Respond.io

Respond.io's Growth plan costs $159/month. Annual billing at the 1,000-contact tier. 10 user seats. The pricing page reprices Growth as you move the contact selector up through 2,500 / 5,000 / 10,000 / >10,000, so $159 is the floor, not the plan price. MAC on-demand is $12 per 100 contacts; AI Credit on-demand $15 per 1,000; extra users +$20/mo each. Monthly billing is $199/mo. For comparison, Converge costs $49/month flat for up to 15 team members.

Respond.io is best suited for sales-oriented teams needing ai agents, broadcast messaging, and crm integrations for lead-to-customer conversion. Its standout feature is ai agents that handle complex conversations, qualify leads, and trigger workflow automations without human intervention.

There are 49+ platforms you can compare with Respond.io in the customer support platform category. Each comparison above shows detailed feature and pricing differences to help you choose.

Starter costs $79/month on annual billing or $99/month monthly, and includes 5 user seats plus unlimited monthly active contacts and a fixed 5,000 AI Credits that do not scale with usage (respond.io pricing page, 22 August 2026). The unlimited-contacts headline is real but narrower than it sounds: Starter excludes workflow automation, broadcast messaging and AI Agents, so you cannot reach those contacts proactively. Adding any of them means Growth at $159/month — which is also the plan that introduces the 1,000-contact meter and $12-per-100 overage. The upgrade that unlocks automation is the same upgrade that starts metering your contacts.

Respond.io charges Meta's WhatsApp per-conversation fees on top of every plan. There is no separate WhatsApp add-on fee — but conversation costs vary by country and type (service, utility, marketing, authentication). A team handling 500 service conversations per month in the US pays roughly $30-50 extra on top of the plan price.

Four plans: Starter ($79/month), Growth ($159/month), Advanced ($279/month) and Enterprise (custom). Those figures are annual billing at the 1,000-contact tier — monthly billing costs about 25% more ($99/$199/$349), and the contact selector on the pricing page reprices each plan as you move up through 2,500, 5,000 and 10,000 monthly active contacts (respond.io pricing page, 22 August 2026). Starter includes 5 seats and unlimited contacts with a fixed 5,000 AI Credits, but no broadcasts, workflows or AI Agents. Growth and Advanced both include 10 seats. Advanced and Enterprise are sales-assisted rather than self-serve.

Because the sticker is a floor, not a price. Four things sit on top of it. First, the tier itself: the contact selector on respond.io's pricing page reprices Starter, Growth and Advanced as you move from 1,000 up through 2,500, 5,000 and 10,000 monthly active contacts, so $79/$159/$279 are the figures shown at the lowest setting (respond.io pricing page, 22 August 2026). Second, MAC on-demand at $12 per 100 contacts on Growth and $15 per 100 on Advanced. Third, AI Credit on-demand at $15 per 1,000 credits, billed in whole blocks rounded up. Fourth, extra seats beyond the included 5 or 10, at $12 to $24 each per month. Meta's WhatsApp conversation fees apply on top of all of it. Both meters rise with engagement, so a campaign that performs well increases the bill on two fronts at once.

There is no separate AI subscription on Growth, Advanced or Enterprise, but AI runs on a metered credit pool that scales with your contact tier — 10x the contact limit on Growth, 20x on Advanced, 40x on Enterprise, so Growth at 1,000 contacts includes 10,000 credits (respond.io AI Credits documentation, 22 August 2026). Consumption varies enormously by feature: AI Assist, AI Translate and chat summaries cost 1 credit each, an AI Agent response costs 2 to 5 credits, and a Voice AI Agent costs roughly 70 credits per minute. That last figure is the one to check before relying on voice — about two and a half hours of Voice AI time consumes a Growth plan's entire monthly allowance. Past the allowance, on-demand bills automatically at $15 per 1,000 credits, rounded up per block, with a hard cap at 200% of the allowance after which AI features pause until the cycle resets. Text-only AI use rarely troubles the pool.

Yes. Respond.io's documentation states that outbound messages which fail to send still count as a Monthly Active Contact, with broadcasts as the only exception (respond.io Billing & Usage documentation, 22 August 2026). A Monthly Active Contact is any contact who sends or receives a message, or makes or receives a call, during the billing month. That means wrong numbers, unreachable contacts and bounced sends all consume meter capacity, and the count resets at the start of each billing cycle rather than rolling over. It is worth reading your last three billing periods under Billing & UsageMACDetails before comparing platforms: if the count is flat, the model is working in your favour, and if it steps up each month you are on a meter that grows with your business.

No. Respond.io has no permanent free plan — it offers a 7-day free trial on the Growth feature set (5 users and 1,000 monthly active contacts, broadcasts excluded), with no credit card required (respond.io pricing page, 22 August 2026). One behaviour to plan around: the trial ends early if the organization reaches 100% of its MAC limit, so importing a large contact list to stress-test the platform can terminate your own evaluation before the week is up (respond.io Billing & Usage documentation, 22 August 2026). After the trial you pick a paid plan starting at $79/month on Starter with annual billing. Note that Advanced and Enterprise are no longer self-serve — both route to a sales conversation rather than a signup button. Converge offers a 7-day free trial on its single $49/month flat plan for up to 15 agents with no contact caps.