18 platforms · verified 29 July 2026

A $0.69 rate can cost more than a $0.99 one

Because the two are not counting the same event. This page collects what each vendor says triggers a charge, read from their own pricing pages and terms. It is the fact that decides your invoice, and no comparison site publishes it.

The Table

16 of 18 vendors define their billable event in public. 2 do not, which is itself the finding.

Platform	Unit	Published rate	Bills on abandonment?	Seats required underneath?
Fin (formerly Intercom)	Per resolution	$0.99 per outcome, $9.99 per sales qualification	Yes	Seats from $29 with the helpdesk; none on standalone Fin, which instead carries a 50-outcome monthly minimum.
Fini	Per resolution	$0.89 or $0.69 per resolution, above a $3,000-$7,500 monthly platform fee	Not stated	No seats, and the human team is never charged — but there is a platform floor of $3,000 a month, which is the part the headline rate leaves out.
Sierra	Per resolution	~$1.50 per resolved interaction (reported, not published)	Not stated	Not stated
Gorgias	Per ticket	$40-$1,227/mo bundled by volume, then $0.36-0.40 per ticket and $1.50 per automated interaction	Yes	No per-agent pricing, but seats are capped rather than unlimited: 3 on Starter, 500 on Basic, Pro and Advanced.
eesel AI	Per ticket	$0.40 per regular task, $4.00 per heavy task	Not stated	No seats, but you need a help desk underneath — eesel is an automation layer, not a platform.
Zendesk AI Agents	Per seat	$19-115 per agent per month billed annually, plus add-ons and a separate resolution meter	No	Seats are the unit.
Freshdesk with Freddy AI	Per seat	$19-89 per agent per month, Freddy AI $49 per 100 sessions	No	Seats are the unit.
Help Scout	Per seat	$25-75 per user per month, AI Answers $0.75 per resolution	Not stated	Seats are the unit. Free tier up to 5 users and 100 contacts a month.
Tidio Lyro	Per conversation	$0-2,999/mo, two meters	Yes	No.
HubSpot Breeze	Per seat	$7-150 per seat per month, plus 50 credits per resolved conversation	Not stated	Yes. Starter $7, Professional $90, Enterprise $150 — plus a mandatory one-time onboarding fee of $1,500 on Professional and $3,500 on Enterprise, which no comparison table includes.
HappyFox	Per seat	$24-99 per agent per month, billed annually	No	Seats are the unit. The unlimited-agent plan we previously priced is no longer costed on the page.
Zoho Desk	Per seat	$7-40 per user per month	No	Seats are the unit.
Decagon	Other	Not published	Not stated	Not stated
Ada	Other	Not published	Not stated	Not stated
ChatBot by Text	Per resolution	$0.99 per resolution once the allowance runs out	No	$19 per user per month annual, $25 monthly, minimum one user
ManyChat	Other	$0.004–$0.10 per active contact over the allowance, by tier	Yes	No seat floor for automation; extra Inbox seats are $25 each on Pro and Business. Free tier at 25 contacts.
Chatfuel	Other	$49/month flat. No per-conversation or per-resolution charge.	No	Not stated
WhatsApp Business Platform	Other	$2.00 per 1M tokens for Meta Business Agent messages	No	None. No subscription and no seats — pure usage.

How to read this. "Not stated" means the vendor does not define it publicly, not that we failed to look. Where a definition exists we quote or closely paraphrase it. Every row lists its source below.

What Each Vendor Actually Says

Fin (formerly Intercom)

Intercom: “An outcome is counted when: A customer confirms their issue is resolved, or They don’t ask for more help after Fin responds, or Fin completes a workflow (Procedure), including handoffs. You’re only charged once per conversation, even if multiple questions are answered.” Three things follow. Silence bills, so an abandoned conversation is an outcome. A handoff bills when it happens through a Procedure. And a conversation “simply passed to your team without an outcome” does not bill, which makes the difference between those two handoffs the most expensive undocumented distinction on the page.

