Step in mid-sentence whenever you want

The reason a shared inbox exists at all is that a customer does not experience your business in channels — they experience one thread, and they notice immediately when the person on the other end has forgotten what they just said. Zendesk’s own 2023 CX Trends research put a number on the expectation: 70% of customers expect anyone they interact with to have full context, whoever answers and whatever channel they are on. A tool that stores each channel’s messages separately, or a team that answers WhatsApp from one screen and the website from another, is fighting that expectation by design. Kooday’s inbox exists because the alternative — a human trying to remember what the AI already told someone, mid-conversation, from a different tab — is exactly the failure that number describes.

The atomic hand-over is the part worth being precise about, because “shared” is often marketing for “everyone can see it, and good luck if two people touch it at once.” The flip from assistant to human is row-locked: if you take a thread over while the assistant is composing a reply, that reply is dropped rather than delivered alongside yours, so a customer never receives two different answers to the same message, one from a person and one from a machine, seconds apart. What the mechanism does not yet do is tell you which of your colleagues took over — the log says “you,” not a name — and for a business past two or three people answering the same inbox, that is a real gap worth knowing about before you assume you can audit who said what.

Compared with the shared inboxes built for support teams — Front and Zoho Desk are the two most commonly evaluated against a WhatsApp-plus-webchat setup — the pricing shape is genuinely different, not just cheaper. Front charges per seat: $25/seat/month for its Starter tier, which is capped at one channel type and ten seats, rising to $65 and then $105/seat/month as omnichannel support and automation are unlocked. Zoho Desk’s Standard tier, the first to add live chat and multichannel messaging including WhatsApp and Instagram, runs 800 rupees per agent per month. Both are real, capable tools, and both charge more as a team grows. Kooday’s inbox has no seat price and no seat cap at any plan — it is included from the entry tier, because a business answering its own customers is not the same shape of buyer as a support team paying per licensed agent for a helpdesk.

What that comparison also makes honest is what Front and Zoho Desk are built for that Kooday’s inbox is not. Neither vendor is selling an AI assistant that answers first and hands off to a person only when it should — they are selling the queue, the SLA clock, and the routing rules a support team uses to divide tickets between paid agents. Kooday’s inbox is the opposite shape: an assistant is already answering every conversation, and the inbox exists so a person can step into any one of them, not so a team of agents can be assigned a share of a ticket backlog. If SLA timers, priority queues or agent-assignment rules are the thing you actually need, that is a real reason to look at a dedicated helpdesk instead — this page would be wrong to pretend otherwise.

Shared inbox pricing, entry-capable tier

Tool	Price	Team size	AI answers first?
Kooday (Lite and up)	₹99/mo, no per-seat fee	Unlimited, every plan	Yes — the inbox is where a human steps into an AI conversation
Front (Starter)	$25/seat/mo	Up to 10 seats, 1 channel type	No — human agents only, AI is a paid add-on
Zoho Desk (Standard)	800 rupees/agent/mo	Priced per agent added	No — Zia AI answer-bot is a higher tier

Kooday’s row is resolved from the pricing registry at build time; the Front and Zoho Desk rows are read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-09-09. Front and Zoho Desk price by seat/agent; Kooday does not, so the “team size” column is where the shapes actually diverge.