respond.io stacks two units onto one invoice: the user seat and the monthly active contact. Here neither one is counted, because the price belongs to the workspace. In exchange, respond.io covers far more channels and routes conversations between agents, and this product does neither of those things.
Two units that grow at the same time
Almost every tool in this category picks one billing unit and defends it. respond.io uses two at once, and that is the first thing to understand about its invoice: every person on your team who needs to log in adds to it, and every person outside it you talk to adds to it as well. Both grow when the business is working, which is exactly when nobody feels like reviewing a tariff.
| respond.io | GoFeed | |
|---|---|---|
| Units billed | The seat and the monthly active contact | Neither of the two |
| Conversation channels | WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, LINE, Viber, WeChat, SMS and email | Instagram and Facebook, for the automation |
| Routing conversations between agents | Yes | No |
| Workflows and AI agents | Yes | No |
| Comment trigger | Described on its site, not on its pricing page | Yes |
| Google Business reviews in the inbox | No | Yes |
| Publishing calendar | No | Yes, on fourteen networks |
| Free plan anyone can sign up for | No: a seven day trial | No: a 14-day trial, card required, nothing charged until day 15 |
The middle column comes from respond.io's pricing page and from its own Instagram integration page; the right one from this product's module catalogue. It is worth saying up front that the comparison is lopsided: respond.io is a customer conversation platform and this is not one.
What respond.io costs today
Its page defines the active contact without hedging: somebody you have talked to by chat or call during the billing month, whether they wrote to you or you wrote to them. One person, one active contact for that month.
| Plan | Per month | Per year | Users | Active contacts | Each extra 100 contacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $79 | $948 | 5 | Unlimited, per its page | Not applicable |
| Growth | $159 | $1,908 | 10 | 1,000 | $12 |
| Advanced | $279 | $3,348 | 10 | 1,000 | $15 |
| Enterprise | Contact us | Contact us | Unlimited | Custom | Not published |
Prices checked on 8 September 2026: respond.io.
Two details in that table rarely get mentioned and both count in respond.io's favour. The first is that the entry tier does not cap active contacts at all, which is unusual for a product that charges by contact and deserves saying out loud. The second is that the extra seat carries a published price, $20 a month on Growth and $24 on Advanced, so you know what person number eleven costs before you hire them. There is no permanent free plan, only a seven day trial with no card on the Growth feature set, and that trial excludes broadcasts. Everything above is billed in dollars, as respond.io publishes it, with nothing converted here.
The month a campaign works
This is where the model becomes concrete, and you can do the arithmetic yourself from the table above. A ten person team on Growth pays $159 a month while it talks to fewer than a thousand people. The month one post runs away from the average and you talk to 3,000, that is 2,000 contacts over, twenty blocks of a hundred, $240 on top. That month's invoice is $399, two and a half times the previous one, and the team did exactly the same work.
Worth repeating what was said above, in fairness: that does not happen on the entry tier, where contacts are not capped. It happens from the next tier up, which is precisely the one you need if you want workflows or more than five people inside. So the unit most likely to surprise you arrives at the moment the team grows, not before.
There is a second multiplication underneath. The seat counts too, so a team going from ten to fourteen people adds four lines at $20 a month on Growth, or $24 on Advanced, on top of whatever it is already paying for conversations. Both units answer to the same signal, that the business is doing well, and neither corrects itself.
None of this is small print or a trap: it is printed, with its price per block, and anyone can work it out before signing. It is simply how a per contact price behaves, and it makes clear sense when every conversation is a sale handled by a person. It makes much less when the conversation is automated and the whole point is to reach as many people as possible.
Two billing units against a rate with none
Putting the two columns together does not settle the comparison, because the left one buys things the right one does not have. It is useful for the other job: seeing what each number depends on.
What respond.io costs
- Starter, 5 users, contacts uncapped
- $79 a month
- Growth, 10 users and 1,000 contacts
- $159 a month
- Growth, each extra 100 contacts
- $12
- Growth, each extra user
- $20 a month
What it costs here
- Agency Base
- 79 €
- Agency Pro
- 199 €
- Agency Max
- 399 €
Our figures are read from the live catalogue, which is why they are not written into the article: the pricing page.
