Light evidence (grade D: anecdotal)A shared template with the builder's cost estimate, but no results from a live store.

Auto-Answer Support Tickets with n8n for About $1 a Month

A builder shared an n8n workflow that tries to resolve support tickets from your knowledge base and order history and escalates the rest to the right Slack channel, for about $0.90 a month at 50 tickets a day by his estimate.

Who this is about: Automation builder (shared n8n workflow template)

n8n ChatGPTGoogle SheetsSlackShopify & ecommerce Startups Local & service AgenciesAutopilot

Get the prompt

SupportAdded Oct 15, 2026Source: community.n8n.io

What it takes

Cost: Free to self-hostn8n: Cloud plans start at €20 a month billed yearly (Starter); Pro is €50. You can also host it yourself under its Sustainable Use License, which allows internal business use; you pay for your own server.Price checked Oct 15, 2026 on n8n.io. Prices change; check before you buy.
Setup time: An afternoonOur estimate from the source, for one business.
Skill needed: Some tech skillsComfortable installing an app, pasting an API key or running a command.

Explain it simply

When customers send questions, this automation looks up the answer in your help articles and their order history, and AI writes a reply. If the AI is confident, the email goes out; if not, it sends the question to the right person in Slack, a team chat app, along with a suggested answer. It's built in n8n, a tool for connecting apps into automatic steps, and the builder estimates the AI costs about $1 a month.

New to AI? See how AI works

What was done

Tickets arrive by webhook from any website form, chat widget or API. n8n searches the knowledge base and order history at the same time, and GPT-4o-mini classifies the category, priority and sentiment and writes a reply.

If the AI can resolve the ticket, it sends a branded HTML email, logs it to Google Sheets and posts to Slack. If it can't, it escalates to the right channel with its draft reply, a confidence score and internal notes.

How it went

The builder estimates the running cost at about $0.90 a month for 50 tickets a day with GPT-4o-mini.

Escalation rules are fixed, not left to the AI: billing and refunds always go to #billing-support, account security to #security-urgent, technical issues beyond the knowledge base to #tech-support, and everything else to #support-escalations.
It's a shared template (workflow JSON on GitHub) with no results from a live store, and the cost figure covers model usage only, not n8n hosting.

Prompt

PromptAdapted from the source

SETUP (from the source)
Needs: n8n (cloud or self-hosted), OpenAI API key, SMTP credentials,
Google Sheets, a Slack bot token; optionally knowledge base and
order/CRM APIs.
Import the workflow JSON from github.com/ivansiyanko/n8n-support-ai,
add your credentials and activate.

CLASSIFIER PROMPT (adapted, ours)
You are first-line support for [store]. Using only the knowledge base
and order data provided, return JSON with:
category (billing, shipping, technical, account, other), priority
(low/medium/high), sentiment, confidence (0-1), reply.
If the answer isn't in the provided data, set confidence below 0.5
and don't guess. Never promise refunds, discounts or delivery dates.

Setup from the post; the classifier prompt is ours.

Business fit

Who this helps, and how:

E-commerce sellers: connect order data so "where's my order?" emails get real tracking info, and refunds always reach a person.
Shopify & ecommerce
Startup founders: auto-resolve FAQ tickets and send the rest to Slack with a draft reply already written.
Startups
Mechanics and tradespeople: answer quote-status and appointment questions from a web form, and route anything about warranty claims to the owner.
Local & service
Medical and health practice owners: answer hours, location and paperwork questions automatically, and send anything clinical or billing-related to staff.
Local & service
Agencies and freelancers: set up and host this for clients as a fixed-fee support package.
Agencies

Similar tools

Other tools for this job, and how they differ. Chosen by our editors, never paid for.

Intercom Fin
An AI support agent inside Intercom, for teams that want it ready-made rather than built in n8n.
Zendesk AI agents
AI ticket answering for teams already on Zendesk.
Gorgias
A helpdesk built for Shopify stores, with AI replies that use order data.

“Light evidence” (grade D) means: A brief, early or in-progress claim. Treat it as an idea to test, not proof. How we grade. Spotted a mistake? Suggest a correction.