SOURCE: HTTPS://WWW.INTERCOM.COM/PRICING · CHECKED 2026-08-25

Fini

Priced in tiers rather than as a bare rate. Growth is $3,000 a month billed annually with 2,000 resolutions included, then $0.89 each. Scale is $7,500 with 8,000 included, then $0.69. Enterprise reaches $0.49 at an unpublished price. Unused allowance rolls forward one month. What a resolution is is not defined.

SOURCE: USEFINI.COM/PRICING, READ 5 AUG 2026 · CHECKED 2026-08-05

Sierra

Sierra has argued publicly for outcome-based pricing, charging only when the agent resolves. The rate is negotiated per customer and is not published, so the definition cannot be audited before a sales conversation.

SOURCE: SIERRA BLOG ON OUTCOME-BASED PRICING; RATE VIA VALUE ADD VC · CHECKED 2026-07-29

Gorgias

Two meters on one bill, and since the August repricing the headline is the two bundled together. The helpdesk bills per inbound ticket against a tier allowance, so a failed interaction bills the same as a successful one. The AI Agent bills per automated interaction above a bundled allowance — 30 on Starter and Basic, 190 on Pro, 530 on Advanced — at $1.50, the highest published AI rate in this table. Ticket overage is $0.40, falling to $0.36 on Pro and Advanced.

SOURCE: HTTPS://WWW.GORGIAS.COM/PRICING · CHECKED 2026-08-25

eesel AI

Billed per task the AI actually performs, quoted as: you are invoiced based on what your AI actually does each month. Lookups and dashboard tasks are free, a support ticket or chat session is $0.40, and a long-form generation is $4.00. No platform fee and no monthly minimum on pay-as-you-go; Enterprise starts at $1,000 a month.

SOURCE: EESEL PUBLISHED PRICING PAGE; CONFLICTING FIGURES IN FEATUREBASE AND MY ASKAI REVIEWS · CHECKED 2026-07-29

Zendesk AI Agents

Two structures on one bill. Seats are the base unit: Support Team $19, Suite Team $55, Suite Professional $115 per agent per month billed annually, with Suite Enterprise quoted. Three add-ons stack on top per agent — Copilot $50, Workforce Engagement $50, Contact Center $83 — and reviewers note Copilot generally has to be licensed across all agents rather than only those using it. Automated resolutions are metered separately with no included allowance. Note the unit trap: zendesk.com/pricing server-renders only the annual figures and the widely-quoted $25/$69/$149 are the monthly rates, so a comparison putting Zendesk's annual against a rival's monthly overstates Zendesk by about a fifth.

SOURCE: HTTPS://WWW.ZENDESK.COM/PRICING/ · CHECKED 2026-08-25

Freshdesk with Freddy AI

Per seat for the help desk, and the AI is a separate session meter at $0.49 — not the roughly $0.11 widely quoted, including by us until August. A session is a 72-hour window from the customer's first email, and every AI reply inside it counts once. It bills whether or not anything is resolved, so the meter tracks traffic rather than performance. The 500 free sessions are once per account, not monthly.

SOURCE: FRESHWORKS PUBLISHED PRICING 17 APR 2026 · CHECKED 2026-07-29

Help Scout

Repriced since our April read, and the change reverses what made it unusual. It used to bill on contacts with unlimited agents, so cost did not move with headcount. It is now per user — Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 — with unlimited contacts, and the AI Answers chatbot is a separate $0.75 per resolution on every tier.

SOURCE: HELPSCOUT.COM/PRICING, READ 5 AUG 2026 · CHECKED 2026-08-05

Tidio Lyro

Visitor conversations and Lyro AI conversations are metered separately, so the tier covering your traffic may not cover your AI usage. Starter's 50 Lyro conversations are a one-time allowance rather than monthly.

SOURCE: FRESHWORKS ROUNDUP 17 APR 2026 · CHECKED 2026-07-29

HubSpot Breeze

Breeze bills 50 credits per resolved conversation, and credits are $9 per 1,000 paid annually — so $0.45 a resolution, which is cheaper per outcome than Fin or Gorgias. We previously described this charge as high relative to competitors, on reviewer reports rather than the rate card, and that was wrong.

