Hiver Pricing Explained (2026): Plans, Seat Minimums and What a Small Team Really Pays

Hiver pricing at a glance

Source: hiverhq.com/pricing and hiverhq.com/pricing/hiver-in-gmail, retrieved 23 September 2026. Growth's 10-seat maximum is from help.hiverhq.com, retrieved the same day.

Two things to know before reading further. First, Hiver now sells two products at the same price list: Hiver Omni, a standalone platform that Hiver says "works with Gmail, Outlook, and other email providers", and Hiver in Gmail, which its FAQ describes as a Chrome extension that "works on top of your existing Gmail or Google Workspace account" (both quotes from hiverhq.com/pricing pages, retrieved 23 September 2026). The tier names and per-user prices are identical on both pages; the feature lists differ in small ways we note below.

Second, there is no free plan any more. When we verified Hiver for our Hiver vs InReply comparison in July 2026, the pricing page listed a $0 "Free forever" tier. As of 23 September 2026 that tier is gone from both pricing pages. If a review site tells you Hiver is free to start, it is quoting the old line-up.

What each plan includes, and what it doesn't

Hiver's pricing pages list features cumulatively, so each tier is "everything in the one below, plus". Here is the same list turned round, because the gaps are what decide which tier you actually need (hiverhq.com/pricing, retrieved 23 September 2026).

Growth ($25/user/month annual, $35 monthly)

Included: shared inbox and ticketing, help centre, AI Agents, AI Copilot, Skills, AI Knowledge Builder, rule-based automations, pre-built analytics, basic integrations and 24/7 support. On Omni the page frames this as email, live chat and self-service.

Not included: SLAs, CSAT surveys, a customer portal, advanced analytics, premium integrations and API access, all of which start at Pro. Growth is also the only plan with a seat ceiling: Hiver's help centre states "a minimum of 2 seats and a maximum of 10 seats" (help.hiverhq.com/billing/managing-your-subscription, retrieved 23 September 2026). If you are the kind of team that will ever want a response-time SLA, Growth is a starting point, not a destination.

Pro ($55/user/month annual, $65 monthly)

Included: everything in Growth plus a customer portal, SLAs, CSAT surveys, advanced analytics, premium integrations and API access. On the Omni page, Slack channel management also appears at this tier.

Not included: AI QA, AI Insights, Customer Intelligence, skill-based routing, custom objects, SSO and HIPAA controls. In other words the reporting-on-quality layer and the enterprise security layer are both Elite-only. Pro is where most support teams will land, and Hiver labels it "Most popular".

Elite ($85/user/month annual, $95 monthly)

Included: everything in Pro plus AI QA, AI Insights, Customer Intelligence, skill-based routing, custom objects, and SSO, HIPAA and custom roles. The Hiver in Gmail page also lists "Personal to Shared Inbox rules" here.

Not included at any tier: voice. Phone support is a paid add-on on every plan, covered below. Hiver also lists GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, CCPA and HIPAA compliance on its pricing FAQ, but note that HIPAA controls (the product settings) are gated to Elite even though the compliance statement covers the company as a whole.

The seat minimum and how it changes the real starting price

The headline "from $25 per user" is true and slightly misleading at the same time, because you cannot buy one user. Hiver's pricing FAQ states: "All Hiver plans start at 2 seats. You can increase from 2 to 5, and then in increments of 5 seats (10, 15, 20, and so on)" (hiverhq.com/pricing, retrieved 23 September 2026).

That produces three real starting prices, not one:

• A solo founder pays for two seats: $50/month on Growth with annual billing ($600/year), or $70/month billed monthly.
• A team of six rounds up to ten seats, because seats above five come in blocks of five: $250/month on Growth annual, $550/month on Pro.
• A team of eleven cannot use Growth at all (10-seat cap) and rounds up to fifteen seats on Pro or Elite: $825/month or $1,275/month on annual billing.

