A helpdesk puts email, chat, social and sometimes phone into one inbox, spreads the conversations across several people and, if you pay for the AI, answers tickets without anyone reading them. In the App Store the entry plan runs from $10 to $90 a month, and the AI is billed on top for every conversation it resolves. If you answer support yourself and nearly all of it comes in by email, you probably don't need one. Here are the numbers so you can decide.
Prices come from the public listings of eight support apps on the Shopify App Store. We checked them on 27 August 2026.
This is what almost all of them ship, under one name or another.
Email, on-site chat, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and SMS, all on the same screen.
Assign each conversation to someone, see who has what and how long they take.
Saved replies and automations that tag, prioritise or close tickets.
The customer's order next to the conversation, so you don't go looking for it.
A bot that answers and closes without anyone reading the ticket. Nearly always a separate add-on with a separate price.
Response times, volume per channel and per person, service targets.
All of it comes from the App Store listings, not from what their websites say.
| Typical in the category | |
|---|---|
| Free plan for good | Only 3 of the 8. The rest give you 7 or 14 days |
| What they charge for | Tickets or conversations in 5 of 8. The 3 most expensive charge per person |
| If you go over | Between $0.20 and $1.50 per extra conversation |
| Paying yearly | Takes 10 to 30% off |
See which of the two lists looks more like your week.
If you're in the second list, your problem isn't organising channels. It's that every email costs you five or ten minutes: open Shopify, find the order, check where it is, type the same thing you typed yesterday. What actually saves you time is having the reply already written, order in front of you, when you open the email.
mailipy is an email support assistant for Shopify. It isn't a helpdesk and doesn't try to be one.
| Typical helpdesk | mailipy | |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | Email, chat, social, SMS, phone | Email only |
| Built for | Support teams | One or two people |
| What the AI does | Answers and sends on its own | Writes the draft; you send it |
| Shopify order | Next to the conversation | Inside the draft |
| Learns from you | Macros you write and keep up yourself | Every edit becomes a rule |
| How it's billed | Tickets or people, plus the AI on top | Drafts per month, no other counters |
| Price | $29 entry (median); $57 at 200 conversations | Free · Pro $15 (200 drafts) · Max $49 (900) |
| Abandoned carts | Hardly ever | Included |
| Setup | Configure channels, macros and rules | Connect the inbox and answer an interview |
To be clear: if you need chat, social or a team, mailipy won't do. That's a job for a helpdesk.
Free plan, no card. If you already use something else, no need to remove it.
On the free plan. Whatever you already have keeps working as before.
Gmail, Outlook or your own domain. Customers keep writing to the same address.
Ten minutes on shipping, returns and how you talk. That's what builds your agent.
Count how many drafts you sent untouched. That number tells you whether it's worth it.
No. It reads your inbox, finds the order in Shopify and leaves the reply written for you to approve. No chat, no social, no team management. If you need those, a helpdesk will suit you better.
Yes. It connects to your inbox over IMAP and doesn't get in the way of other tools reading the same mail. It's the easiest way to try it before deciding anything.
Because a wrong reply costs more than the time it takes to approve one. mailipy saves you the writing, not the deciding. The only thing that does go out on its own is abandoned cart emails, and those are your own templates, approved beforehand.
It stops generating drafts until next month, or until you move to Max, which is 900 a month. It doesn't charge you for the extra ones.
From the public listings of eight support apps on the Shopify App Store, checked on 27 August 2026. They're medians and ranges, not the price of any one app. If a listing says otherwise, the listing wins.
Free plan, no card. You'll have the first draft in a few minutes.
Install on Shopify