through Freshworks' own connectors, that's a line item that didn't exist in last year's model.

How much does Freddy AI cost on Freshdesk?

AI isn't included in your Freshdesk plan beyond a one-time taster. Freddy AI is sold as separate add-ons priced on two completely different models, which makes it easy to under-budget.

Freddy AI Copilot at $29 an agent a month

Copilot is the agent-facing assistant: it drafts replies, summarizes long threads, rephrases responses and surfaces suggestions inside the agent workspace. It is priced per agent per month and appears only on the Pro and Enterprise cards, so the real entry cost for agent-side AI is $55 plus $29. Freshworks' FAQ confirms you can buy it selectively: "Freddy AI Copilot can be purchased and assigned to any number of agents of your choice." There's no day pass for Copilot.

Freddy AI Agent at $49 per 100 sessions

The customer-facing agent is priced by session, at $49 per 100 sessions, or about $0.49 each, sold in packs. Freshworks defines the unit on the same page: "In Freddy AI Agent Studio, an Email AI Agent session is defined as a 72-hour window starting from the customer's first email. All AI responses within that window count as a single session, regardless of the number of replies." A three-day back-and-forth is one session.

The 500 complimentary sessions are on all three paid plans and they run out. Freshworks' wording: "We offer 500 free sessions on the Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans to try out Freddy AI Agent. This is limited to once per account." Our previous version of this guide had them as Pro and Enterprise only on Support Desk, which was wrong.

The session model rewards Freshworks when volume grows and does nothing for you when deflection improves, because you're paying per conversation the agent touches instead of per conversation it finishes. At 2,000 customer conversations a month that is about $980 in sessions alone, which can exceed the seat cost of the humans. Zendesk charges $1.50 per automated resolution on a committed plan, or $2.00 pay-as-you-go, and only bills when the ticket closes, which is the opposite trade: a higher unit, a narrower trigger.

How does Freshdesk Omni pricing compare with Support Desk?

If you need more than email (live chat, a bot, WhatsApp and social, phone), you're looking at Freshdesk Omni rather than the Support Desk plans above.

Both lines are per agent per month on annual billing, checked on Freshworks' Omni pricing page the same day. Omni has no free tier either. The decision isn't purely about price: if you're an email-and-knowledge-base shop, Support Desk is cheaper and sufficient; if chat, social and bot deflection are core to how you support customers, Omni's bundle can work out cheaper than stitching add-ons onto Support Desk. Map your channels first, then pick the line.

What should you check before buying Freshdesk?

• Annual billing is the default discount. Every headline price is the annual rate, and monthly runs 20% to 21% higher. Annual also locks in your seat count, so don't over-provision.
• AI is extra on every tier. Neither Copilot nor the AI Agent is included beyond that one-time 500. Budget them as separate line items from the start.
• Copilot is Pro and Enterprise only. You can't get agent-side AI on Growth. The real floor is $84 an agent a month.
• Key features are gated upward. Multilingual knowledge base, custom dashboards and intelligent routing sit at Pro; skill-based routing, audit logs and sandbox sit at Enterprise. Write your must-have list first and buy the lowest tier that covers it.
• Per-tier limits step up too. Automation runs, API call limits and collaboration caps all scale with the plan, so high-volume teams sometimes move up for limits rather than features.
• Day passes are back, and they are tier-priced. $2, $7 and $12 a pass on Support Desk, $5, $10 and $15 on Omni. Cheaper than a seat for anyone who works support two days a month.

What does a 10-agent Freshdesk team really pay?

Sticker math says 10 agents on Pro is "$55 each." Here is a fuller estimate for a mid-sized team running AI properly, all on annual billing, at the rates we checked on September 20, 2026.

The base seats are $6,600 a year. With AI fully switched on, the run-rate is $15,960, or 2.4 times the sticker. The swing factor is the session line: at 300 conversations a month it drops to $147, and at 3,000 it climbs to $1,470 on its own. Model your conversation volume before your seat count. The one-time 500 complimentary sessions reduce your first invoice only.

If you're paying monthly instead of annually, the same team is at $660 in seats. The AI lines don't move, because neither is discounted for an annual commitment.

What can you use instead of the Freshdesk free plan?

Three options still have a $0 tier with no end date, all re-checked on September 20, 2026:

• Zoho Desk Free Edition: free forever for 3 users, email ticketing and a knowledge base. The nearest like-for-like swap for the old Freshdesk free program.

• Jira Service Management Free: free forever for 3 agents, on Atlassian's own pricing page. Better if your requests are IT-shaped.

