Comparison
Refik and Richpanel, read on the same day.
Their pricing page sells two products side by side and meters them differently: one counts the orders your shop takes in a month, the other counts the people who sit and answer. Ours counts neither. It counts conversations a shopper started — most of which end without an order and without anyone answering. Three meters, one job, and no exchange rate between them. The rows below are the evidence for that sentence, each one dated, each one from a page you can open yourself.
Method
Two sides, two dates, and an empty cell that means something.
The right-hand side of every row was read out of Richpanel’s own pages on 10 October 2026 — the home page, the pricing page and the integrations page, nothing else. No analyst report, no review site, no sales call. The quotes are theirs, word for word, including the one place where a single cell of theirs carries two numbers that do not agree with each other. The left-hand side was read out of our own source code on 4 October 2026, and the plan figures come from the pricing page in this same directory, which fails its build if a price in the code changes without the page changing with it.
One thing about their pricing page shapes this whole table, so it belongs here rather than in a footnote: it is not one price list. It is two, under two headings — Self-Service Portal For customers and Help Desk For agents — and the two are metered on different things. Every right-hand cell below says which of the two it came from, because a figure from one of them is not comparable to a figure from the other, let alone to ours.
An empty cell is a third state and it is on purpose. It does not mean “they do not have it”. It means we did not read it on that day, so printing a dash there would turn a gap in our reading into a claim about their product. Where a cell is empty, the reason is written underneath, and it says which side the gap is on — one of the three is ours.
Two things are missing from this page by design. There is no verdict row and no score: an order, a seat and a conversation are three different units, and dividing one by another would produce a number that looks like a measurement and is not one. And there is nothing here about how well either assistant answers a shopper, because we did not measure that on either side.
The rows
What each side charges for, and who it expects to be on the other end.
Read the first row before the prices. It is the reason the rest of the table looks the way it does: an order meter scales with how much you sell, a seat meter scales with how many people answer, and a conversation meter scales with how many shoppers asked — a number that includes everyone who asked and then did not buy. The same shop lands in a different place on each of the three.
Richpanel read from richpanel.com, richpanel.com/pricing and richpanel.com/integrations; Refik read from this repository and the pricing page.
| What the row measures | Refik | Richpanel |
|---|---|---|
| What the meter counts | ||
| The billing unit | Conversations in a billing period. Three bands: 300, 1,000 and 3,000. The code counts no orders and sells no seats. | Two meters, one per product. The portal is metered on monthly order volume — “Starter 3,500 orders/mo”. The help desk is metered on people — “Starter $29 per user per month”. |
| Entry tier, list price in USD | Starter, $39 a month or $390 a year, for the whole shop, with 300 conversations in the band. | Portal: “Starter 3,500 orders/mo $50 per month”, and “$42 per month” on yearly billing. Help desk: “Starter $29 per user per month”, with a lower line above it reading “Base $9 per month for 3 users”. |
| Upper tiers, and the top of the list | $99 and $249 a month; $990 and $2,490 a year. The bands are 1,000 and 3,000 conversations. Nothing above that is quoted on the page. | Portal: “pro 10,000 orders/mo $600 per month”, “$500 per month” yearly, then “Enterprise Custom order volume Custom”. Help desk: “Pro • $ 59 per agent/month”. |
| Charges above the allowance | On monthly billing, $0.15, $0.12 or $0.10 for a conversation above the band, capped at one band’s worth. On yearly billing, none. | |
| AI work counted separately | None, because the band is the allowance: all 300 conversations on the entry plan are answered by the assistant, and there is no second meter underneath it. | Counted on its own on the help desk free plan, which lists “50 AI Assists per company” next to “Email & Live Chat Basic Reporting”. Per company, on a plan priced per user. |
| Getting in without paying | ||
| Free tier | There is none. The lowest line on our pricing page is $39 a month, and the page says so in those words rather than burying it. | One on each product. Portal: “FREE 1,000 orders/mo $0 per month Up to 50 orders per month” — both of those order numbers are in that one cell, as printed. Help desk: “Free $0 per user per month” with “3 Seats”. |
| Free trial | 14 days on every plan, with a conversation allowance scaled to the plan. | |
| Who uses it, and where it runs | ||
| Per-person limits and seat counts | Counted and priced. “3 Seats” on the help desk free plan, “Base $9 per month for 3 users”, and above that the price is written per user and per agent. | |
| Channels a shopper can use | The web storefront, and only that. WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email and SMS are not built, and that is written on the integrations page rather than left to be discovered. | More than one, and the pages say which: “Manage emails, chats, and socials from one dashboard” on the home page, “Email & Live Chat Basic Reporting” on the free help desk plan, and “Manage Email, Social and Chat from one app” on pricing. |
| Platforms it connects to | Shopify only. The catalogue, the policies and the order lookups all come from one store’s Admin API, and there is no second platform in the code. | Shopify is one of the entries on their integrations page: “Shopify eCommerce Manage customer support for your Shopify store from Richpanel”. We read that entry and did not count the rest of the page. |
| How each side describes itself | A shopping assistant on the storefront: it recommends, it looks up an order, and it hands a hard question to a person. | “Respond faster & smarter with the leader in AI for ecommerce customer service. Manage emails, chats, and socials from one dashboard.” |
- Charges above the allowance, their cell is empty. The three pages we read did not say what a shop pays when it goes past an order bracket, or past the AI count on the free plan. A list of brackets implies that something happens at the edge of one; implying is not reading, so the cell stays blank.
