The short version
Gorgias is an ecommerce helpdesk. It was built for Shopify stores, it is genuinely good at that, and it does not charge per agent. Its AI Agent answers questions and is billed per resolved interaction.
Aiders is not a helpdesk. It is an email agent that acts on the order. It issues the refund in Shopify, edits the order, changes the address, and it notices a chargeback threat while the customer is still writing to you.
How each one charges
| Gorgias | Aiders | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Per ticket, plus per automated interaction | Per store, per month |
| Agent seats | Not charged | Not charged |
| Published plans | $10 for 50 tickets, $60 for 300, $360 for 2,000, $900 for 5,000, via the Shopify App Store listing | From EUR 49 per store, 250 emails included |
| AI charge | $0.90 per automated resolution, $1 on Starter | Included in the plan |
| Overage | $1.00 to $2.00 per interaction | EUR 0.40 down to EUR 0.20 per email |
| A conversation AI finishes alone | Ticket fee plus automated interaction fee | Same as any other email |
| A conversation AI hands to a human | Ticket fee only | Same as any other email |
Prices move. Check the Gorgias pricing page and ours before you decide.
What that means when the volume comes
Read the last two rows again. A Gorgias ticket becomes billable when at least one message in it is sent from the helpdesk, whether it comes from a human agent, from AI Agent, or from an automatic rule. The automated interaction is charged separately when AI resolves it without a human. So the outcome you actually want, a conversation closed with nobody touching it, meets both meters. Automated means no human joined within 72 hours.
In fairness, when the AI hands off to a person, only the ticket fee applies. That is the honest reading of their billing docs, and it produces an odd shape: the invoice is cheapest on the tickets your team does by hand.
Aiders is priced per store. A month where the agent resolves everything costs what a month where it resolves nothing costs. Nothing on the bill goes up because the software worked.
What Aiders does here
- Issues partial and full refunds itself in Shopify, back to the original payment method, no human in the loop.
- Waits for the carrier to confirm the parcel actually arrived before paying a return refund. It does not refund on a promise.
- Edits the real Shopify order to swap a size or colour. Shopify restocks the old item, deducts the new, and emails a payment link if the new one costs more. It checks live stock first and refuses a variant that does not exist.
- Issues store credit into the Shopify store credit account, spendable at checkout with no code, or a real gift card.
- Enforces a refund ladder in code. It cannot jump to a full refund without walking the rungs you set, and any rung can be offer but never pay.
- Reads a chargeback threat in the email, including the coded ones: the bank, the lawyer, the resolution centre, the consumer authority, the vague "you leave me no choice". The published Gorgias intent taxonomy has 24 intents and not one of them is a chargeback or a payment dispute.
That last point is worth more than it looks. Visa excludes disputes resolved through pre-dispute solutions from the ratio it monitors. A dispute you settle in your own inbox never enters the maths. Once the bank is in it, it counts, and it counts whether you win or lose.
What Gorgias is good at
Gorgias is ecommerce native, not a general helpdesk with a Shopify connector bolted on the side. Their own line is that the helpdesk is never priced per agent, and that is genuinely merchant friendly: put the whole team in the inbox during launch week and the licence cost does not move. The rules and macros engine is mature, and their AI is deliberately careful. Gorgias states that if it cannot find an answer, it will not respond. If a wrong reply frightens you more than a slow one, that is the right default.
Who should pick which
Pick Gorgias if you run a support team across chat, social and email, want a mature shared inbox with rules and macros, and are content that humans make every decision involving money.
Pick Aiders if most of your email is post-purchase order work and you want it finished rather than drafted. Where is my order, I want a refund, wrong size, change my address, and the thread that starts hinting at the bank.
If what you need is a multi-channel helpdesk with a team rota and a chat widget, Aiders is not that.
Start free
Install Aiders on Shopify. The first 100 emails are free, once, not per month. Only emails that get a reply count.