Tidio

What it is

Tidio is a live chat and helpdesk for small and mid-sized businesses, with an AI agent called Lyro on top. It has three products that are priced separately. The core helpdesk covers live chat, a ticketing inbox, and email and social channels. Flows is a rule-based chatbot builder for proactive messages and lead capture. Lyro, launched in 2023, answers customer questions from the support content you give it, and hands anything it cannot answer to a person.

Lyro is not locked to Tidio’s own widget. It can deploy into Zendesk, Salesforce, and Intercom, and it pulls product recommendations from Shopify. Its Smart Actions, built on MCP, let it call connected systems for jobs like updating an order or qualifying a lead. It answers only from your content, so a thin help center caps its resolution rate.

The company was founded in 2013 in Szczecin, Poland, by Tytus Gołas and Marcin Wiktor, is now headquartered in San Francisco, and raised a $25M Series B led by PeakSpan Capital in 2021. It says 300,000+ businesses use it; named customers include Under Armour, The Body Shop, Dermalogica, and Stanley. It is independent — no acquisition or parent-company change is on record as of September 2026.

Why it shows up in Customer Success stacks

• It writes a resolution rate into the contract. The Premium plan lists a “guaranteed 50% Lyro AI resolution rate” and is the one tier where Lyro can bill per resolution instead of per conversation. Tidio is not alone here — Richpanel guarantees 50% to every new account for its first 30 days — but among the SMB chat tools, it is the one that attaches a floor to the AI rather than to a case study.
• The entry price is low. A free plan and a $29-a-month Starter plan let a five-person team run live chat and ticketing before spending anything on AI.
• The AI agent is portable. Because Lyro runs inside Zendesk, Salesforce, and Intercom, you can test it on your existing queue without migrating the helpdesk first.

Pricing

As published on 2026-09-26. The helpdesk plans meter billable conversations — any chat, ticket, email, or social conversation that includes a reply from a human agent; AI and Flows replies do not count. Free is $0 for 50 billable conversations a month and 50 lifetime Lyro conversations. Starter is $29 a month ($24.17 billed annually) for 100 billable conversations. Growth starts at $59 a month ($49.17 annually) from 250 billable conversations. Both include 10 seats. Plus starts at $300 a month plus usage, with discounted usage rates and custom seats. This replaced a flat $749-a-month Plus plan before 2026-03-19, and many 2026 pricing roundups still quote the old number. Premium is quote-only; third-party reports put it from $2,999 a month, with at least 3,000 Lyro conversations bundled.

Lyro is billed on top. Standalone packs run $39 a month for 50 conversations ($32.50 annually), $75 for 100, $110 for 150, and $140 for 200 — $0.70 to $0.78 per conversation. On Plus and Premium, Tidio’s Lyro page lists $0.50 per conversation. Flows is separate again, from $29 a month.

Model the AI line on resolutions, not conversations. At $0.50 per Lyro conversation and a 50% resolution rate, each resolution costs $1.00; at Tidio’s advertised 67% average, it costs $0.75. Intercom’s Fin bills about $0.99 per resolution, so the two break even at roughly a 50% resolution rate. The Premium floor sits almost exactly at that parity point. On the small packs, $0.70 per conversation at 50% is $1.40 per resolution — more than Fin.

Best for

Founders and support leads at small ecommerce and SaaS businesses with 1 to 10 agents, where website chat is the main channel, 300 to 3,000 conversations arrive a month, and most questions are answerable from a help center — shipping, returns, sizing, plans, and account basics. It is the wrong pick for B2B support where tickets turn into engineering work, and for teams above roughly 25 agents that need workforce management, deep QA, and routing across many queues.

Watch-outs

• Published prices and quoted prices differ. Plus moved from a flat $749 to $300 plus usage in 2026, the usage rate is not published, and Premium is quote-only. The guard: get a written quote listing the base fee, the billable-conversation rate, the Lyro rate, Flows, seats, and the renewal uplift, and model it on your last three months of volume before you sign.
• Lyro bills attempts unless you are on pay-per-resolution. On the packs and on Plus, you pay for every conversation Lyro handles, including the ones it escalates. The guard: track cost per resolved conversation weekly for the first 90 days; below a 50% resolution rate at $0.50, or below about 71% on the $0.70 packs, you are paying more per resolution than Fin’s $0.99.
• The guarantee lives only on Premium, and its terms are not published. The pricing page states the 50% rate but not how a resolution is defined, which conversations are eligible, over what window it is measured, or what the remedy is. The guard: get all four in the contract, measure the rate yourself on the agreed definition, and calendar the claim deadline on day one.
• Resolution depends on your content. Lyro answers only from the knowledge you load, so the 67% average is a ceiling set by other companies’ help centers. The guard: before go-live, pull the top 50 questions from your last month of chats and confirm each has a written answer in the knowledge base.

Alternatives, and when to pick them instead

Zendesk and Intercom are the category’s two largest vendors. Pick Zendesk when support spans email, voice, and many queues and you need mature routing and reporting. Pick Intercom — renamed Fin in May 2026, and which Salesforce agreed to acquire in June 2026 — when in-app messaging for software users is the main channel and a per-resolution AI meter is what you want.

Gorgias is the ecommerce-helpdesk incumbent; pick it over Tidio when the store runs on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento and agents need order edits and refunds inside the ticket. Pick Richpanel when you want a resolution guarantee without a Premium contract. Sierra and Decagon are the fastest-growing AI-agent entrants, but they sell enterprise deployments; pick them when volume and budget run to six figures a year. Pick Chatwoot when you want an open-source inbox you can self-host. Under 100 conversations a month, stay on Tidio’s free plan and skip Lyro entirely.