Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- Brainfish at a glance
- What is Brainfish?
- Who is behind Brainfish?
- How easy is it to set up Brainfish?
- What channels does Brainfish work in?
- What are the limitations of Brainfish?
- What knowledge sources can I train Brainfish on?
- What features does Brainfish have?
- How do I improve Brainfish responses?
- What resolution rate can I expect from Brainfish?
- What AI model does Brainfish use?
- What languages does Brainfish work in?
- How secure is Brainfish?
- Who is using Brainfish?
- How much does Brainfish cost?
- The platform fee
- Queries, sessions and what actually gets counted
- The add-ons
- What Brainfish costs at 3,000 conversations a month
- Does Brainfish have a free trial?
- Is Brainfish worth it?
- Brainfish pros and cons
- FAQs
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Brainfish builds a self-updating knowledge layer for B2B software teams and puts cited AI agents on top of it. Billing is one platform fee covering five seats and 5,000 user sessions a month, with everything past that sold as add-ons.
$17,400 a year, for five platform seats and 5,000 user sessions a month on a 12-month contract, is Brainfish's AWS Marketplace list price. Brainfish's own pricing page sets out the model and routes every buyer to a sales call, with $1,500 a month for the base tier sitting in the page's own structured data. The annual figure comes from the AWS listing Brainfish sells through, where the add-ons and the one-time $5,000 implementation fee are priced line by line.
Underneath that price is a knowledge layer rather than a helpdesk: one store of product knowledge, with cited AI agents on your help center, your product, Slack, Teams and your helpdesk (voice is not one of them). The number Brainfish markets on top of it is a 92% resolution rate, attributed on the homepage to a single customer. That sits well above the field median AI-handling rate of 70% across 195 rated deployments from 38 vendors in our benchmark dataset.
Brainfish is easy to describe and its customers publish their numbers. The work you take on is keeping the knowledge behind it current.
Disclosure before we start: I'm Mike, and I co-founded My AskAI, which sells an AI support agent into the same market and runs customer service for 200+ ecommerce and SaaS businesses. Every figure below is Brainfish's own or its customers', so you can weigh my read against their numbers.
Brainfish at a glance
Fact | Detail |
What it is | Cited AI agents over your product knowledge |
How you're billed | Platform fee, then add-ons for everything past it |
List price on AWS Marketplace | $17,400 a year, 5 seats, 5,000 sessions |
Best for | Docs-rich B2B SaaS wanting cited self-service |
Not a fit for | Teams wanting AI answering inside their own helpdesk |
Biggest limitation | No self-serve trial and no free plan |
Our verdict | 7/10 |
My AskAI runs inside the helpdesk you already pay for, and its prices are public. We put the two products side by side in our My AskAI vs Brainfish comparison.
What is Brainfish?
TL;DR: Brainfish is a standalone AI support platform for B2B software companies. It builds one self-updating knowledge layer from your docs, tickets, calls and Slack, then runs cited agents on your site, in your product, in Slack and Teams, and through your helpdesk.
Brainfish pulls your product knowledge into one store, keeps it current, and every agent it runs reads from that same store.
The product page introduces its main feature section with "Introducing the Self-updating Knowledge Layer", and the homepage markets three stages of it: Build, Grow and Refine. Build the knowledge, deploy agents against it, then use what those agents learn to improve the knowledge again.
Brainfish sits alongside Zendesk or Intercom and hands tickets back when a human is needed. The homepage is direct about that: "Plugs into the stack you already pay for."
I treat Brainfish's own help center as the live demo, because it runs on a Brainfish agent, with an "Ask new question" box at the top and 263 articles across seven categories behind it. Brainfish started as an answer engine for help centers, before the knowledge layer and the agents.
There is now a second product too. "Introducing Ballet" sits on the homepage, and the help center describes it as "a workflow-automation platform built by the team behind Brainfish", handling L2 flows while Brainfish handles L1.
Who is behind Brainfish?
Brainfish was founded in Sydney and now runs two headquarters, Sydney and San Francisco. The company page names Daniel Kimber as CEO and Co-Founder and Ajain Vivek as CTO and Co-Founder, and puts total funding at $10M with more than 10 million customer questions answered.
The most recent round was a $6.4 million pre-Series A led by Prosus Ventures, with Peak XV's Surge and Macdoch Ventures also taking part. Fun fact: the name is a Douglas Adams reference, "Like the Babel Fish, but for your product."