One wrinkle to raise with Hiver's sales team: the purchase article in its help centre says "Hiver sells licenses in bundles of 5, so you can choose from 5, 10, 15, and so on" (help.hiverhq.com/billing-and-payment/purchase-your-hiver-subscription, retrieved 23 September 2026). That is stricter than the pricing page's "increase from 2 to 5", and for a 3 or 4 person team it is the difference between 3 seats and 5. We treat the pricing page as governing below and flag where the bundle rule would change the number. Seat changes settle in the next billing cycle: additions are charged, removals credited (help.hiverhq.com/billing/managing-your-subscription, retrieved 23 September 2026).

On the annual discount: the pricing page shows no percentage and the help centre says "annual billing saves up to 20%", but the published prices work out at about 29% on Growth ($35 to $25), 15% on Pro and 11% on Elite. Use the prices, not the slogan.

AI features: what's included and what costs extra

This is the part of Hiver's pricing that has moved most since July 2026, and in the buyer's favour. In July the pricing page marked AI Knowledge Builder as "coming soon" on Growth and AI QA, AI Insights and Customer Intelligence as "coming soon" on Elite. As of 23 September 2026 none of those labels appear: AI Agents, AI Copilot, Skills and AI Knowledge Builder are listed on every paid plan, and AI QA, AI Insights and Customer Intelligence are listed as live Elite features (hiverhq.com/pricing, retrieved 23 September 2026).

Just as important is what is not on the page. We looked for per-resolution pricing, AI credits, fair-use caps or an "AI add-on" line and found none on either pricing page. That is unusual: Help Scout charges $0.75 per AI resolution and Front sells Copilot at $20 per seat on its lower tiers (both verified 23 September 2026, see the comparison below). If Hiver applies any AI usage limits, they are not disclosed on its pricing pages, so ask before you assume unlimited.

The one add-on with a published price is Voice: "$30 per voice seat/month", with "1,000 minutes per voice seat/month included" and additional usage "charged at $0.03 per minute" (hiverhq.com/pricing, retrieved 23 September 2026). Three agents on the phone therefore add $90/month before overage. Hiver's Omni page also says you can "manage email, live chat, slack, voice, WhatsApp and socials from Hiver Omni"; the pricing table itself does not state which of those channels unlock at which tier, and we could not confirm that allocation from the public page, so treat channel availability per tier as a question for the demo.

What a 3, 5 and 10 person team pays

Assumptions: annual billing, seats equal to headcount where the pricing page permits it (2 to 5 seats, then blocks of 5), no voice add-on, prices from hiverhq.com/pricing retrieved 23 September 2026. "Per year" is the monthly annual-billing rate multiplied by seats and by twelve.

Two adjustments to keep in mind. If Hiver applies the help centre's "bundles of 5" rule to your quote, the 3-person row becomes the 5-person row: $1,500/year on Growth rather than $900. And on monthly billing the same three teams pay $105, $175 and $350 per month on Growth, $195, $325 and $650 on Pro, and $285, $475 and $950 on Elite.

The number that surprises small teams is the middle column. Pro is where SLAs and CSAT live, and for five people it is $3,300 a year before anyone picks up a phone: reasonable for a support department that uses the reporting weekly, a lot for a five-person business whose real problem is the same twenty questions arriving every day.

Is there a free plan, and is it usable?

No free plan exists as of 23 September 2026. Both hiverhq.com/pricing and hiverhq.com/pricing/hiver-in-gmail show Growth as the entry tier, and the pricing FAQ describes only the trial: "When you sign up, you instantly get access to our Elite plan for 7 days", with no credit card required, after which "your account will be suspended at the end of your trial" unless you upgrade, and "you can reactivate your account by upgrading within 7 days after your trial ends" (retrieved 23 September 2026).

Is the trial usable? Seven days of the top tier is generous in scope and tight in time: one working week to connect an inbox, invite colleagues and generate enough real conversations to judge the AI. Start it on a Monday and note by Friday which features you actually touched. Assignment, notes and AI drafts point to Growth; if you set up an SLA and opened the reporting twice, that is Pro. Two smaller facts from the same FAQ: Hiver migrates data from another helpdesk "at no extra cost", and offers discounted pricing to qualified nonprofits on request.