The two columns do not measure the same thing. The left one is in dollars and is a base with two variable lines stacked on it at once: the seats that join and the contacts you speak to that month, and only one of those two is yours to decide. The right one is the whole workspace, in euros and including VAT, the value added tax charged in Spain, with no charge per seat and none per post, and with the contact the automation reaches left out of the count entirely, except on the entry tier, where a cap remains that blocks nothing either.
The uncomfortable half has to be spelled out, because a lower price is not an extra feature. respond.io handles WhatsApp, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, LINE, Viber, WeChat, SMS and email, distributes conversations between agents, and carries workflows on top of all that. The automation here is Instagram and Facebook, and the inbox is shared, with no queues and no assignment. If your clients write on WhatsApp, or you have people taking turns to reply, the cheaper column is buying a different thing.
Here the contact is not a billing unit
Of the five quotas a plan carries, four are hard: members, storage, connected social accounts and ad accounts. Hit any of those four and the system stops and tells you.
The fifth is the contacts reached by the DM automation, the only soft one, and outside the entry tier it has no ceiling at all: the automation reaches whoever it needs to reach and the invoice does not move for it. On the entry tier a cap remains that blocks nothing either, because the messages keep going out and the excess shows up as a line that month. Where that line falls is on the pricing page, which reads the live catalogue, and that is why it is not printed here: they are database rows and they move.
The reasoning is the same one written up in the ManyChat comparison, the other product in this category that counts contacts. A hard limit on a comment automation punishes you on exactly the day you wanted to celebrate. And the price is per workspace rather than per seat, so putting one more person on the team adds no monthly line at all.
What the Auto DM covers, precisely
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeTime to be exact, because this is where a comparison can turn dishonest fast. The automation is Instagram and Facebook, and that is the whole list. There are three triggers: a comment, a story reply, which exists on Instagram only, and a direct message. If your audience writes to you on WhatsApp, the conversation ends in this paragraph and respond.io wins it outright.
The follower filter works in a way worth knowing before you build on it. Instagram only answers the question of whether somebody follows you once that person has already written to the account, so for most people commenting on a reel the platform simply does not know. Instead of looking anyone up, the message asks: the person confirms in the thread and the link goes out after that reply. It is one more step and it loses people, in exchange for nobody being shut out over a value the platform never had. How a full automation is assembled is in the Instagram Auto DM guide, and the module itself is on the Auto DM page.
One more detail is worth checking yourself before deciding. The respond.io pricing page never mentions comment to DM automation anywhere, although its own Instagram integration page does describe automatic replies to comments. Which means it is not published which plan that particular capability sits in, and if it is the one you care about, that is the first question to put to their sales team.
The inbox here collects messages, comments and Google Business reviews in one thread list, with a clock that marks a message overdue at 24 hours, the window Meta itself imposes. What it does not do, and this matters, is distribute those conversations between agents: there are no queues, no automatic assignment, no routing rules. It is a shared inbox, not a support desk.
What respond.io does better
Four things, and they are big.
The channels. WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, LINE, Viber, WeChat, SMS and email, plus custom channels on its top tier. For a business whose customers write on WhatsApp, which in Spain is very nearly all of them, that is not a marginal advantage: it is the whole conversation.
The routing. Distributing conversations between agents, with workflows and AI agents on top, is what turns a shared inbox into a support team with shifts and owners. There is nothing equivalent here and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.
The entry tier that does not count contacts. Its Starter plan includes five users and does not cap active contacts, which is the opposite of what the rest of the category does on its first paid plan. For a small team with high conversation volume, that tier is hard to beat.
The published scale. A price per extra seat, a price per block of contacts and the annual saving all printed on the same page. You can budget next year on a spreadsheet without calling anybody, and that is worth more than it sounds.
The reasonable conclusion is not that one replaces the other. If handling conversations is your operation, across several channels with several people taking turns, respond.io is the specialist and does a great deal more. If what you want is a reel comment turning into a private message, with the link measured and the result read next to the calendar and the analytics for those same accounts, then you are comparing a support platform with a growth module, and they are not the same thing.