How easy is it to set up Brainfish?
TL;DR: The technical work is light. Connect your existing docs and helpdesk content, set the agent's tone, scope and escalation rules in Skills, then deploy. Every route in runs through a demo.
Brainfish's claim is a deployed AI support agent in hours, with no engineering sprint. The documented flow needs no engineering.
Knowledge sources connect from one screen. The Zendesk sync doc has you open Knowledge, pick "+ Connect data source", then paste a subdomain and an API token. The Intercom flow runs through Knowledge, then External Data, then "+ Source", with a key from Intercom's Developer Hub (the menu path differs by source).
You configure behavior in Skills, which the product page describes as custom instructions controlling how the agent responds in each channel. You can update a Skill without redeploying the agent.
Then comes tuning. Mad Paws "spent two weeks running real customer questions through the AI and refining content", and its first week live ran more than 1,000 AI searches (the week after the tuning finished, once the content work was done). Smokeball ran an eight-week pilot integrating Brainfish into its platform and support hub.
Budget those two weeks of content work as the real setup period. Name the person on your team who owns it.
The AWS Marketplace listing carries a $5,000 one-time implementation fee, covering setup, configuration, first deployment and the initial knowledge base build. In my sums that fee lands in year one, on top of twelve months of platform fee. Ask on the call exactly what it covers beyond the content work you are taking on anyway.
My AskAI installs from your helpdesk's own marketplace with no code and no developer. Most teams are live in 10 to 15 minutes. Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias and HubSpot are all fully supported, and we put a self-serve signup behind every one.
What channels does Brainfish work in?
TL;DR: Website and in-product chat, a hosted help center, developer docs, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Salesforce Email, plus handoffs through Zendesk, Intercom, Freshworks, Help Scout, HubSpot and Salesforce. No voice channel is documented.
The product page lists six channels by name: Chat, Help Center, Dev Docs, Slack, MS Teams and Salesforce Email. Each one gets its own agent, trained on the same knowledge layer.
Help center and dev docs are where the product started. I still rate them the strongest surfaces. If your customers already search your documentation before they write in, this is the part that will pay for itself first.
Internal channels get the same treatment as the customer-facing ones. In Teams you can "@mention Brainfish in any Microsoft Teams channel and get a grounded, cited answer right there in the thread". The Slack integration is available on every plan.
Brainfish's helpdesk integrations are handoffs, so it answers on its own surfaces and then passes the ticket to your helpdesk for a human. I read that as the biggest fit question for a support team. The integrations grid lists Intercom for messaging handoff, Help Scout for email, ticketing and messaging handoff, HubSpot for email and ticketing handoff, Freshworks, Zendesk for drafting and deflection, and Salesforce marked Enterprise only.
For a customer in the widget, escalation is a configured next best action. The escalation doc shows someone typing "Can I talk to human" and the widget offering a "Speak to Expert" button.
Commerce platforms are on the grid too, with BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify through API Actions. There are 25 named tiles on the integrations page.
Voice is not a documented channel anywhere in that grid. If you run a phone line, I would keep it where it is and scope Brainfish to your text channels.
My AskAI answers chat and email inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias and HubSpot, as your agent, on the ticket. WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram come through those same helpdesk integrations, so there is nothing extra to wire up.
What are the limitations of Brainfish?
TL;DR: Four things to weigh before the demo: buying is sales-led and the pricing page carries no figure in its visible copy, there is no self-serve trial, results track how good your knowledge base already is, and the headline rates mix several different definitions.
Start with pricing, because it is where most evaluations stall. Brainfish's pricing page describes the model but shows no figure in its visible copy, and its "Contact sales now" button goes to Brainfish's demo request page. The page's own structured data does carry one: $1,500 a month for the base Platform tier.
The AWS Marketplace listing sold by Brainfish carries a full 12-month price list. Brainfish is the seller on it, so I read those numbers as its list price.
Second, there is no way to try it yourself. The "Start your 14-day free trial" button on the product page books a demo.
Third, Brainfish is only as good as the knowledge you bring it. The whole pitch is "Your AI knows exactly what your best SME knows" (their words).
That pitch only works once you have written down what your best support expert knows. A thin or stale set of docs gives you a thin agent until you fix the docs.
Fourth, the headline numbers are measuring different things. Across Brainfish's own customer pages you will find deflection rates, answer rates, self-service rates, prevention rates and resolution rates. I side with Brainfish's own blog here: "Deflection isn't resolution."
