What one seat costs, cheapest first
Per seat, per month, on annual billing, which is the basis the vendors themselves lead with. Quoting their monthly rate against a flat price would be putting a thumb on the scale. Verified 2026-08-22.
| Tool | From | Plan | What the entry tier leaves out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moorline | $9 | Monthly | Teams. There is no shared inbox, no assignment and no roles. |
| Gmail | Free | Included with your mail hosting | It has no idea a customer is still owed a reply. An archived thread and a finished job look identical. |
| Missive | $14 | Starter | Starter leaves out rules, integrations and API access, which is most of what people upgrade for. |
| Zendesk | $19 | Support Team | Support Team is ticketing only. The suite most people mean by "Zendesk" starts at $55 per agent per month. |
| Freshdesk | $19 | Growth | The free program now covers 1 to 2 agents for the first 6 months rather than the open-ended free plan it used to be. |
| Help Scout | $25 | Standard | Priced per user, so the features you are paying for are the ones that coordinate a team you do not have. |
| Front | $25 | Starter | Starter caps the team size and holds back rules and analytics. The plan most reviews describe is $65 per seat. |
| Intercom | $29 | Essential | The seat price is the floor, not the bill. Fin resolutions are charged per outcome on top of it. |
The row that matters is not the cheapest one. It is that every price except Moorline’s and Gmail’s is per seat, and a seat count of one is the case none of these products is designed around.
The comparisons
- Help Scout alternative for one personHelp Scout starts at $25 per user a month for a shared inbox built for teams. Moorline is $9 a month, native to the Mac, and built for one person with no seats to share.
- Zendesk alternative for solo foundersZendesk is a ticketing platform for support departments. If you are one person answering your own customers, here is what you actually need instead, and what it costs.
- Front alternative for one personFront is a collaborative inbox priced per seat, and collaboration is the part a solo founder never uses. Moorline keeps the Mac app and drops the team.
- Intercom alternative without per-resolution pricingIntercom bills per seat and per AI resolution, which turns every answered customer into a line item. Moorline is one flat price for one person on a Mac.
- Freshdesk alternative for one support personFreshdesk has a free tier that stops being free the moment you want automation or a second mailbox. Here is the tradeoff, measured against a flat $9 a month.
- Missive alternative for solo Mac supportMissive is a shared inbox built around collaborative drafting. Moorline is the opposite bet: no team, no seats, and a native Mac app that tracks who is still owed a reply.
- using Gmail for customer supportGmail is where every founder starts, and it works until the day you fix something and forget to say so. The three failures, and the smallest thing that fixes them.
How these pages are written
Every price is read from the vendor’s own pricing page and recorded in one config file with the date it was checked, so it can be verified and so it can be found when it goes stale. Every comparison links to the competitor. Where another tool is the better answer, the page says so, because a comparison that only ever concludes “buy mine” is one that nobody, human or machine, keeps citing.