How Much Does Gladly Cost in 2026? Every Published Price and Rate

Gladly publishes no plan price on its own website, but its Shopify App Store listing does: a free plan with 100 AI interactions and one team member seat, and a Starter plan with a $250 monthly spending cap that charges $1.50 per AI Resolution, $0.25 per AI Assist and $120 a month per team member. The enterprise platform is quoted by sales, and Gladly's help documentation prints about a dozen telephony and Voice AI usage rates to five decimal places. Every figure below has a date and a source.

What does Gladly cost in 2026?

Prices checked 22 September 2026 and re-checked on 24 September 2026 on the Gladly listing in the Shopify App Store and in Gladly's help documentation.

Where does Gladly publish its self-serve prices?

Gladly's Shopify listing, published by Gladly Inc and rated 4.7 from 29 reviews, carries two plans.

Free plan. No cost, and it includes "100 AI interactions to test out", the AI agent for chat and email, Shopify product recommendations, integrations with Shopify, Klaviyo and others, and 1 team member seat.

Starter cap, $250 a month. The description is the important part, verbatim: "Set your monthly limit and pay as you go. Everything in the free trial + unlimited interactions up to your spending cap." So the $250 is a ceiling you choose, not a subscription. Underneath it, three rates:

• $1.50 per AI Resolution
• $0.25 per AI Assist
• $120 a month per team member

The listing adds that "External charges may be billed by Gladly Inc separately from your Shopify invoice", and that all charges are in USD on a 30-day cycle.

Two things about that rate card are worth sitting with. The $120 seat is expensive for this category: it is more than a Zendesk Suite Team seat, more than a HappyFox Pro seat and five times a Missive Productive seat. And with one seat costing $120, almost half the default $250 cap is spent before the AI answers anything.

The $1.50 resolution is one of the highest published AI resolution rates we have priced this month, level with Zendesk's $1.50 committed rate (Zendesk's pricing page lists $2.00 pay-as-you-go), and above Intercom's Fin at $0.99, Help Scout at $0.75, Tidio's Lyro at about $0.70 and HappyFox's chatbot at $0.33. What softens it is the second line: Gladly charges 25 cents for an Assist, a conversation the AI worked on before handing to a human. Most vendors charge either full price or nothing for that case. Gladly is one of the few that prices partial credit.

What does Gladly count as a billable AI conversation?

The rates only mean something if you know what triggers them, and that is documented rather than guessed.

From Gladly's Guides and Answers Performance Dashboard documentation, Billable Conversations are two things: Resolved, meaning "Conversations where Gladly AI resolved the Customer's inquiry without handing off to an Agent", and Assisted, meaning "Conversations where Gladly AI sent at least one AI-generated response before handing off to an Agent". And explicitly: "Conversations that were neither Assisted or Resolved are not considered Billable Conversations."

So a conversation where the AI read a guide and said nothing is free of charge. A conversation where it said one thing and handed over is an Assist. A conversation it finished is a Resolution. That's a cleaner ladder than most, and it is materially better for the buyer than a meter that charges full price the moment the bot is matched to an intent.

There's one trap, and Gladly documents it too. Its AI FAQ notes that Gladly AI "treats all inbound messages as Customer inquiries", so it may try to answer spam, and if you let it: "Gladly AI will reply to the message, but this will count as a billable resolution." Gladly's own recommendation is to configure spam to hand off instead. On a $1.50 rate, a few hundred junk emails a month is a real line on the invoice.

How is Gladly's enterprise plan billed?

Buy Gladly the traditional way and there is no price to find, but the billing structure is fully documented. Gladly's implementation docs say you may receive four types of invoice: a Subscription invoice, a Renewal invoice, a Monthly Telephony Platform invoice for voice and IVR, and a Monthly True-Up invoice for "User activity that exceeds the seat licenses you originally contracted for", which can also carry chat payments and pay-per-use features.

The seat model is more granular than most, with four billable user types: Support Users, Task Users, Analyst Users and Information Users.

