SleekFlow
If you're running a 10-person support team in Ho Chi Minh City off SleekFlow's app, the update that actually matters this cycle isn't the AI headline. It's that the mobile app finally stopped being the neglected sibling. On 6 May 2026, SleekFlow shipped its 2.0 mobile release, and contact management, the inbox, product catalog, payment links, and settings are now aligned with the 2.0 web app. Before this, the mobile app trailed the web feature set for months — the kind of gap that costs a shift-worker real minutes every time they're away from a desk.
The same release added AI Smart Reply, which reads the conversation history plus the connected knowledge base and drafts a contextual reply for an agent to approve. Alongside it came an AI Writing Assistant that adjusts tone, fixes grammar, and translates AI-drafted replies before they go out. Native file sharing landed on mobile too — agents can now send photos and documents straight from the phone's own gallery without leaving the app.
The more interesting move, honestly, is what happened in AgentFlow, SleekFlow's AI agent builder. It picked up Shopify actions inside the Playbook step editor in May 2026. Now an AI agent can search products, pull up a product detail page, and manage cart contents without ever leaving a live chat conversation. That's a real commerce workflow inside a chat window, not a chatbot bolted onto a store. No published change to SleekFlow's subscription tier pricing this cycle — the update is entirely feature parity and automation depth.
Respond.io
For a debt-collection agency in Kuala Lumpur that's spent two years arguing with contacts who refuse to hand over a phone number, July's Respond.io update solves an actual, specific problem. Contacts can now message a business using a username instead of sharing their number. Respond.io falls back to a BSUID — a business-scoped user ID — to keep the conversation thread intact when no phone number exists. That's not a small technical footnote; it's the difference between losing a contact's history and keeping it.
The same changelog cycle let AI Agent replies include files and images as rendered attachments. Previously, the AI Agent could only send plain links, which pushed contacts out of the chat window just to view a document. Sending a rendered PDF instead of a bare URL sounds minor, but it's the difference between a contact actually opening your invoice and swiping past a link that looks like spam. No published change to Respond.io's per-seat or per-conversation pricing this cycle.
Freshdesk (Freshworks)
If you signed up for Freshdesk before 1 December 2025 and never noticed a migration email, you're probably already on a different plan than you think. Between December 2025 and April 2026, standalone Freshdesk customers who joined before that cutoff date were automatically moved onto Freshworks' new two-product line. "Freshdesk" covers email-first ticketing, automation, and a knowledge base. "Freshdesk Omni" adds a unified WhatsApp, live chat, and social DM inbox on top of ticketing. Between April and June 2026, existing "Freshdesk Omnichannel" customers were pushed through the same self-serve upgrade path onto Freshdesk Omni.
There's also a correction to make here, because our own listing for Freshdesk was out of date. The free tier is no longer an open-ended plan for up to 10 agents. It's now a time-boxed "Free Program" covering up to 2 agents for the first six months. After that, the account has to move to a paid plan starting at $19 per agent per month on the Growth tier — roughly ₱1,115 a month per agent for a Manila-based team. Two free agents for six months barely covers a single WhatsApp inbox for a two-person shop in Cebu; budget for Growth from day one rather than counting on the free program to last.
Freddy AI Copilot is still a paid add-on, billed annually at $29 per agent per month, which works out to roughly Rp 455,000 a month per agent for a Jakarta support team. The AI bot itself is billed separately, at $49 per 100 resolved sessions. None of this is a new pricing tier for this specific cycle — the free-plan change actually took effect back in 2025, and it's only showing up here because our database entry hadn't caught up.
Coverage note
No vendor in this cycle published an exact subscription-tier price change — no "$X to $Y a month" moment from any of the three tools. What's confirmed and dated: SleekFlow's 2.0 mobile app and AgentFlow's Shopify actions (6 May 2026 and May 2026), plus Respond.io's username-based messaging, live since July 2026. Add Freshdesk's Omni migration windows — December 2025 to April 2026 for standalone signups, April to June 2026 for existing Omnichannel accounts. Sapo, Xendit, and KiotViet have shown up in five of the last eight tracker entries, so we picked three tools that hadn't been tracked yet: SleekFlow, Respond.io, and Freshdesk. Of the three, Respond.io's username fallback is the one worth watching — it fixes a support problem that Southeast Asian teams run into constantly and rarely see solved this cleanly.