Two smaller items for a procurement pack. HIPAA is not among the certifications Brainfish lists, and the detailed control evidence in its trust center sits behind a "Request access" wall.
My AskAI puts its plan prices and per-ticket rates on its public pricing page, and you can sign yourself up for 30 days free with every feature unlocked, no card and a business email. We name what is under the hood: a suite of models, predominantly OpenAI, with Google and Anthropic models where they win on a task. Our trust report is live and open to anyone, covering SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS in transit.
What knowledge sources can I train Brainfish on?
TL;DR: Help docs, tickets, product videos, PDFs, call recordings and Slack threads, plus live connections to Confluence, Guru, Helpjuice, Mintlify, Notion, ReadMe, Google Drive, a website crawl and an OpenAPI spec. All of it feeds one knowledge layer.
The ingestion list is one of the broadest in this category. Brainfish's pricing FAQ puts it in one line: "Brainfish ingests from Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, Loom, Zendesk, Salesforce Knowledge, Help Scout, Helpjuice, Mintlify, ReadMe, OpenAPI specs, websites, and any HTTP source via API."
Raw material counts too. The product page says you can "Drop in videos, PDFs, call recordings, or any asset and Brainfish automatically extracts the knowledge and turns it into structured, usable content". The changelog adds article generation from videos and from Slack.
The integrations grid adds Chorus for call recordings, OneDrive, SharePoint and Guru to that list (Salesforce sits there too, but on Enterprise only).
The layer also proposes edits to your content. Brainfish calls it Knowledge Discovery, and the changelog line is "Brainfish automatically finds every article affected by a product change and shows you what needs updating."
"Ask Brainfish" is the internal agent, in Slack, Teams and Chrome, for your own team, and it reads from the same layer as the customer-facing ones.
My AskAI connects Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox and your Zendesk, Intercom or Freshdesk help center. If you have no help center to connect, our Train on Historic Tickets builds starter knowledge from your last 5,000 resolved tickets, and more on request.
What features does Brainfish have?
TL;DR: Three layers. Customer-facing agents with citations, confidence scores and per-account personalization; internal copilots in Slack and Teams; and AI Actions that trigger workflows or hand off to a human in Zendesk. The Actions layer is a paid add-on.
The customer-facing layer is built around trust signals. Every answer carries citations, and the tough-questions post states that "Each generated answer includes confidence scoring and inline citations".
Personalization runs at the account level. The homepage promises answers tailored "by plan, role, region, or account health". It also offers to "Surface upsells and next-best actions inside the chat" and to "Route high-value accounts straight to a human owner" (a sales job as much as a support one).
Skills sit over all of it, setting rules for tone, scope and escalation per channel. The Skills figure on the product page reads like a real support SOP: escalation, support SOPs, citations, brand tone and billing rules.
The second layer is the internal copilot, sold as "Ask Brainfish, real-time guidance for your team" and reachable from Slack, Teams or a browser tab.
The third layer is actions. The product page's worked example is a refund request, checked against an SOP and then handed to Zendesk (that handoff is an Action, so it comes out of a paid bucket). AI Actions are sold in buckets of five, covering APIs, tool calls, MCP connections to your other tools, and callbacks.
The analytics cover channel-level volume, resolution and deflection, content health over time, and Insights and Themes surfaced from real conversations. Proactive Nudges push in-product alerts before someone writes in.
My AskAI runs multi-step workflows through Tasks and Tools, described in natural language and calling your own APIs. Each action can run on its own or come to an agent as a proposal. User Data connects your billing system or order database so our AI can answer account questions with live data.
How do I improve Brainfish responses?
TL;DR: The loop is content-first. Read Insights and the content-gap report, fix or write the missing article with the AI-assisted editor, tune Skills for tone and escalation, then re-check the channel analytics. Budget about two weeks of it at launch.
Brainfish calls this stage "Refine". You track resolution, deflection and satisfaction, then surface the questions the knowledge layer is not answering. Recommendations come back on specific responses, and the fixes go into the content (Brainfish's own line for it is "close the loop between insights and content updates").
The editor is where you spend the time. The article editor doc offers Markdown, WYSIWYG and keyboard shortcuts, with AI-assisted suggestions on top.
Drift detection flags articles affected by a product change, so the work arrives as a list you can work through.
