Intercom vs Drift vs LiveChat: Live Chat Pricing Playbook

Three vendors sell a chat widget for the same website, and the three price tags have almost nothing in common. Intercom charges per seat plus $0.99 for every question its Fin AI agent resolves. LiveChat charges a flat per-person rate and no per-conversation fee. Drift charges nothing in public, because Salesloft stopped selling it as a standalone product and set its retirement for January 31, 2027.

This playbook prices all three on the same terms: 5 seats, annual billing, and 1,000, 5,000, and 20,000 conversations a month. Every figure comes from the vendors' own pricing pages as read on November 9, 2026, except the Drift floor, which no vendor publishes.

1. The three ladders as published on November 9, 2026

Intercom sells three priced tiers. Essential lists at $29 per seat per month with $19 shown as the current new-customer price, a 35 percent cut. Advanced is $85 and Expert is $132. Fin AI Agent is priced separately on every tier at $0.99 per outcome.

LiveChat still sells legacy plans on a separate page, while new buyers are steered to Text. Starter is $19 per person per month on annual billing and $25 monthly; Team is $49 and $59; Business is $79 and $89; Enterprise is custom. Text repeats the same entry price: Essential $19 annual and $25 monthly, Growth $79 and $99, Enterprise custom.

Drift publishes no price anywhere: drift.com redirects to a Salesloft page that lists no Drift package. The only Drift number here is a corroborated secondary figure: two independent 2026 reads put the Premium floor at about $2,500 a month, $30,000 a year, billed annually. Treat it as a planning estimate, not a quote.

2. Three different products wearing the same widget

The three widgets do different jobs. Intercom is a customer-service platform: Messenger live chat, a shared inbox, ticketing, a public help center, and Fin, an AI agent that answers inside that inbox. LiveChat is chat-first: the widget, an inbox, campaigns, and visitor tracking, with ticketing and an AI agent arriving through Text. Drift is a sales product: its playbooks qualify visitors, score buyer intent, and book meetings for sales reps. It has no ticketing, no shared inbox, no SLA tracking, and no help-center deflection.

That difference decides which price is comparable: Intercom's $19 buys a support seat, LiveChat's $19 buys a chat seat, and Drift's reported $2,500 a month buys a sales pipeline tool. For the helpdesk-suite comparison, see our Zendesk versus Freshdesk versus Intercom support pricing playbook, which runs all three desks on the same 5, 25, and 100 seats. For the chat half, the Slack versus Microsoft Teams versus Discord pricing guide prices team chat at the same seat counts.

3. Free tiers: none of the three publishes one

Every vendor here sells a trial, and none publishes a free tier. Intercom offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, including Fin and the add-ons. Text offers a 14-day trial with no card collected. LiveChat's legacy page offers a free trial without stating a day count. Drift offers no free trial at all: signup is demo-gated, and getting started begins with a sales call. There is no free tier to fall back to when the trial ends. The first dollar is a seat dollar, and on Intercom it is a seat dollar plus an AI dollar.

4. The AI bill: three different meters

Intercom's Fin is priced per outcome at $0.99. An outcome counts when the customer confirms the issue is resolved, when the customer does not ask for more help after Fin responds, or when Fin completes a workflow including a handoff. Fin charges once per conversation even if it answers several questions inside it, and a minimum of 50 outcomes applies: a $49.50 monthly floor.

Text prices its AI per resolution: one resolution is one customer question the AI solved directly, and several questions inside one chat still count as one. Essential includes 10 AI resolutions a month and Growth includes 200. Extra resolutions come in packages of 50 at $49.50 on both plans, which is $0.99 per resolution, the same unit price as Fin. Text also meters API calls: 10,000 a month on Essential and 20,000 on Growth, with extra packages of 100,000 at $29.50.

Drift publishes no AI meter, no resolution rate, and no deflection figure: it measures pipeline and meetings booked, not questions resolved without a human.

Intercom also sells AI add-ons outside the Fin meter: Copilot at $29 per agent per month on annual billing ($35 monthly), Pro at $100 a month for 500 conversations plus 6,000 credits, and Proactive Support Plus at $99 a month for 500 messages.

5. Worked math at 1,000, 5,000, and 20,000 conversations

The model is fixed: 5 seats, annual billing, and 50 percent of conversations resolved by AI. The 50 percent figure is an assumption, not a vendor claim. Intercom uses Essential, LiveChat uses Business, and Text uses Growth. At 5 seats the seat bill is $95 on Intercom Essential or Text Essential, $425 on Advanced, $660 on Expert, $245 on LiveChat Team, and $395 on LiveChat Business or Text Growth.