• Support Users are anyone who communicates with a customer: sending an email, chat or SMS, or taking a call.
• Task Users process tasks without talking to customers, and are "billed at a reduced rate because they do not communicate with the Customer or client", but Gladly is clear that if one of them replies to a customer, "They will then be billed as Support Users."
• Analyst Users are the Insight Builder license, billed per assigned Analyst role. Two details there catch people: Insight Builder needs at least one Analyst permissioned at all times to stay active, and unassigning the role "does not stop billing for the number of Analyst licenses as contracted in the Order Form."
• Information Users are free.

Because the classification is driven by activity rather than by a job title, the True-Up invoice is where a quiet month of everybody-pitching-in shows up. Gladly documents exactly which events flip a user into each category, down to "Task Comment Added". If you are costing Gladly for a team where supervisors occasionally answer tickets, assume they are Support Users.

One contractual detail worth diarizing: the renewal notice goes out before an opt-out window that Gladly describes as "usually 60 days before your contract expiration".

Which usage rates does Gladly publish?

This is the part no third-party page carries, and it is where the real running costs of a voice-heavy Gladly deployment live. All of it is from the Voice, Voice AI and SMS usage costs doc, updated 3 August 2026, and labeled by Gladly as estimates that include call conferencing, quality monitoring, recording and storage.

On top of those sit four more published rates:

Gladly works its own Voice AI example, which is the clearest illustration of the model: a five-minute call with Voice AI active throughout costs 5 × $0.02794 + 5 × $0.06216 = $0.4505, while the same call with Voice AI active for one minute costs 5 × $0.02794 + 1 × $0.06216 = $0.20186. The AI is billed only for the minutes it is actually speaking, which is the right way round.

For scale: an hour of toll-free calls fully handled by Voice AI is 60 × ($0.02794 + $0.06216) = $5.41. A thousand inbound toll-free minutes with no AI is $27.94. These are small numbers next to a seat license, and that's the point: telephony isn't where Gladly gets expensive.

What does Gladly cost for a real team?

Every line is arithmetic on a rate stated above. The first two use the published Shopify rates; the third is the one we cannot complete, and we say so.

A one-person Shopify store on the self-serve plan

• 1 team member: $120 a month.
• 60 AI Resolutions at $1.50: $90.
• 100 AI Assists at $0.25: $25.
• Total: $235 a month, $2,820 a year, which sits just under the $250 default cap.
• Across the 160 conversations the AI touched, that is $1.47 each, and the seat is 51% of the bill.

A three-person team at real volume

• 3 team members at $120: $360 a month.
• 400 AI Resolutions at $1.50: $600.
• 600 AI Assists at $0.25: $150.
• Total: $1,110 a month, $13,320 a year, which means raising the spending cap from $250 to at least $1,110.
• Across 1,000 AI-touched conversations that is $1.11 each, all-in, including the humans' seats.

A 40-agent contact center

This is the one we can't finish honestly. There is no published seat price for Gladly Team, no published Support User rate, and no published AI rate outside the Shopify listing, and the Shopify rates are attached to a product built for lean Shopify merchants, so there is no reason to assume they carry over to an enterprise Order Form. What we can tell you is the shape of the invoice: a subscription for contracted Support, Task and Analyst users, a monthly telephony bill at the rates above, and a True-Up for anyone who exceeded their license. If you are pricing at this size, the number you need is in a quote, not on the internet.

What does Gladly not publish?

Any plan price on its own site. gladly.com redirects to gladly.ai, and the /pricing path on both lands on the homepage. The only dollar figure on it is "+$34 Bigger Average Order", which is a customer result.

The Gladly Team seat rate. Not on the site, not in the docs, not on any marketplace.

International telephony. The doc covers the US and Canada and then says to "Contact Gladly Support your CSM, or your Gladly Account Executive for international rates."

The marketplaces, which we checked before writing any of that. There is no Gladly listing on AWS Marketplace, the only result that names Gladly there is a third-party service from zeb for migrating off Gladly onto Amazon Connect. There is nothing on Microsoft's Azure Marketplace and nothing on Salesforce AgentExchange. The Shopify App Store is the one marketplace where Gladly sells itself, and it is the only place a Gladly price is published at all.

