Leaving Gorgias: what you actually have to replace

What Gorgias is genuinely good at

Shopify data on the ticket. The agent sees the order, the fulfilment status and the customer history without leaving the conversation. This sounds minor and it is most of the product. A help desk without it makes every reply a tab switch.

Acting on the order from the ticket. Refund, cancel, duplicate, edit, without going to Shopify admin.

Every channel in one inbox. Email, chat, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, reviews. The social channels are genuinely fiddly to build.

Rules and macros built by support people rather than developers.

If you replace Gorgias and skip any of these, your team will notice in week one and they will be right.

The two reasons people actually leave

The bill tracks ticket volume. Every plan has an allowance and every ticket above it costs 36 to 40 cents. The problem is not the rate, it is that ticket volume is not a thing you control. The months you get the most tickets are the months something went wrong, and that is when the bill goes up.

The AI is priced per interaction. 90 cents each on annual billing, a dollar monthly, $1.50 above allowance. Automate a thousand conversations and you have added $900 to $1,500 a month. Automation is supposed to reduce your cost of support, and here it increases it.

What replacing it looks like

A custom desk is worth building when your support load is concentrated in a few repetitive, data answerable questions. It reads every inbound message and does one of three things: answers it from your own order data, drafts a reply for a human to approve, or escalates it untouched. The third case is the important one, because a system that tries to answer everything is worse than no system.

£1,000 to build and £69 a month, and the AI usage sits inside the monthly rather than being metered. That is possible because answering a message with a model costs a fraction of a penny. The per interaction price you are quoted elsewhere is mostly margin.

What you would not get on day one is the long tail. Instagram DMs, review replies, the permissions model a ten person support team needs. Those can be built, but they are scope and they should be priced as scope rather than assumed.

Be honest about team size

This decision changes completely above about five support people. At that size you are not buying a tool, you are buying the workflow a support manager runs the team inside: routing, SLAs, permissions, performance reporting. Gorgias and Zendesk have both spent years on that and it is not worth commissioning.

Below that, most stores have one or two people answering everything, and the workflow layer is overhead they navigate around rather than benefit from.