Hiver pricing vs the alternatives

For context, here are the entry prices of the tools people most often weigh against Hiver, each checked on the vendor's own pricing page on 23 September 2026. All are per user or per seat, annual billing unless stated.

Sources: hiverhq.com/pricing, missiveapp.com/pricing, helpscout.com/pricing, front.com/pricing, gmelius.com/pricing, all retrieved 23 September 2026.

Read as a group, Hiver is mid-table on sticker price and unusually clean on AI: no per-resolution meter, no Copilot add-on. Its cost pressure comes from the seat rules, not the rate card. For what you give up with each option, see our Hiver alternatives guide and the wider shared inbox software roundup; if you are weighing a full ticketing tool, start with email ticketing systems and Freshdesk alternatives.

How InReply's flat pricing compares

A straight caveat first: InReply is not a helpdesk, so this is not a like-for-like swap. There are no tickets, SLAs, CSAT surveys, reporting dashboards or chat and phone channels. What it does is answer customer email. It connects to your existing Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365 inbox via OAuth, classifies what comes in, and writes replies grounded only in the knowledge you upload (FAQs, PDFs, CSVs, documents or a linked website), organised into playbooks. Ghost Mode, on every plan, holds each reply as a draft for approval; Autopilot, switched on per playbook, sends automatically with human-like delays, business-hours awareness and a confidence threshold. Anything it cannot answer is raised to a person as a draft or a tracked, assignable action item in the team workspace.

The pricing model is the opposite of Hiver's. InReply charges a flat monthly price per workspace, set by email volume rather than seats: Starter £39/month (500 emails/month, 1 inbox, 2 users), Growth £79/month (2,000 emails, 3 inboxes, 5 users, playbook analytics), Scale £149/month (5,000 emails, 5 inboxes, 10 users, custom rules engine, smart auto-filing), and a custom Business plan for 10,000+ emails. There is a 14-day free trial with no credit card.

So the 5-person team from the table above, paying $125/month on Hiver Growth or $275/month on Pro with annual billing, fits InReply's Growth plan at a flat £79/month. The question is not which is cheaper but which job you are buying. If those five people need organising around a queue (who owns this, was it answered in time, how did the customer rate it), Hiver's price buys that machinery and InReply does not offer it. If they are mostly typing the same answers to the same questions, InReply's price buys the answering, and the seat count stops mattering. Details on the InReply pricing page; the head-to-head is in Hiver vs InReply.

Verdict: who Hiver's pricing works for

A dedicated support team of 5 to 20 on Pro: yes, comfortably. $55/user/month buys SLAs, CSAT and analytics with AI Agents and Copilot included rather than metered, and the seat blocks suit a team that hires in fives. This is who the price list is designed for.

A regulated or enterprise team on Elite: yes, if you need SSO, HIPAA controls, AI QA and routing on the box. $85 to $95 per user is in line with Front's and Help Scout's top tiers; negotiate on volume.

A team of 2 to 3 that mainly needs collaboration: workable on Growth at $50 to $75/month annual, but confirm the seat-bundle rule with sales, and know that the first SLA more than doubles the bill. Missive or Gmelius are cheaper for pure collaboration; see the alternatives guide.

A solo founder, or a team of six: the seat rules work against you. One person pays for two seats; six people pay for ten, and the effective per-person price sits well above the sticker.

A small business whose inbox is mostly repeat questions: Hiver's price buys queue management you may never open. A flat-priced AI email agent that answers from your own documents and hands the rest to a person is the cheaper shape; our guide to email management software lays the categories side by side.

Bottom line

Hiver's 2026 price list is simpler than the third-party pages suggest: $25, $55 and $85 per user on annual billing ($35, $65 and $95 monthly), AI included throughout, voice the only priced add-on, no free plan, a 7-day Elite trial. The costs to watch are structural: the 2-seat floor, blocks of five above that, Growth's 10-seat ceiling, and the jump to Pro for your first SLA. Run your headcount through the table, then decide whether you are buying a support desk or just need the email answered. Every Hiver figure here was retrieved from hiverhq.com on 23 September 2026; check the live page before you sign.