One naming note, because it changes what you should search for: Gladly's documentation now carries a banner reading "Sidekick is now called Gladly (AI) and Gladly Hero (the Platform) is now Gladly Team." Pages quoting Sidekick or Hero prices are quoting a product that has been renamed, whatever else they get right.

Where do third-party Gladly pricing pages get it wrong?

G2's Gladly pricing page, last updated 28 July 2026, says two things that were true and are not any more: "Gladly does not offer a free trial", and that pricing information "is not listed on G2 by the vendor. Buyers typically need to engage directly with the vendor to understand pricing options."

There is a free plan, it has been on the Shopify App Store for months, and it comes with 100 AI interactions and a seat. The second half is fair about G2 itself, but it leads readers to conclude that no Gladly price is published anywhere, and three of them are.

That's the whole gap this page exists to close. A vendor taking its pricing page down doesn't mean it has stopped publishing prices. It means the prices moved.

How does Gladly's AI pricing compare with Zendesk, Fin and Help Scout?

Every rate here is published by the vendor named; Zendesk's comes from the plan comparison table on its pricing page. The volume column is the same: 1,000 AI-resolved conversations a month.

Gladly is the most expensive way to resolve a thousand conversations in that table, on both lines. That isn't automatically wrong. It's the only product in the list built around a single customer thread instead of tickets, and the reviews say people buy it for exactly that. The incentive is worth naming too: a per-resolution meter earns the vendor more when the AI does more of the work, so at $1.50 Gladly's AI has to be right to be worth running, and the $0.25 Assist rate is the piece that keeps a half-finished answer from costing full price. But it does mean the case for Gladly is a customer-experience case, not a cost case, and anyone pitching it internally on savings is pitching the wrong argument.

It suits teams selling considered, high-value goods to repeat customers, where knowing the whole relationship changes the answer, which is why its published case studies are Rothy's, Deckers, Crate & Barrel and Condé Nast rather than high-volume commodity retail. It's the wrong fit if your volume is large and your average order is small, because every one of those conversations arrives at $1.50.

Our what is Gladly explainer covers the product, best Gladly alternatives covers the field around it, and the same pricing exercise on two rivals is in our Zendesk pricing and HappyFox pricing guides. The wider market is in best help desk software.

What do real buyers say about Gladly's bill?

On G2, Gladly scores 4.7 out of 5 from 1,114 reviews, checked 22 September 2026. Its mined cons are Missing Features (37 mentions), Limited Features (27), Learning Curve (27), Limited Customization (26) and Call Issues (26), price is not on that list, which is a reminder that the tag cloud reflects what most reviewers write about rather than what the biggest objection is.

When price does come up it's unambiguous. Aarav P., a senior IT manager at a mid-market company, gave five stars on 7 April 2026 and titled his review "Last moved off tickets to people- Good software but very costly." He is positive about the product: "Gladly works differently since they are not depending on the amount of tickets... My agents trained only 2 days and were using it." Then: "The key issue that I think is the price. To be quite frank, gladly is very expensive. The per-user cost may be very expensive to a mid-sized company and they lack a flexible plan that are available should you be having a small group of people."

That last clause is the one worth updating him on. The Shopify listing is exactly the flexible small-team plan he says is missing: a free tier, a spending cap you set, and per-use rates. It isn't available to everybody, it's built for Shopify merchants, but it exists, and it is the most concrete evidence available of what Gladly thinks its AI is worth.

How we researched this

We started where everyone starts, at gladly.com/pricing, and followed the redirect to the homepage, and we checked that a scripted fetch of that page returns exactly one dollar figure in the entire document before writing that Gladly publishes no price. We then searched AWS Marketplace, Microsoft's marketplace, Salesforce AgentExchange and the Shopify App Store, because a vendor with no pricing page often still has a listing with prices on it, which is exactly what we found. The billing mechanics and every usage rate come from Gladly's own documentation rather than from anyone's summary of it, including the two Voice AI worked examples, which we re-did by hand and which reconcile. We did not get a sales quote, so the Gladly Team seat price, international telephony rates and anything on an enterprise Order Form are outside what we can tell you. Capterra was not usable for reviews: it serves a bot-verification interstitial even to a real browser, and we did not attempt to get past it.