Smokeball built a cadence around exactly that, feeding behavior analytics into help-center updates every two weeks so confusion gets fixed before it becomes a ticket.
Answer quality tracks knowledge quality, so most of the ongoing work is keeping your docs current. I put that content work in the same budget line as the platform fee. A team not already funding its docs is taking it on as part of the rollout.
My AskAI's Self-Learning drafts new knowledge articles by comparing what our AI replied with what your human agent actually sent. Ask Echo why any answer came out the way it did and which source it used. Teams with no help center at all start from their last 5,000 resolved tickets.
What resolution rate can I expect from Brainfish?
TL;DR: Brainfish markets a 92% resolution rate. Its named customers publish figures of several different kinds, from 80% deflection at Mad Paws to self-service rising from 30% to 76% at CareMaster. Ask the demo which definition it is using.
The headline sits on the homepage stat card: "92% resolution rate across customer queries", attributed on the page to Smokeball, a legal software company.
I read the customer stories closely, because each one names the metric it moved. No two of them name the same one.
Customer | Figure Brainfish publishes | What that figure counts |
80% deflection | Self-service queries, on Brainfish's wording | |
Mad Paws | 96% answered | Questions that got an AI-generated answer |
Mad Paws | Inbound tickets down 22% | Mad Paws' own inbound ticket volume |
Mad Paws | 636% ROI, 30,000+ queries resolved | A five-month return figure and a four-month count |
Search-to-ticket rate 30.8% to 15.3% | Searches that went on to raise a ticket | |
Smokeball | Self-service rate 67% to 83% | Named on the page with no denominator given |
Smokeball | Support NPS 60 to 77, ROI 849% | A survey score and a return figure |
Self-service resolution 30% to 76% | Named on the page with no denominator given | |
CareMaster | 23% user-base growth absorbed | Growth taken on without extra hiring |
51% prevention rate | Roughly 5,000 monthly queries | |
Huntress | 99% CSAT | Satisfaction held through the rollout |
Take all of those with a grain of salt: they are vendor-published and customer-defined. Deflection, answered, self-service, prevention and resolution are five different measurements, and a page can move one of them a long way without moving your ticket count much. Mad Paws' 80% deflection rate sat alongside a 22% fall in inbound tickets, so the ticket count moved far less than the deflection number.
Our own AI resolution rate benchmark study puts the median AI-handling rate at 70% across 195 rated deployments from 38 vendors.
My AskAI's Insights scores 100% of conversations for AI CSAT, and reports resolution and handover rates next to it. Our resolution rate benchmarks report covers how the wider field measures up.
What AI model does Brainfish use?
TL;DR: Brainfish's trust center names GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro, each reached over an API. It markets the retrieval side hardest: a structured knowledge layer, and an open-source database called ReasonDB. The Claude tile on the integrations grid is a separate developer connection for your own team.
Brainfish names three models in its trust center: GPT-4 Turbo from OpenAI, Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic and Gemini 1.5 Pro from Google, each reached over an API. Its own blog stays broader: "Brainfish uses context-aware models trained on your verified product knowledge."
I ask every vendor to name the model on the demo call, and to say which one answers which channel.
The vendor gets specific on retrieval, or RAG (the layer that decides which of your articles the model reads before it answers). The GitHub organization hosts ReasonDB, and the engineer who built it wrote up the thinking behind it:
"I spent 3 years building knowledge retrieval at my company (Brainfish) — vector DBs, graph DBs, custom RAG pipelines." A Brainfish engineer, posting on r/LocalLLaMA
The argument in that post is for preserving a document's structure, headings then sections then paragraphs, so the model can work through it in order.
On data handling the trust center is specific: no training on customer data, and data retention under 24 hours. The pricing FAQ says the same in one line, "Models are not trained on your data."
The Claude tile on the integrations grid connects your Brainfish knowledge base to Claude so you can search, draft and audit content from an assistant. It is a tool for your own team. Your customers never see it.
We wrote a whole post on what to ask a support AI vendor about its models. A one-word answer is a red flag.
My AskAI uses a suite of models, predominantly OpenAI with Google and Anthropic models where they win on a specific task, and the mix is A/B tested continuously. Your data is never used to train any of them.
What languages does Brainfish work in?
TL;DR: More than 100 languages, sold as a paid Localization add-on alongside geo-specific hosting. Brainfish does not publish the language list or any per-language quality data, so ask for both and test your top three.
