The Same AI Agent Costs $0.99 for Support and $9.99 for Sales

Intercom charges $0.99 when Fin resolves a support conversation. It charges $9.99 when Fin qualifies a sales prospect.

Its documentation is explicit about what qualification can mean: routing a prospect to self-serve counts as a qualification, because Fin matched the prospect to your defined criteria and routed them accordingly.

So the same agent, matching the same person against a rule and pointing them at a page, is a dollar or ten dollars depending on which product surface you configured it under. Neither price is wrong. But nobody comparing outbound tools is being shown that.

Why this is suddenly a question

Outbound used to live in a different tool. Order updates and renewal reminders sat in a marketing platform, lead qualification in a sales stack, and neither talked to the bot answering support.

That is collapsing. Most of the platforms in this directory now sell some form of proactive messaging, and the argument for it is genuinely good: when a customer replies to a campaign, the same trained agent picks up the conversation with full context instead of the reply dying in a marketing inbox.

What has not caught up is how any of it is billed.

What each platform actually sells

Read on each vendor's own pricing and documentation, August 2026.

The quota interactions are the trap

Two vendors fund outbound out of the budget you bought for support, and neither makes that obvious.

Zendesk's proactive messages have no separate price, which sounds generous until you read what happens when someone replies: the reply is handled by your AI agent and draws down your automated resolution allowance. Its documentation also notes that campaigns pause automatically when that allowance runs out. So a successful campaign can exhaust the budget your inbound support depends on, and the failure mode is your marketing stopping rather than your support desk.

Tidio does something similar in miniature. A proactive role consumes the Flows quota, because it is executed as a flow, and each proactive role also counts as one piece of Guidance used. Two quotas, neither of them the one you would think to check.

Gorgias is the opposite and worth crediting for it: Convert is a separate subscription with published per-click rates, from $0.60 down to $0.50 at volume. Clear, until you notice the plan auto-upgrades by default as click volume grows.

The channel most of them mean is WhatsApp, and Meta sets the rules

Almost every outbound story in this category is a WhatsApp story, and the constraints belong to Meta rather than to the vendor you are paying.

Meta documents a 24-hour customer service window opened by a customer messaging or calling you. Inside it you can send ordinary messages. When it closes you can only send pre-approved template messages — and Meta states that you can only message users who have opted in to receiving messages from you.

Templates go through review that can take up to 24 hours, and Meta lists the common rejection reasons: spam or scam-like content, a message that starts or ends with a parameter, too many variables for the length, and duplication of an existing template's wording.

There is also a throttle nobody mentions. Meta limits how many marketing templates a user receives from any business in a period, adapting automatically to that person's recent engagement. If they reply, a 24-hour window opens and messages inside it stop counting against the limit — so engagement literally buys you reach.

The compliance gap worth checking before you send

Meta requires opt-in. We read one major platform's entire WhatsApp campaign guide and its prerequisites are an integration, an approved template, contacts with phone numbers, and a Meta payment method.

Opt-in is not among them. That is not the vendor breaking a rule — the obligation is yours, and Meta's own documentation carries it. But a team following the setup guide end to end will have sent a campaign without ever being told that consent was required, and consent is the part regulators care about.

If you take one thing from this piece: the opt-in record is your problem, and no vendor's onboarding flow will build it for you.

One shared budget, or two

Salesforce takes the cleanest structural position. Flex Credits apply across teams, channels and use cases, at 20 credits per agent action — about ten cents — and its documentation states you cannot run Flex Credits and conversation pricing in the same org.

One pool for everything is easier to forecast and harder to attribute. You will not be able to say what support cost versus what sales cost without instrumenting it yourself.

And one platform in this set sells no outbound product at all. Decagon's product navigation is voice, chat, email, procedures, integrations, experiments, testing and insights. Outbound appears on its site only as glossary entries about AI SDRs, not as anything you can buy. In a category rushing to bundle, choosing not to is a position.

Where this stops being a support decision

There is a line worth drawing. Sending an order update or a renewal reminder to an existing customer is support work with a proactive trigger, and the platforms above handle it well.

Cold outbound to people who have never contacted you is a different job with different tooling, different deliverability problems and different economics, and none of these products is built for it. Every vendor above is explicit that their outbound is for existing contacts with proper opt-in. If prospecting is what you actually want, that is a separate category — we cover the economics of it on ai-sdr.cc.

The mistake is buying a support platform because its outbound demo looked good, then discovering that the thing you wanted was prospecting and the thing you bought was reminders.

What to ask

Does outbound draw on the same quota as inbound, and what happens to my support agent when a campaign performs well? Is the reply handled by the same agent with the same knowledge, or does it land somewhere else? Are Meta's template fees billed through you or through my own Meta account? And what happens to the price if I label the same action sales rather than support?

Pricing and constraints read from each vendor's own pages and from Meta's developer documentation in August 2026. Where a vendor's marketing and documentation disagree, both are given.

WRITTEN BY AR · UPDATED 2026-08-21

I read the fine print. Vendor pricing pages, billing definitions, terms, funding filings and acquisition notices — then I do the arithmetic nobody publishes: what a platform actually costs at your volume, what its headline metric is really counting, and who owns it now. I do not run benchmarks, and no page here pretends otherwise.

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