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What AI customer service actually costs at your volume
Vendors publish a rate. A rate is not a price until you attach a ticket count to it — and the cheapest option changes as that number grows. This works out both.
At 5,000 contacts, 10 agents and 15% resolved by AI
Can query your systems
Looks up an order, a subscription or an account before answering. What most support teams actually need.
Priced to about 4,000 contacts a month. Set the slider to 4,000 or below and it appears — above that you are on a tier the vendor does not publish.
Answers from documents only
Reads your help centre and answers from it. Cheaper, and it cannot tell a customer where their parcel is.
Priced to about 1,000 contacts a month. Set the slider to 1,000 or below and it appears — above that you are on a tier the vendor does not publish.
Priced to about 2,000 contacts a month. Set the slider to 2,000 or below and it appears — above that you are on a tier the vendor does not publish.
AI is sold as a separate product with no published price, so this would be a help desk cost with the AI missing. Priced at any volume, it would not be comparable.
AI is sold as a separate product with no published price, so this would be a help desk cost with the AI missing. Priced at any volume, it would not be comparable.
Rates read from vendors’ own published pricing and dated in our billing records. Vendors who do not publish a rate are absent rather than estimated — that is roughly half the category, including Ada, Decagon and Sierra.
What This Does Not Count
Three costs no calculator can know, and they are not small.
Implementation
At the enterprise end this is a separate quote and it can rival first-year licences. Sierra has been reported at $150,000 a year and Decagon at a $50,000 platform fee before usage. Neither publishes, so neither appears above.
Integration engineering
Anything that queries your own systems is development work. Answering from your help centre is configuration; looking up an order, checking a subscription or issuing a refund is a project. Budget one to three weeks for the first custom action — it never appears on a pricing page and it is frequently the largest number in year one.
The documentation work
Not a cost so much as a prerequisite. Knowledge bases refreshed within 30 days show around 45% deflection against 18% for those left six months, on identical software. If your resolution rate slider is optimistic, that fortnight of editing is what makes it true.
How to Read the Result
Two labels in the table carry more weight than the totals beside them.
Docs only means the tool answers from content you have written and cannot query an order or an account. If your highest-volume question is where is my order, those options resolve almost none of it however cheap they look. That single distinction eliminates most of the list for most e-commerce businesses.
Scales with success marks per-resolution billing. It is the only structure where the thing you are optimising and the thing you are paying for are the same — every improvement to documentation, scope or confidence raises the invoice. It is not a reason to avoid those tools, and it is a reason to model cost at the resolution rate you are aiming for rather than the one you have.
And the crossover. Most evaluations compare rates at today’s volume, sign a three-year term, and discover the shape of the decision eighteen months later. Move the slider to three times your current volume before deciding anything.
Frequently Asked
How much does AI customer service cost?
It depends far more on your ticket volume than on which vendor you pick. At 500 contacts a month the realistic range is $25 to $150. At 20,000 it runs from a few hundred to over $20,000, because per-resolution and per-seat pricing diverge sharply with scale.
What is the difference between per-resolution and per-seat pricing?
Per-seat bills for agents, so the cost moves with headcount. Per-resolution bills for successful AI outcomes, so the cost moves with how well the AI performs — which means every improvement you make raises the invoice.
What resolution rate should I use in the calculator?
15% for year one unless your documentation is genuinely current. Published research puts B2B SaaS first-year true deflection at 10 to 15%, against the 30 to 50% vendor marketing implies.
Why are some vendors missing from the calculator?
Because they do not publish a rate. Ada, Decagon, Sierra and most enterprise platforms quote after a demo, and we do not estimate numbers vendors have chosen not to state.
What costs does the calculator not include?
Implementation and professional services, integration engineering for anything that queries your own systems, and annual-commitment discounts. The first two are frequently larger than the licence in year one.
What is the crossover point?
The volume at which the cheapest option stops being cheapest. It matters because a rate tells you what something costs today and nothing about where the decision flips — which is the number that determines whether a three-year term was a good idea.
Read Next
The pricing models, compared properly
Published rates for 14 vendors, and the per-seat option every vendor comparison leaves out because none of them sell it.
What counts as a billable resolution
The term that decides your invoice, and which vendors define it in writing.
What resolution rate is realistic
Published benchmarks range from 15% to 80% for the same metric. Here is why, and what to plan against.