- The short answer
- Side by side
- What a small team pays
- Why DevReply for mobile apps
- Where Helpshift is stronger
- Which one to pick
The short answer
Helpshift calls itself “the AI-native player engagement platform for games”. It sells to game studios, with support, player engagement, trust and safety, and community tools, and its prices come as a custom quote. DevReply does one thing: a native “message the developer” chat inside your app, answered from one inbox, with an MCP server so your own AI agent can read and work that inbox. Its prices are public, there's a free plan, and the free plan includes the mobile SDKs. If you run live-ops support for a large game, Helpshift is built for you. If you're a small team that wants to hear from its app's users this week, DevReply is.
Side by side
From each company's own pages, in USD, before tax. Checked October 2026; things change, so check the sources below before you decide.
| DevReply | Helpshift | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Flat monthly or yearly plan. No per-seat fees | A custom quote, based on interaction volume, the solutions and capabilities you use, and regions and languages |
| Free plan | $0: unlimited apps, users and teammates; 50 conversations a month; history kept forever; 500 MB of files, kept 90 days | Not listed publicly |
| Paid plans | Pro $49/mo or $490/yr (500 conversations). Scale $199/mo or $1,990/yr (5,000 conversations). Enterprise on request | Prices on request |
| AI answers | No per-answer fee: on Pro, your own agent works the inbox over MCP | Its own AI agent for autonomous resolution and an AI copilot for human agents, priced within the quote |
| Mobile SDK | Every plan, Free included: native SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, React Native and Flutter wrappers that open the same native screens, a web script | SDK X for iOS, Android, Unity, React Native, Unreal Engine, Cocos2d-x and Xamarin. Helpshift calls it a hybrid SDK; its release notes show it relies on the system WebView |
| Help center | None | FAQs and a help center inside the SDK |
| Built for | Developers answering their own app's users | Game studios: support, engagement, trust and safety, community |
Sources: helpshift.com, helpshift.com/pricing, developers.helpshift.com, SDK X migration guide, SDK X Android release notes, and our own pricing. Checked October 2026. DevReply prices are in USD, with VAT added where it applies. Scale's webhooks and in-app nudges are coming, not built yet.
What a small team pays
Take a team of three answering one app for a year:
- DevReply: $0 on Free while you stay under 50 conversations a month. Pro is $490 a year for the whole team, with your agent working the inbox. A fourth or a tenth teammate costs nothing.
- Helpshift: not listed publicly. Its pricing page says pricing is “solution-based and modular, not one-size-fits-all plans” and asks you to request a quote. You'll know the number after a sales conversation, not before.
For a small team the difference is less about the amount than the process. With DevReply you can sign up, add the SDK and answer your first user the same afternoon, and you know what next year costs before you start.
Why DevReply for mobile apps
Helpshift is built to run player support for studios at scale. DevReply is built for the developer who wants their app's users to reach them before the App Store review box does. That shows up in a few concrete places:
- Native screens, not a web view. DevReply's chat is written in SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. The React Native and Flutter packages open those same native screens. Photos, files, the keyboard and right-to-left languages behave the way the phone does.
- Public prices and a free plan. Free includes the native SDKs, unlimited apps and unlimited teammates. Pro and Scale are flat, listed prices, with no per-seat and no per-answer fees.
- Your own AI agent, over MCP. Instead of a bot you configure inside the product, DevReply has an MCP server. On Pro, the agent you already use reads conversations, tags and sorts them, drafts replies and sends them as your app allows. On every plan it can set DevReply up for you.
- Context with every message. Device, OS, app version and language arrive with each message, plus anything your app passes, like the user's plan. Open the chat from a paywall with a draft and an error code, and the conversation shows them as “Opened with”.
- Accounts the way the stores expect. Log in with your own user id, log out on sign-out, and delete a user from the app, the inbox or your backend, as Apple requires. The chat speaks 34 languages, including Hebrew and Arabic right to left.
Where Helpshift is stronger
- Games at scale. Helpshift works with large studios and supports game engines DevReply doesn't: Unity, Unreal Engine and Cocos2d-x, plus a PC widget for Unity. If your app is a game built in an engine, that matters.
- A help center and its own AI. FAQs live inside the SDK, and Helpshift's AI agent resolves issues on its own. DevReply has no help center and no AI bot of its own: you bring your agent.
- More than support. Proactive in-app and push outreach, VIP engagement, toxicity detection, moderation and community tools, and human services such as moderation and VIP engagement. DevReply has none of these; in-app nudges are planned for Scale but not built.
- Over-the-air updates. Helpshift says most SDK X updates reach users without an app release. DevReply's chat updates when you ship a new SDK version.
- Maturity. Helpshift has been around for years and serves big studios. DevReply is new, made by Code Axolot for our own apps first.
Which one to pick
- Pick DevReply if you're an indie developer or a small team with an iOS or Android app, you answer users yourself, you want public prices and a free start, and you'd like your own coding agent to help.
- Pick Helpshift if you're a game studio with a support or player-experience team, high volume, games in Unity or Unreal, and a need for moderation, VIP programs or human services under one contract.
Try DevReply free with your own app: no card, unlimited teammates, and the native SDKs on the free plan. Coding agents can read everything about it in llms.txt.