• Chatwoot Hacker: $0 for up to 2 agents and 500 conversations a month, live chat only, 30-day data retention. Self-hosting Chatwoot removes the caps and costs you a server instead.

Our roundups go deeper here: free Freshdesk alternatives for the like-for-like list, free help desk software for the wider market, and open-source ticketing systems if you would rather run it yourself.

Is Freshdesk worth it?

For a lot of teams, yes, with eyes open. Growth is well-priced for organized email support with automation, and the product is mature and quick to roll out. The friction points are predictable. The Pro jump is steep for features some rivals include earlier, AI is entirely a la carte, and session-based AI billing makes your bill scale with ticket volume rather than headcount. It suits teams that want a dependable ticketing core and will add AI selectively. Pencil it out carefully if you're a high-volume support org leaning hard on deflection, because the per-session math can outgrow the seat cost. For the ticketing core itself, see our Zendesk vs Freshdesk comparison.

Where does an AI agent layer like Macha fit with Freshdesk?

Session billing means you pay for conversations whether or not they end well, which is why the unit is worth comparing before you commit.

Macha is an AI agent layer that runs on top of the help desk you already have. It integrates with Freshdesk natively, so it isn't a replacement for Freshdesk and isn't another help desk to migrate to. It reads from your connected knowledge and past tickets, resolves issues in the ticket itself, and escalates with full context when it is not confident. The honest framing: it's another integration to set up, and it's only as good as the knowledge you connect.

On cost, Macha is one plan priced on monthly ticket volume, from $299 a month for 750 tickets, about $0.40 a ticket at every tier, with monthly billing and custom pricing above 10,000 tickets. A ticket is one thread with one person, charged once however many replies it takes. Setup and monitoring by the Macha team are included on every plan. It fits teams already running Freshdesk who want agents acting inside the ticket rather than a separate widget; it's the wrong choice if you want the AI and the help desk on one invoice. The setup detail is in how to automate Freshdesk with AI, and the integration specifics are on the Macha on Freshdesk page. There's $50 of free usage to try it, with no credit card and no time limit, and the pricing page has the full table.

Frequently asked questions

Does Freshdesk have a free plan? Not a permanent one. The Freshdesk pricing page lists Growth, Pro and Enterprise only, and the old /freshdesk/free-help-desk-software/ URL returns a 404. The public free option is a 14-day trial of the Enterprise plan; inside an account you can also switch to the Free Program, which covers up to 2 agents for 6 months.

How long is the Freshdesk free trial? 14 days, and it gives you the Enterprise plan. Freshworks' pricing FAQ says you'll be alerted before it expires, after which you pick a plan and pay by card or the account is suspended.

How much does Freshdesk cost per agent? On annual billing, $19 for Growth, $55 for Pro and $89 for Enterprise per agent per month. Paying monthly, the same seats are $23, $66 and $107. Freshdesk Omni, the omnichannel suite, is $29, $79 and $119 on annual billing.

Is Freddy AI included in Freshdesk pricing? Not beyond a one-time allowance. Every paid plan includes the first 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions once per account. After that, sessions are $49 per 100. Freddy AI Copilot is $29 an agent a month and is sold only on Pro and Enterprise.

What counts as a Freddy AI Agent session? For the Email AI Agent, Freshworks defines a session as a 72-hour window starting from the customer's first email, with every AI response inside that window counting as one session regardless of how many replies there are.

Does Freshdesk still sell day passes? Yes. The current pricing page lists day passes at $2 on Growth, $7 on Pro and $12 on Enterprise, and at $5, $10 and $15 on the Omni line. They're not available for Freddy AI Copilot.

What is the cheapest way to run Freshdesk with AI? Growth at $19 an agent plus Freddy AI Agent sessions, because Copilot isn't sold below Pro. A five-agent team handling 300 AI sessions a month lands at $95 in seats plus $147 in sessions, or $242 a month on annual billing.

What replaced the Freshdesk free plan? Inside Freshworks, the 6-month Free Program for up to 2 agents. Teams that need a $0 tier with no end date generally move to Zoho Desk's Free Edition (3 users), Jira Service Management's free plan (3 agents), or a self-hosted tool like Chatwoot or FreeScout.

Sources: Freshdesk pricing (read 2026-09-20, re-checked 2026-09-24) and Freshdesk Omni pricing, read 2026-09-20; Freshdesk Free Program, updated 2026-09-22; Zendesk on outcome-based pricing; Zoho Desk pricing; Jira Service Management pricing; Chatwoot pricing; r/sysadmin, "Freshdesk ticketing no longer free - alternatives?"; r/msp, "Freshdesk 35% price increase".