The pricing page sells Localization as an add-on: "AI-powered support in 100+ languages, and geo-specific hosting". You also get real-time translation of AI answers, region-specific content and a localized admin platform.
The AWS Marketplace listing carries Localization and Translation at $1,992 per 12 months, outside the base fee (a 12-month contract price, so divide by twelve for a monthly view).
The vendor does not publish the list itself, or how the agent performs language by language. Those are fair questions for the call. A live test in your three biggest non-English markets settles them.
The funding release names active users across Australia, Asia, the UK and the US.
My AskAI supports 95 languages, auto-detected per message, with the AI replying in the customer's language by default. On Intercom, Live Translation also turns the conversation back into your agent's language on handover.
How secure is Brainfish?
TL;DR: Strong on the things a reviewer asks for first: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR, private tenants, SSO, SAML and SCIM, customer-managed keys, and no training on customer data. HIPAA is not among its listed certifications.
The compliance strip on the homepage covers what a reviewer asks for first. No training on your data, US, EU and AU hosting, SSO, SAML and SCIM, GDPR, customer-managed keys, private tenant.
The trust center shows SOC 2 Compliant and ISO 27001 v2022 Compliant, and the pricing FAQ states it directly: "Brainfish is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 certified."
ISO 27001:2022 on top of SOC 2 Type II, with US, EU and AU hosting, gives a security reviewer most of what they ask an AI vendor on the first pass.
Residency needs one clarifying question, because the docs and the marketing do not quite match. The data security doc says data is stored in the US by default, with EU residency available on request for Enterprise. The pricing FAQ offers US, EU and AU hosting, with EU "available on Platform and above".
Either way, the question for the call is which plan unlocks yours.
The help center records annual penetration testing by an external firm, TLS 1.2 in transit, encryption at rest, and a subprocessor list running through AWS, GCP, Vercel, Datadog, ClickHouse and Qdrant. The trust center lists around 40 policies and documents, with the detail behind a "Request access" button. Put that request in before your security review starts.
My AskAI is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, with AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS in transit, and customer data is never used for model training. Our live trust report is public.
Who is using Brainfish?
TL;DR: Named B2B software companies with published numbers: Huntress in cybersecurity, Smokeball in legal software, Mad Paws the listed pet-care marketplace, and CareMaster in care software, alongside ChangeEngine, Coassemble, Kloud Connect, Vrio, Gradeo and Circular.
Brainfish describes its buyers as "Ambitious teams in high-trust industries, legal, healthcare, HR, fintech, education". The customers page backs that up with names and published numbers.
Huntress is the featured cybersecurity story, preventing 51% of roughly 5,000 monthly queries while holding 99% CSAT. Smokeball, a legal software firm, cut search-to-ticket journeys by 74% and lifted support NPS by 17 points.
Mad Paws is the outlier in the set, an ASX-listed pet-sitting marketplace among the software companies, reporting 636% ROI within five months. Its CEO is quoted on the customers page:
"Brainfish is a no-brainer. I recommend it to anyone that wants to transform their customer support." Justus Hammer, CEO and Co-Founder of Mad Paws, on Brainfish's customers page
The rest of the set spans other verticals (useful if yours is one of them). CareMaster sits in NDIS and aged-care software, ChangeEngine in HR tech, Coassemble in edtech, Kloud Connect in accounting software and Gradeo in education. Vrio resolves 80% of developer questions automatically, Circular saves 20% of weekly support hours, and the trust center adds Buffer and Relevance AI.
The published reference set leans Australian, with US names now appearing. If you are buying from the US or Europe, ask for a reference in your own region and segment before you sign.
Two of our own SaaS customers publish their numbers. RecruitCRM runs My AskAI on Intercom at 68% AI resolution and saves 62 hours a month; YesLMS runs it on Zendesk at 76% resolution. Both case studies are on our reviews and case studies page.
How much does Brainfish cost?
TL;DR: One platform fee for the team, usage counted in user sessions, and add-ons for AI Actions, integrations, localization and extra seats. Brainfish's own pricing page routes every buyer to a sales call, while its AWS Marketplace listing publishes a full 12-month price list.
The pricing page states the model clearly. It prices the team, then the usage, then whatever else you switch on.
