Move from Help Scout to Ochre in a weekend.
A 25-agent team saves roughly $25,000 a yearmoving from Help Scout Plus to Ochre — mostly because the AI Drafts overage math compounds faster than the per-seat headline. Help Scout is the prettiest small-team helpdesk on the market; if you’ve outgrown it on Slack Connect or B2B custom fields, the move is gentle.
Help Scout
Conversations, customers, Docs, workflows, tags
Ochre
Aliases, rules, embedded chat, Slack Connect, BYOK AI
Weekend cutover map
Honest checklist of every entity.
We accept Help Scout’s API export ZIP (JSON / JSONL) and the CSV from Manage → Company → Export → Conversations. Parser: src/lib/migration/parsers/helpscout.ts. It handles both “one row per conversation” and “one row per message” CSV layouts, and folds threads correctly in either shape.
Four steps. We do most of them.
Source
Help Scout workspace
Mapping
API/ZIP/CSV export
Destination
Ochre workspace
Connect via API key or upload an export
Profile → API Keys → generate a Personal Access Token with read scopes for conversations, customers, mailboxes, and Docs. Or upload the ZIP from Manage → Export. Both paths land in the same parser; we’ll tell you which is faster for your size.
We pull the last N conversations
All conversations + threads, customers, mailboxes, tags, and Docs articles are pulled with original Help Scout conversation IDs preserved as searchable aliases. Configurable window: last 30 days for a pilot, or full history (5,000-conversation cap in v1, lifted on request).
AI auto-generates KB articles from your top intents
We cluster inbound conversations by intent and draft new articles for the top questions Beacon’s suggested-replies used to handle. A human reviews and ships. This is the same KB pipeline whether you’re migrating from Docs or starting fresh — Docs articles import 1:1, the AI fills the gaps.
Switch your inbound email when you’re ready
We mirror Help Scout into Ochre for 30 days. New conversations land in both; replies sync. When the team is comfortable, repoint the forwarding rule from your support@ mailbox over to Ochre. Cancel Help Scout on your timeline.
What you actually save.
Drawn from /compare/help-scout. The seat math is closer than Zendesk or Intercom — the gap shows up when you turn AI on.
| 5 agents | $195/mo on Ochre | $250/mo on Help Scout Plus |
| 25 agents | $975/mo on Ochre | $3,050/mo on Help Scout Plus + AI overages |
| Annual difference at 25 agents | +$25,000/year |
Help Scout Plus bundles ~1,500 AI actions/user/month. Above that, overages run ~$0.30–$1 per AI action depending on type. Ochre BYOK keeps the per-action cost at retail OpenAI / Anthropic prices — no overage tier to worry about.
We do this with you, not at you.
Concierge migration is bundled with the Scale tier. You get a Slack Connect channel with a founder for as long as the move takes — usually a long weekend for Help Scout teams under 50K conversations. We run the export, review the workflow translations, and stay on call through the parallel run.
For Team-tier customers, the same parser is self-serve. If your team has heavy custom-field usage or workflows beyond the rules engine’s native coverage, ping us first — we’ll scope the translations on a 20-minute call and tell you if anything won’t carry cleanly.
What about Help Scout-specific X?
What about Beacon, the in-app widget?+
Replace it with Ochre’s embedded chat — same one-line snippet, similar identify/boot semantics. The visual polish is good but not Beacon-grade; if your product’s in-app support widget is a competitive advantage, demo Ochre’s widget side-by-side before committing. We’d rather you stay on Help Scout than be disappointed by a downgrade in surface polish.
What about Help Scout Docs and our SEO?+
Docs articles import 1:1 via the API, preserving collections, slugs, and metadata. We set up 301 redirects from your old docs.yourdomain.com URLs to the new Ochre URLs, so SEO history and bookmarks survive the move. We’ve done this for sites with 300+ articles without losing rankings.
What about workflows and saved replies?+
Workflows translate into Ochre’s rules engine. The common conditions (status, tag, mailbox, customer attributes) all carry. Help Scout’s more exotic conditional logic (deeply nested AND/OR with custom-field math) gets flagged in your migration mapping doc and we propose a 1:1 translation or a simplification — you approve before import.