SOURCE: HUBSPOT.COM/PRICING/SERVICE, READ 5 AUG 2026 · CHECKED 2026-08-05

HappyFox

Per seat — Basic $24 capped at five agents, Team $49, Pro $99, Enterprise custom. AI is not part of this price at all: HappyFox sells AI, chatbot, workflows and BI as separate products with their own pricing, and directs you to sales to bundle them. So the published number is a help desk cost with the AI missing.

SOURCE: HAPPYFOX.COM/HELP-DESK-PRICE, READ IN-BROWSER 5 AUG 2026 · CHECKED 2026-08-05

Zoho Desk

Per seat. Zia AI features are gated to the $40 Enterprise tier, so the $7 headline buys ticketing rather than intelligence.

SOURCE: FRESHWORKS ROUNDUP 17 APR 2026 · CHECKED 2026-07-29

Decagon

No public definition of the billable event. Pricing is sales-led or the term is left undefined on published material.

SOURCE: NO PUBLIC PRICING. SALES-LED. · CHECKED 2026-07-29

Ada

No public definition of the billable event. Pricing is sales-led or the term is left undefined on published material.

SOURCE: NO PUBLIC PRICING. QUOTED ON SUPPORT VOLUME AND INTEGRATIONS. · CHECKED 2026-07-29

ChatBot by Text

One resolution = the AI directly solved a customer question. Multiple questions in the same chat still count as one. Explicitly excluded: chats where no issue is solved, irrelevant answers, test, spam, greetings and browsing, and any chat the agent transfers to a human without having answered a question first.

SOURCE: HTTPS://WWW.CHATBOT.COM/PRICING · CHECKED 2026-08-21

ManyChat

An Active Contact is a person who has interacted through Manychat during the current billing month. Manychat: “A contact counts as ‘active’ when messages are sent or received through Manychat - via automations, AI, Broadcasts, or the Inbox.” One person counts once regardless of message count, and Inbox messages from a human agent count too.

SOURCE: HTTPS://MANYCHAT.COM/PRICING · CHECKED 2026-08-21

Chatfuel

No billable event is defined. Chatfuel meters AI token consumption against an unpublished fair-use allowance that scales with knowledge-base size, instruction length and conversation length. Its own words: “it depends on how much information your AI is working with, not just how many clients write to you.” Exceeding it does not bill — it pauses the bot until the period resets.

SOURCE: HTTPS://LIMITS.CHATFUEL.COM/EN · CHECKED 2026-08-21

WhatsApp Business Platform

Per message, charged on tokens consumed by AI processing plus delivery. Meta estimates 20,000–25,000 tokens per message, about 4–5 cents; its own worked examples run 16–20 cents for a simple enquiry and 40–50 cents for a complex one. Inbound customer messages are never charged. Meta Business Agent messages are free in neither the 24-hour service window nor the 72-hour free-entry-point window.

SOURCE: HTTPS://DEVELOPERS.FACEBOOK.COM/DOCUMENTATION/BUSINESS-MESSAGING/WHATSAPP/PRICING/NON-TEMPLATE-MESSAGES/ · CHECKED 2026-08-21

Frequently Asked

What counts as a billable resolution?

It depends entirely on the vendor, and most do not define it publicly in terms a buyer could audit. Some bill when the customer stops replying, some when the AI produces any answer, some only on a confirmed outcome. This is why headline rates are not comparable.

Is a cheaper per-resolution rate always cheaper?

No. A platform charging $0.69 that bills on customer non-reply can cost more than one charging $0.99 that bills only on confirmed resolution, because the cheaper one charges for abandonment as well as success.

Which pricing model is safest at high volume?

Per seat. It does not move with ticket volume, so costs stay predictable as you scale. Per-resolution and per-ticket models both rise with volume, and per-resolution rises specifically as the AI gets better.

What should I ask a vendor before signing?

What specific event triggers a charge, what happens when a customer abandons mid-conversation, and whether seats are required underneath. Get all three in writing before the trial ends.

Use This Table

It is free to cite and free to reuse. If you are writing about support pricing, link to it rather than rebuilding it. If a figure is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it and note the date.