Brainfish puts it this way: "A single platform fee covers the team. Add what you need, when you need it…"
The platform fee
Everything starts from the Base Platform plan. It includes 5 platform seats, 5,000 queries a month and a dedicated account manager. The features listed with it are the AI support agents, Knowledge Discoveries, internal copilots, Proactive Nudges and customer analytics (the core product, with Actions and integrations sold on top).
There are three commercial routes from there: a startup deal with a lower annual commitment, the standard platform, and an enterprise arrangement with custom scope, MSA and SSO support and localized hosting. The startup route has published criteria: up to $1M in funding, under two years old and fewer than five employees.
On the vendor's own site the route from here is a "Contact sales now" button. The published list price sits on the AWS Marketplace listing sold by Brainfish, which prices the platform fee at $17,400 per 12 months and marks it required (the same listing also carries 24-month and 36-month terms at a discount).
Queries, sessions and what actually gets counted
This was the question I most wanted answered, and the pricing FAQ answers it.
"A user session is a single conversation with Brainfish — anywhere from a one-shot query to a multi-turn back-and-forth. Sessions are bounded by 30 minutes of inactivity. The 5,000 monthly queries on Platform are user sessions." From Brainfish's pricing FAQ.
That is a generous unit compared with per-message billing, because a customer who asks six follow-up questions inside half an hour still counts once. Work from your conversation count.
The AWS listing prints a different unit though, "AI Answers" in blocks of 1,000, against the pricing page's monthly sessions. Which one your contract counts is a question for the call (the two only diverge when your customers ask follow-ups).
The add-ons
Four things sit outside the base fee: AI Actions, sold in buckets of five and covering APIs, tool calls, MCP and callbacks; per-system integrations; Localization; and extra seats or query volume. If your plan involves handing tickets to Zendesk or triggering a refund workflow, AI Actions is not optional for you.
The AWS listing prices every line as a cost per 12 months. The platform fee is $17,400, a bucket of five AI Actions $5,640, each integration $3,000 and localization $1,992. A block of 1,000 AI Answers is $1,800, each seat past the fifth $30, and implementation is charged once at $5,000.
Divided by twelve, here is what each line costs a month, next to the number you have to bring from your own side:
What to count on your side | Brainfish's billing unit | What it costs a month |
Whether you need the platform at all | Platform fee, required | $1,450 for 5 seats and 5,000 sessions a month |
Conversations a month | User sessions, bounded by 30 minutes of inactivity | 5,000 included |
People needing a login | Platform seats | 5 included, then $2.50 a seat from the sixth |
Extra conversation volume | AI Answers | $150 per 1,000 |
Workflows and helpdesk handoffs | AI Actions | $470 per bucket of five |
Systems you connect | Per integration | $250 each |
Non-English markets | Localization and translation | $166 |
Getting live | Implementation | $5,000 one-off, on top of the monthly lines |
Take that table to the demo and make them price your actual numbers against it.
What Brainfish costs at 3,000 conversations a month
Here are my assumptions, on the lowest published plan that covers the volume. Base Platform includes 5,000 user sessions a month, so 3,000 conversations sit inside the included allowance and buy no extra AI Answers. Five people need a login, which the plan covers, and one bucket of AI Actions and one integration go in because a deployment that hands tickets to Zendesk needs both.
Assumption | Value |
Conversations a month | 3,000 user sessions |
Plan priced | Base Platform, 5 seats and 5,000 sessions a month |
Extra session volume needed | None, 3,000 sits inside the included 5,000 |
People needing a login | 5, all included |
AI Actions | One bucket of five, for the Zendesk handoff |
Systems connected | One, Zendesk |
Platform fee | $1,450 a month |
AI Actions bucket | $470 a month |
Zendesk integration | $250 a month |
Monthly total | $2,170 |
The $5,000 implementation fee lands once on top of that, in year one. Past the included 5,000 you buy AI Answers, which the AWS listing prices at $1,800 per 1,000 on a 12-month contract and describes as answers delivered to end users rather than the sessions the pricing page counts. Which of those two units your contract counts is the question to settle on the call.
We publish our plan prices and per-credit rates. Pro is $199 a month with 1,000 credits included and $0.12 a credit after that; Scale is $499 with 2,000 credits and $0.10 a credit. Usage-based extras like Tasks, Tools and AI Tagging are charged separately, and the 30-day free trial unlocks every feature with no card. Our ROI calculator and our My AskAI vs Brainfish pricing comparison put the two costs side by side.
Does Brainfish have a free trial?
