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Help Scout

Help Scout is an email-first help desk platform with shared inboxes, live chat, knowledge bases, and a customer portal. The Help Scout APIs expose conversations, customers, inboxes, users, workflows, ratings, reports, Docs (knowledge base), Beacon (in-app messaging), and webhooks.

agent ready

Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Help Scout the way a machine reads it — 47 machine-readable artifacts across 25 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Help Scout scores 63.0/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 54/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 63.0/100 · strong
Contract Quality 15.5 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 6.5 / 20
Commercial Clarity 18.4 / 20
Operational Transparency 7.9 / 13
Governance 7.3 / 12
Discoverability 7.5 / 10
Agent readiness — 54/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 6 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile Help Scout

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Help Scout. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 25

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Help Scout Threads API

Append customer replies, agent replies, internal notes, phone, chat, and forwards to an existing conversation as new threads.

Help Scout Customers API

Manage customer profiles including addresses, emails, phone numbers, chat handles, social profiles, websites, and properties.

Help Scout Mailboxes API

Read mailbox / inbox configuration including routing settings, saved replies, custom fields, and folders.

Help Scout Users API

Retrieve Help Scout user accounts (agents) including roles, permissions, and online/offline status.

Help Scout Teams API

Manage teams that group users for routing and assignment within shared inboxes.

Help Scout Tags API

List, create, and apply tags to conversations for categorization, automation, and reporting.

Help Scout Workflows API

List automation workflows and trigger them manually against a conversation.

Help Scout Custom Fields API

Read custom field definitions on inboxes and read / update custom field values on conversations.

Help Scout Attachments API

Upload and download attachment data for conversation threads.

Help Scout Ratings API

Read customer satisfaction ratings (great / okay / not good) attached to conversation threads.

Help Scout Reports API

Aggregated reports across company performance, conversations, happiness ratings, productivity, and user/team statistics.

Help Scout Webhooks API

Subscribe to Help Scout events (convo.created, convo.assigned, convo.tag, customer.created, rating.received) for downstream automation. Webhooks include HMAC signatures for veri...

Help Scout Docs API

Manage knowledge-base sites, collections, categories, articles, and search/related content for Help Scout Docs.

Help Scout Beacon API

Embed Beacon (live chat, help docs, customer portal) into web and mobile applications and pre-fill or update Beacon context via the Beacon JS API.

Help Scout Chat API

Read and write live chat conversations and messages alongside the email Mailbox API for unified ticketing.

Help Scout Apps API

Build sidebar applications that render custom content within the Help Scout Inbox UI for partner integrations.

Help Scout Conversations API

The Conversations API from Help Scout — 2 operation(s) for conversations.

Help Scout Customers API

The Customers API from Help Scout — 2 operation(s) for customers.

Help Scout Mailboxes API

The Mailboxes API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for mailboxes.

Help Scout Tags API

The Tags API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for tags.

Help Scout Teams API

The Teams API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for teams.

Help Scout Threads API

The Threads API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for threads.

Help Scout Users API

The Users API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for users.

Help Scout Webhooks API

The Webhooks API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for webhooks.

Help Scout Workflows API

The Workflows API from Help Scout — 1 operation(s) for workflows.

Scroll within the panel for all 25 ·

Open Collections 1

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Help Scout Mailbox API

OPEN COLLECTION

GraphQL 1

Where a provider ships GraphQL, the schema is the contract. We profile it alongside the REST surface so the whole interface is legible in one place.

GraphQL schemas published by this provider.

Help Scout GraphQL Schema

This conceptual GraphQL schema models the Help Scout customer support and help desk platform. It covers the full surface of the Help Scout Mailbox API v2, Docs API, Beacon API, ...

GRAPHQL

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Helpscout Rate Limits

3 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Features 10

The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.

Notable capabilities this provider offers.

REST API at https://api.helpscout.net/v2 with OAuth 2 authentication
JSON-only request/response format with HATEOAS resource links
Free plan up to 5 users, 1 inbox, 1 Docs site
Standard $25/user/mo, Plus $45/user/mo, Pro $75/user/mo (16% off annual)
AI Answers add-on at $0.75 per resolution
Additional inbox $10/month, additional Docs site $20/month
Account-shared rate limit; write requests count double
X-RateLimit-Limit-Minute / Remaining-Minute / Retry-After headers
Webhooks with HMAC signatures
PHP SDK and Laravel/Lumen adapter

Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·

Event Specifications 1

Not every API is request/response. AsyncAPI describes the event-driven and streaming side — the webhooks and channels — so the asynchronous half of the interface is documented the same way the synchronous half is.

AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.

Help Scout Webhooks

Help Scout publishes webhook events from the Mailbox, Beacon, Docs, and organization surfaces to subscriber-configured URLs. Each delivery is an HTTP POST containing a JSON body...

ASYNCAPI

Spectral Rules 1

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

Help Scout API Rules

7 rules · 1 errors · 5 warnings

SPECTRAL

Security Posture 3

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Helpscout Authentication

oauth2 · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Helpscout Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Helpscout Trust Center

SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, CSA STAR

SECURITY

Scopes 1

OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.

OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.

Helpscout Scopes

OAuth 2.0 · no documented scopes

0 scopes

SCOPES

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Helpscout Agentic Access

17 operations · 7 acting

17 operations · 7 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for Help Scout — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 2

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Design & Contract 1

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Company 3

The organization behind the API

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/helpscout · machine-readable index on apis.io