Helpie

Helpie is a self-hosted helpdesk for WordPress with an AI chat widget built in: a real ticket system, reply-by-email, a customer portal, and an assistant that answers from your own content and cites the page each answer came from. It runs on your site, and your customer data stays on your server.

No. The tickets, the AI chat, the portal and reply-by-email all work on any WordPress site. When you do run WooCommerce, Helpie adds order-aware tickets and slots into the My Account area. You’ll want WordPress 6+ and PHP 8+; reply-by-email also needs the PHP imap extension.

Your own content. Helpie indexes the posts, pages, products and docs you choose, and the assistant answers from those, citing the page each answer came from. New content is answerable the moment you publish it.

It doesn’t make one up. Helpie enforces citations in code before any answer reaches the customer: an answer it can’t trace to a passage on your site is discarded, and the assistant asks a clarifying question or offers a ticket instead of guessing.

No. Helpie checks every page before indexing and skips anything gated: password-protected, membership-restricted, private forums, and anything flagged noindex. Move a public page behind a membership later and it’s purged. Personal data like orders is never indexed; the assistant fetches a customer’s own order live, with an ownership check.

Yes. You give the assistant its own name and voice so it reads like part of your brand, and there’s a calibration mode to test and tune answers privately before any customer sees it.

You bring your own Anthropic API key. You create the account, paste the key into Helpie, and your site talks to Claude directly with no proxy and no markup from us. Three models are selectable, Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, so you can trade cost against depth.

Because of how the answering works. Helpie only sends an answer it can trace back to a page on your site, and Claude suits that kind of grounded, careful answering: it stays with what it was given and says when it doesn’t know, rather than inventing something to fill the gap. Setup is quick, an Anthropic account, a key, and paste it in. And the cost sits outside any plan: you buy API credits directly from Anthropic, not a subscription tier, so there’s no monthly minimum, and a typical answer runs a fraction of a cent.

No. Helpie uses a lean MySQL index rather than vector embeddings, so there’s no separate vector database to run and no Pinecone subscription. A 200-source site uses roughly 3 to 5 MB, which is why it runs happily on shared hosting.

Less than people expect. Repeated questions are cached for anonymous visitors, the greeting and out-of-scope questions are handled without an expensive call, and a typical Haiku answer costs a fraction of a cent. A shop answering a few hundred questions a month is looking at a couple of dollars of API spend.

Three layers you set: a per-visitor rate limit, a per-session message cap, and site-wide spend caps for the day, week and month. When a cap trips, the chat does what you told it to, and there’s a running log of what’s been spent and where.

Yes. Tickets come with custom statuses, priorities, assignments and an audit log of every change. The chat and the tickets are one system, so when the assistant can’t answer it hands over to a ticket without the customer starting again.

That’s a supported setup. The chat widget and the ticket system are separate switches, so you can run the assistant on its own and turn the helpdesk off. With it off, anything the chat can’t handle is routed to your nominated support email instead of a ticket queue, and you carry on the conversation from your own inbox. Chat only, helpdesk only, both, or neither: you choose.

Yes. Helpie polls your support mailbox and matches replies back to the right ticket, with the quoted text stripped so your team only reads the new message. This needs the PHP imap extension, which your host can confirm.

Yes. There’s a frontend agent dashboard you drop onto any page with a shortcode, laid out for phones and tablets, so staff can work the queue without needing wp-admin access.

Yes. A standalone support page, plus a tab in the WooCommerce My Account area. Logged-in customers get their whole support history; a guest gets back into the ticket they raised with its ID and the email they used, or through a single-use link Helpie has already emailed them.

Yes. The Content Prospector clusters the questions the chat couldn’t answer into content gaps, so instead of guessing what to document you get a to-do list written by your own customers. Answer those, and both the chat and your search get better.

Self-hosted, all the way. Your tickets, conversations and index live in your own WordPress database. The only thing that leaves is what’s needed to answer a chat message, sent to Anthropic over HTTPS with your own key, and Anthropic does not use it to train their models.

Your data is yours and stays in your WordPress database, so nothing disappears if a licence lapses. You keep running the version you have; the licence is what brings updates and new features.

No. Helpie runs on its own with just WordPress, and adds WooCommerce features when Woo is present. It shares the Tracksies styling, so if you already run Trustie, Perkie, Packsie or HQ it matches your branding and passes customer context across, but it doesn’t need any of them.

One flat yearly licence, with no per-agent fees and no per-conversation fees, however many staff you have and however busy support gets. One licence covers up to five sites, so a staging build and a handful of client sites are included. Your only other cost is your own Anthropic API spend, which you control with the built-in caps, and for most sites that’s a couple of dollars a month.

Up to five. One Helpie licence activates on five sites, all updating from the same licence, so your live site, a staging copy and a handful of client builds are covered without buying again.

Because a half-powered support assistant is worse than none. To make a free tier here you would have to cap the answers or use a weaker model, and an assistant that gives partial answers erodes the trust the whole thing depends on. Some plugins divide neatly into free and paid; Trustie does. Helpie doesn’t, without degrading the part that matters. So we keep it whole, price it flat (one licence, up to five sites, no per-agent or per-conversation fees), and give you two ways to see it before you commit: calibration mode, where the assistant runs privately on your own content before a single customer sees it, and a 14-day refund.