TL;DR: No self-serve trial and no free plan. Evaluation runs through a 30-minute demo and then a proof of concept arranged with sales, and the trial button on the product page is a demo request.
The product page shows a "Start your 14-day free trial" button. The link behind it goes to Brainfish's demo request page, and "Sign in" goes to app.brainfi.sh.
Evaluation runs as a working session on your own content. The homepage promises "We'll use your actual docs and customer data" and that "You'll leave with a working agent against your own content." The company page puts it at 30 minutes.
For a full proof of concept, Smokeball's eight-week pilot is the reference point on Brainfish's own site. The $5,000 implementation fee on the AWS listing points at a real deployment too.
Three things go on my list for that call. Ask what the 14-day trial or proof of concept includes, whether it is billed, and what happens to the knowledge you connect if you walk away.
My AskAI gives you 30 days free with every feature unlocked, no credit card and a business email to sign up. Most teams have it live on their own tickets the same day, running in internal notes mode so customers see nothing until you are happy.
Is Brainfish worth it?
TL;DR: Worth it for a documentation-rich B2B software team that wants cited self-service across help center, product, Slack and Teams, will invest in its knowledge base, and can work with sales-led buying. Less so if you want a published price, a self-serve trial, or AI resolving tickets inside the helpdesk you already run.
If you are weighing Brainfish against Intercom Fin, get each vendor to price your own volume before you compare them. Brainfish is a separate knowledge layer that hands off into Intercom, sold as an annual platform fee plus sessions. The choice turns on how many channels you need one knowledge base to serve.
For a broader field, our Best AI Customer Service for B2B ranking covers nine tools in the same market. Our My AskAI vs Brainfish comparison does the cost work side by side.
Brainfish is worth it if:
- You sell a B2B software product with real documentation, and customers already search it before writing in
- You want the same cited agent on your help center, inside your product, and in Slack and Teams
- You will fund content maintenance, and want drift detection and gap reports driving it
- Your reviewer needs ISO 27001, multi-region residency and customer-managed keys
Brainfish is not worth it if:
- You need HIPAA compliance
- You need a price you can put in a business case without booking a call
- You want to sign up, connect a source and see it working this afternoon
- You want tickets resolved inside Zendesk, Intercom or Gorgias without running a separate knowledge layer
If the last two bullets above describe you, My AskAI is the in-helpdesk option. It lives inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Gorgias or HubSpot, replies as your agent on the ticket, and hands over to a human with a summary when it cannot finish.
Brainfish pros and cons
Pros
- A knowledge layer that maintains itself. It finds content gaps, flags articles a product change has made stale, and drafts the fix in an editor built for the job.
- Citations and a confidence score on every answer, tuned per account. Answers can be tailored by plan, role, region or account health, and high-value accounts routed straight to a human owner.
- The certifications and residency options a security review asks for. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022, US, EU and AU residency, SSO, SAML and SCIM and customer-managed keys.
Cons
- Pricing is sales-led. The visible pricing page explains the model and stops at "Contact sales now", so the figures sit elsewhere: $1,500 a month for the base tier in the page's own structured data, and a full 12-month list on AWS Marketplace.
- No self-serve trial. The "Start your 14-day free trial" button links to a demo request, so every evaluation starts with a meeting.
- Results track the docs you bring. Answer quality follows knowledge quality, so a team with thin documentation is taking on a content project before the agent earns anything.
- The headline rates mix definitions. Deflection, answered, self-service, prevention and resolution all appear across the customer stories, so the 92% needs a definition attached before it goes in a business case.
The 7/10 verdict covers eleven things: setup effort, channel coverage, knowledge sources, features, the improvement loop, published resolution figures, model transparency, languages, security and residency, customer references, and price and trial access. Evidence comes from Brainfish's own product, pricing and integrations pages, its help center documentation and trust center, its published customer stories, and the AWS Marketplace listing it sells through. Brainfish names its models in the trust center but publishes no per-language quality data, so the language criterion scores on what the vendor states.
Brainfish
- Brand: Brainfish
- Rating: 7/10
- In a sentence: A capable, well-secured knowledge-first agent for docs-rich B2B software teams, sold sales-led with no way to try it before you book a call.
If you want a full comparison against Brainfish, we've written one.
FAQs
What is Brainfish, and what does it do?