LiveChat Starter cannot run a five-person team: the plan allows exactly one user, so the $19 seat price is a $19 total, not a $95 total, and the team that buys it must upgrade to Team at $245 a month.

Monthly cost, seats plus AI. Intercom: $95 in seats plus $0.99 per AI-resolved conversation. LiveChat Business: $395 flat, no AI meter or AI agent included. Text Growth: $395 in seats plus $49.50 per 50 resolutions above the 200 included. Drift: the reported $2,500 floor, flat.

The arithmetic, line by line:

Cost per conversation falls for the flat-priced vendor and stays nearly flat for the metered ones: LiveChat Business $0.40, $0.08, and $0.02 at 1,000, 5,000, and 20,000 conversations; Intercom $0.59, $0.51, and $0.50; Text $0.69, $0.53, and $0.50; Drift's reported floor $2.50, $0.50, and $0.13. Annual totals at 5,000 a month: Intercom $30,840, Text $32,064, LiveChat Business $4,740, Drift $30,000.

6. The break-even: 606 conversations a month

Intercom's seats cost $300 a month less than LiveChat Business, and Fin adds $0.495 per conversation at the assumed 50 percent resolution rate. Dividing the $300 gap by $0.495 gives about 606 conversations a month, the volume where the two cost exactly the same.

Below about 600 conversations a month, Intercom Essential plus Fin is cheaper. Above it, the flat seat price wins, and the gap widens by about $0.50 per conversation. At 5,000 conversations the gap is $2,175 a month in LiveChat's favour.

The Intercom-versus-Text gap is nearly constant instead: both vendors charge $0.99 per AI resolution, so above the volume where Text's included 200 resolutions run out, the difference settles at about $102 a month in Intercom's favour.

That $102 holds above roughly 400 conversations a month at the assumed rate, and reverses below it, where Text's included resolutions cover the whole AI load.

7. Drift and the sunset: the floor that buys the least time

Drift's pricing story is not a ladder. It is a retirement notice. Salesloft's Drift Sunset FAQ states that Drift will be retired on January 31, 2027, that access ends on that date or at the end of the current contract, whichever comes first, and that the chat widget, Drift Email, and custom API integrations stop working after that date. Data stays offline through April 30, 2027, and all remaining data is permanently deleted on May 1, 2027. Salesloft names 1mind as the recommended replacement for chatbot functionality and allGood for Drift Email.

A buyer signing Drift today gets at most 83 days of service before the widget stops, under three months of a contract priced by the year. At the reported $2,500-a-month floor, that is $30,000 a year for a product whose maker has already named its replacement. No new buyer should sign Drift in November 2026.

8. Seat minimums, caps, and ceilings

Intercom's Lite seats are for internal collaboration only: Advanced includes 20 free Lite seats and Expert includes 50, but only full seats can send messages, so Lite seats do not cut the seat bill.

9. Buying and booking the spend

A chat subscription is a vendor contract before it is a software choice. All three vendors bill in USD, and LiveChat adds sales tax by ZIP code where required, so the price on the page is before tax. LiveChat Enterprise lists alternative payment terms on its pricing page.

Keep the vendor file complete before the first payment: the vendor's W-9 for a US supplier, or a W-8BEN for a foreign payee, the EIN of the buying entity on the invoice, and the contract term in writing, including the Drift sunset date. Pay by ACH where the vendor allows it. Under GAAP the subscription is an operating expense in the month it covers, and a CPA reviewing the year will ask for the invoice, the seat count, and the AI usage statement as one packet. Export conversation and billing data as CSV through the vendor API on a schedule: the export is the audit trail when a renewal quote arrives with a different seat count. Confirm data-processing terms in writing: Text states SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and CCPA compliance; Intercom reserves HIPAA support and SSO for Expert; LiveChat reserves HIPAA compliance and SSO for Enterprise.

10. Who this playbook is for, and the execution checklist

This playbook is for a founder or support lead choosing a live-chat widget for a website that already takes real traffic, who can state a monthly conversation volume and a seat count, and who will pay annually. It is not for a team whose volume is mostly phone, a team that needs a free tier, or a regulated team that needs HIPAA or SSO at the mid-tier. And it is not for a team that measures AI by deflection rate alone.

1. Count last month's conversations, split into human-handled and bot-handled.
2. Fix the seat count at the people who will answer chats, and check the Starter one-user ceiling first.
3. Run the three totals at the team's real volume using the formulas in section 5 and the pricing calculator, at 50 percent AI resolution and at the team's own rate.
4. Read the AI definition for the chosen vendor and write it into the decision note.
5. Check the contract end date against January 31, 2027 if Drift is in the stack.
6. Confirm the billing terms in writing: annual or monthly, tax treatment, and the vendor's W-9 or W-8BEN on file.

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