Last checked: October 2026. Intercom and every other vendor change prices, plans and features often. Figures marked "reported" come from third-party summaries, not from a page we verified on the day, and may be out of date. Please confirm on Intercom's own pricing page before you decide.
What Fin is built for
Any honest Intercom Fin alternative page begins with what Fin does well. Fin answers support questions and passes the rest to your team inside a helpdesk, so tickets, history, teammates and routing already exist around it. If your support team lives in Intercom, Fin is not a separate product to run; it is a layer on one you use.
Its pricing is built around outcomes. Third-party summaries report roughly $29 per seat plus roughly $0.99 per resolution, with a trial rather than a free plan. Paying when the AI resolves a conversation suits a support team that measures deflection and wants the cost to track the result. Intercom publishes its own figures on its pricing page; confirm them there, because ours are reported and may be out of date.
What each billing model charges for
The useful way to compare is to follow a few chats through each model.
- The AI answers and the visitor is satisfied. Under resolution pricing this is the billable event, subject to the vendor’s own definition of a resolution. On SiteTrellis it counts as one conversation and your provider bills the tokens.
- The AI cannot help and hands over to a person. Resolution pricing is tied to the outcome, so how this is billed depends on that definition. On SiteTrellis it still counts as one conversation, and tokens are still billed.
- The visitor leaves without an answer. Same pattern: SiteTrellis counts the conversation whether or not it succeeded, and does not measure resolutions as a pricing unit.
- Traffic doubles for a month. A per-resolution bill follows the resolved volume. A SiteTrellis plan follows conversations, with a soft cap and a buffer on paid plans and a hard cap on Free.
That second and third case is the honest cost of conversation pricing: you pay for chats that did not work. In return, the number does not depend on how a vendor classifies each chat.
Fin and SiteTrellis side by side
| Aspect | Intercom Fin | SiteTrellis |
|---|---|---|
| Core idea | AI agent working inside the Intercom helpdesk | Standalone chat widget with its own AI agent |
| Billing unit | Seats plus a fee per AI resolution | Conversations on a monthly plan |
| Reported prices | Roughly $29 per seat and roughly $0.99 per resolution | $19 a month for 1,000 conversations; AI billed by your provider |
| Free plan | None reported; a trial instead | 100 conversations a month |
| Bring your own key | Not offered, as far as our research found | Yes: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, DeepSeek |
| Helpdesk | Tickets, team inbox and history in one product | No ticketing; a chat inbox for takeover |
| Human handoff | To teammates inside the helpdesk | Live takeover from Starter, or email handoff |
| Channels | Omnichannel support platform; check your plan | Website widget only |
| Provider fallback | Not covered by our research; ask the vendor | Ordered fallback chain, built for resilience |
Modelling the cost of either
Both models can be written as short formulas. Fill the Fin side from its pricing page, not from our reported numbers.
Resolution pricing = seats x seat price + resolutions x fee per resolution
SiteTrellis = plan price + conversations x AI cost per conversation (provider rate)For SiteTrellis the platform part is $19 a month for 1,000 conversations on Starter. The AI part under 6 visitor messages per conversation, 1,500 tokens of prompt and knowledge sent every turn, and 180-token replies is an estimate of about $1.79 per 1,000 conversations on Claude Haiku 5.5, from our catalog. Try your own volumes in the cost calculator. The difficult input on the Fin side is your realistic resolution rate, which only your own data can tell you.
Where SiteTrellis is behind
Leaving a helpdesk for a standalone widget removes things you may rely on.
- No ticketing, routing, SLAs or shared history across email and chat. SiteTrellis is not a helpdesk.
- No omnichannel: no WhatsApp, voice, email inbox or social channel.
- No native CRM or helpdesk connectors and no visual flow builder; the workaround is webhooks and custom tools.
- Knowledge is pasted text and FAQ pairs, not website or PDF training.
- No public reviews yet, because the product is new, and you must manage a funded AI provider account.
Choose Fin if, choose SiteTrellis if
Choose Intercom Fin if
- You already run, or plan to run, your support in the Intercom helpdesk.
- You want AI cost to follow resolved conversations and you can define what resolved means.
- Your team handles tickets, several channels and a lot of volume.
Choose SiteTrellis if
- You run a small or mid-size site with no helpdesk and want a chat agent that answers, captures leads and hands over by email or takeover.
- You want the plan to be a known amount and the AI bill to come from your own provider.
- Your knowledge fits in a few pages of text, and you are fine without ticketing.
Piloting without leaving Intercom
You would not migrate off a helpdesk for a small test. Pilot instead:
- Pick the one page where visitors ask repeat questions, such as pricing or shipping.
- Paste the answers into a SiteTrellis agent as text and FAQ pairs, in strict knowledge mode, then test with real questions from your inbox.
- Add a key with a spend limit, set an email handoff to your support address and embed the script on that page.
- Compare the share of chats the agent handled well against what Fin handles for you, then decide.
Hand-off setup is covered in Escalation and takeover, and the use case is described in AI chatbot for customer support.
This comparison is written by SiteTrellis, so read it with that in mind. We aim to describe Intercom fairly and to say plainly where SiteTrellis is behind. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us and we will fix it. Last checked October 2026; pricing page: Intercom pricing.