Brainfish is an AI support platform for B2B software companies. It builds one self-updating knowledge layer from your docs, tickets, videos and Slack threads. Cited AI agents then run against that layer on your website, in your product, in Slack and Teams, and through your helpdesk. Brainfish's own summary of the product puts it as resolving tickets across every channel, grounding every answer in real product knowledge, and never training on customer data.
How much does Brainfish cost, and is pricing published?
Not in the visible copy of its pricing page, which sets out the model, being one platform fee plus usage in user sessions plus add-ons, and routes you to a sales call. That page's own structured data lists the base Platform tier at $1,500 a month. The published list price sits on its AWS Marketplace listing: $17,400 per 12 months for the platform fee, covering 5 seats and 5,000 sessions a month, with itemized add-ons on top (about $1,450 a month before you add anything).
Who is Brainfish for?
B2B software teams with substantial documentation. Brainfish describes its customers as teams in high-trust industries including legal, healthcare, HR, fintech and education, and its named customers are mostly startup to mid-market software companies. The positioning and the reference set are B2B, with commerce platform tiles on the integrations grid as well.
Is Brainfish a good AI support agent, and what are its limits?
It is strong at cited self-service for docs-rich products, and four limits are worth weighing. Buying is sales-led with no figure in the pricing page's visible copy, there is no self-serve trial, results track the quality of the knowledge base you bring, and the published rates mix deflection, answered, self-service and resolution definitions (pin that last one down before the number goes into a business case). Brainfish's own blog argues deflection is not resolution.
Who is behind Brainfish?
Brainfish was founded in Sydney and now runs headquarters in Sydney and San Francisco. The company page names Daniel Kimber as CEO and Co-Founder and Ajain Vivek as CTO and Co-Founder, and puts total funding at $10M. The most recent round was $6.4 million pre-Series A led by Prosus Ventures, with Peak XV's Surge and Macdoch Ventures participating.
What are the alternatives to Brainfish?
The nearest comparison for a support-team buyer is an agent that works inside your existing helpdesk. Our My AskAI vs Brainfish comparison covers that head to head with the cost math, and our Best AI Customer Service for B2B ranking covers nine tools that do the same job. Intercom Fin is the other name that comes up most.
Does Brainfish have a free trial?
There is no self-serve trial and no free plan. The product page shows a "Start your 14-day free trial" button, but the link behind it goes to Brainfish's demo request page, and "Sign in" goes to app.brainfi.sh. Evaluation runs as a 30-minute demo on your own content, then a proof of concept arranged with sales.
What knowledge sources can Brainfish be trained on?
A wide set. The pricing FAQ lists ingestion "from Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, Loom, Zendesk, Salesforce Knowledge, Help Scout, Helpjuice, Mintlify, ReadMe, OpenAPI specs, websites, and any HTTP source via API". On top of that you can upload videos, PDFs and call recordings and have the content extracted, and generate articles from Slack and Teams threads (a recorded onboarding call can become a help article).
Which channels does Brainfish support?
Six are named on the product page: Chat, Help Center, Dev Docs, Slack, MS Teams and Salesforce Email. Email otherwise arrives through helpdesk handoffs with Help Scout and HubSpot, while Intercom carries a messaging handoff. In Teams you "@mention Brainfish in any Microsoft Teams channel and get a grounded, cited answer right there in the thread" (Slack works the same way, on every plan).
What AI model does Brainfish use?
Its trust center names GPT-4 Turbo from OpenAI, Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic and Gemini 1.5 Pro from Google, each reached over an API. Its blog says it "uses context-aware models trained on your verified product knowledge", and the pricing FAQ adds that "Models are not trained on your data". It documents the retrieval side too, including the open-source ReasonDB project built by its own engineering team.
Is Brainfish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certified, and where is data stored?
Both. The trust center shows SOC 2 Compliant and ISO 27001 v2022 Compliant, and the pricing FAQ states SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 certification directly. On storage, the data security doc says US by default, with EU residency on request for Enterprise. The pricing FAQ lists US, EU and AU hosting, with EU available on Platform and above. Confirm which plan unlocks your region.
Does Brainfish integrate with Zendesk, Intercom or HubSpot?
All three, as handoffs into those platforms. The integrations grid lists Zendesk for drafting and deflection with a live agent handoff, Intercom for messaging handoff, and HubSpot for email and ticketing handoff. Zendesk and Intercom also have knowledge sync flows, so Brainfish can read those help centers as sources.