Where does an AI agent layer fit?

Macha does not connect to Gladly, and this is a Gladly pricing guide, so this stays short and accurate. Macha is an AI agent layer that sits on top of a help desk a team already runs (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom), and it never replaces the desk underneath it. If Gladly is your platform, we are not part of that stack.

The contrast worth one paragraph is publication, not just price. Gladly's AI is $1.50 a resolution where it is published and unknowable where it is not. Macha publishes one rate everywhere: $299 a month for 750 tickets, about $0.40 a ticket, with setup and monitoring by the Macha team included and $50 of free usage, no credit card, to try it. A ticket is one thread with one person, charged once however many replies it takes. You can see the whole rate card on our pricing page, or start a trial and spend the $50 before deciding anything.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Gladly cost? On the plan Gladly publishes, which is its Shopify App Store listing, there is a free tier with 100 AI interactions and one seat, and a pay-as-you-go plan with a $250 default monthly spending cap charging $1.50 per AI Resolution, $0.25 per AI Assist and $120 a month per team member. For the enterprise platform, Gladly publishes no price and quotes by sales. Checked 22 September 2026.

Does Gladly have a pricing page? Not any more, no. gladly.com redirects to gladly.ai, and the /pricing path on both domains resolves to the homepage, whose only dollar figure is a customer-outcome statistic. G2's Gladly pricing page still says pricing is not listed and that there is no free trial; both statements are out of date against the Shopify listing.

Is there a free version of Gladly? Yes, through the Shopify App Store. The free plan includes 100 AI interactions to test out, the AI agent for chat and email, Shopify product recommendations, integrations with Shopify and Klaviyo among others, and one team member seat.

What counts as a billable conversation in Gladly? Two things, per Gladly's own documentation: a Resolved conversation, where Gladly AI answered the customer without handing off, and an Assisted conversation, where it sent at least one AI-generated response before handing off. Conversations that were neither assisted nor resolved are not billable. On the Shopify rate card a Resolution is $1.50 and an Assist is $0.25.

Does Gladly charge for AI answering spam? Yes, if you let it. Gladly's AI FAQ says the AI treats all inbound messages as customer inquiries, and that if it replies to spam, "this will count as a billable resolution". Gladly's own advice is to configure suspected spam to hand off rather than be answered.

How much does Gladly's voice AI cost? $0.06216 per minute, on top of the standard telephony rate, and only for the minutes the AI is actually engaged. Gladly's documentation works the example: a five-minute toll-free call handled entirely by Voice AI costs $0.4505, and the same call with one AI minute costs $0.20186.

What are Gladly's telephony rates? For US numbers, incoming is $0.01860 a minute on a local number and $0.02794 on toll-free, outgoing is $0.02296 on both, SMS is $0.00273 or $0.00637 per message, and MMS runs from $0.01213 to $0.01698. Canadian rates are similar. International rates are not published; Gladly's doc directs you to your account team.

How does Gladly bill users? By activity, in four categories. Support Users communicate with customers and are billed at the full rate; Task Users only act on tasks and are billed at a reduced rate, but become Support Users the moment they reply to a customer; Analyst Users are the Insight Builder license; Information Users are free. Exceeding your contracted licenses produces a monthly True-Up invoice.

What happened to Gladly Sidekick and Gladly Hero? They were renamed. Gladly's documentation carries a banner reading that Sidekick is now Gladly (AI) and Gladly Hero, the platform, is now Gladly Team. Any page quoting Sidekick or Hero pricing is quoting a product under its old name.

Sources:

• Gladly on the Shopify App Store: the free plan, the $250 cap and the three published rates
• Gladly docs: Voice, Voice AI and SMS usage costs: telephony, Voice AI, branded calling and lookup rates
• Gladly docs: invoice and billing overview: four invoice types, four billable user types, True-Ups and renewals
• Gladly docs: Guides and Answers Performance Dashboard: the definition of a Billable Conversation
• Gladly docs: common Gladly AI FAQs: spam replies counting as billable resolutions
• G2: Gladly reviews: rating, review count, mined cons and the cited review