- Free trial, their cell is empty. Those pages state a free tier, not a trial length. A free tier and a trial are not the same object — one has a ceiling and no end date, the other has an end date and no ceiling — so we did not fill one in from the other.
- Per-person limits, our cell is empty. Our price is per conversation and the code sells no seats, but we did not read a user limit out of it on 4 October either. “We do not charge for it” is not the same sentence as “there is no limit”, and we are not going to print the second one on the strength of the first.
- One sentence from their pricing page is left out on purpose. The cell for their $9 line also names another company’s product. This page ships exactly one rival’s name and that name is Richpanel’s; quoting that sentence would ship a second one. The same goes for a row of comparison links on their home page — we read it, it is there, and we are not reproducing the names in it.
- The self-description row carries a superiority claim. It is in their own meta description and we left it inside the quote rather than trimming it, because cutting a rival’s words down to make them smaller is its own kind of dishonesty. We did not test the claim. Nothing on this page tests it.
- All three requests redirected. Each of the three addresses answered from the www host instead of the bare one. Only the host spelling changed, and it is recorded here so nobody has to wonder whether a different site was read.
- Neither side’s answer quality is here. Not theirs, not ours. Measuring it would need the same shoppers asking the same questions of both, on a real catalogue, and that has not been done.
The difference that matters
An order is an outcome. A conversation is the work before it.
A meter tells you what a vendor thinks the unit of value is. Metering on monthly order volume says the worth of the product tracks how much the shop sells, and that is a clean idea for something every order passes through — a returns portal, an order-status page, a place a buyer goes after paying. Metering on seats says the worth tracks how many people are needed on the other end, which is the right idea when the work is a queue that humans pick up. Both are defensible. Neither one counts the thing that happens on a product page, which is that somebody asks whether the shade suits them and then either buys or leaves.
That is why the three numbers do not convert into each other. A shop with a lot of orders and very few questions pays the most on an order meter and the least on ours. A shop whose owner is the only person answering pays almost nothing on a seat meter — one seat — and pays us for every hesitation on the storefront, including all the ones that never turned into an order. The questions that cost a shop money are asked before the order exists, so a meter that counts orders is counting the outcome and skipping the work, and a meter that counts seats is counting the staff you were trying not to need.
There is a product difference underneath the pricing difference, and their page states it before we do: one of their two products is for customers and the other is for agents. We only have the first half of that. There is no agent product here — no shared queue, no assignment, no inbox for a team to work through — and here is the honest state of the handover: the server can open a ticket in one help desk, that one is not Richpanel, and the settings screen for choosing a target is not built. So a shop running Richpanel cannot wire our handover up from our panel today. The integrations page lists what is connected and what is not, in the same words.
Who each one fits
Where we would tell you to buy the other one.
An agent product fits you if support arrives through more than one door — email, a chat widget, a social inbox — and more than one person answers it. If you need a shared queue, assignment, reporting across channels, or anything that lives on for weeks after the sale, that is an agent product’s job and not ours. Our channel list is one channel long and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
A self-service portal fits you if what you want sits after the order rather than before it: a buyer who already paid, looking up a shipment or starting a return without writing to anybody. An order-volume meter is an honest unit for that, because every order is a candidate. Our meter would price the same job strangely — it would charge you for the shoppers who asked nothing and bill you nothing for the orders that generated all the work.
We fit you if the questions that cost you money arrive before the order exists: which of these two is right for me, is this in stock in my size, where is the order I placed on Friday, can I send this back. Those arrive on a product page, they arrive from people who have not paid you yet, and answering them needs the catalogue and the policies of one shop rather than a ticket queue.
Neither of us fits you if what you actually need is a person. Both products put a human at the end of the path; ours does it by opening a handover and telling the shopper a person will pick it up, and it is told never to say a refund is approved. If there is nobody to pick it up, no assistant on either side of this table fixes that.
And if you are weighing a free tier against our lowest price, read the ceilings before you read the figures. Their portal’s free entry is written against an order count and their help desk’s against a seat count; ours has no free entry at all, only fourteen days. A shop that will never pass those ceilings should take the free one, and we would rather say that on this page than have you find it out after paying us.