The question to ask a vendor is not "how much is it". It is "what happens to this number if the agent works twice as well next year". On a per-resolution plan the honest answer is that your bill doubles, and that is worth understanding before you sign rather than after.
How per-resolution pricing works
The model is simple and, on its face, fair: you pay when the AI actually resolves a conversation without a human. Intercom's Fin charges $0.99 per resolution, on top of per-seat costs. You are not paying for a bot that sits there; you are paying for outcomes.
It is genuinely defensible. It is also the pricing decision that reviewers describe as the single biggest reason teams start looking for alternatives, and the reason is arithmetic rather than sentiment.
The arithmetic
Take a store handling 1,000 support conversations a month — a fairly ordinary number for a shop doing steady volume.
Year one, the agent resolves 40% of them on its own. That is 400 resolutions, or $396 a month, plus seats. Fine. It is cheaper than the person you did not hire.
Year two you have done the work. The knowledge base is better, the order lookup is connected, the agent has learned your actual returns policy. Resolution climbs to 70%. That is 700 resolutions, or $693 a month.
Nothing went wrong. Your volume did not grow. The agent got better, and the bill went up 75%. Every hour your team spends improving it is an hour spent increasing your own invoice, and that is a strange incentive to sign up for deliberately.
The other direction is worse
Now run the same store through a good month. A promotion lands, volume triples for three weeks, and the agent handles most of it — which is the entire point of having one. At 70% resolution on 3,000 conversations, that is $2,079 for the month. The tool worked exactly as advertised and sent you a bill three times the size.
The same shape, three different names
Per-resolution is the clearest version, but the pattern recurs under other labels, and it is worth recognising:
- Per ticket. Gorgias bills on conversation volume, so a busy month costs more than a slow one. Reviewers describe $300 plans becoming $1,000+ invoices during peak, and note that an AI-resolved conversation can count as both a resolution and a ticket.
- Per active contact. respond.io prices on Monthly Active Contacts, so a successful campaign raises the bill automatically. Its $79 Starter plan excludes AI entirely; the real entry price with AI is $159.
- AI as an add-on. Tidio sells its Lyro agent and its automation flows as separate usage-based extras on top of the base plan. A store that needs both lands around $80+ rather than the advertised entry price.
None of these are scams. They are all rational ways to price a product whose cost genuinely varies with use. The problem is not dishonesty — it is that they make the one number a small business needs, "what will I pay next month", impossible to answer.
Why vendors price this way, honestly
Because the underlying cost is real. Every AI reply costs the vendor model tokens, and unlike a seat licence that cost recurs forever and scales with usage. A vendor selling unlimited AI on a flat plan is taking a bet on average behaviour, and if they get the average wrong they have to reprice — which is its own kind of damage. When Tidio restructured pricing in December 2024, some customers reported their bills doubling, and the reviews from that period have not aged away.
So the question is not whether the vendor has variable costs. It is whether they have done the work to keep those costs low enough to absorb, and whether they will tell you the number.
What we do, and what it costs us
Thredo includes the AI in every plan, starting at $29 a month with 1,000 replies. There is no per-resolution fee and no AI add-on.
That is only an honest promise because of a constraint we hold ourselves to: our blended model cost per reply runs around a fifth of a US cent, and we keep total AI cost under 10% of subscription revenue. If that stopped being true we would have a choice to make, and we would rather build within the constraint than reprice later.
The plan caps are the honest part of the deal. You can read them before you buy, they do not move when you have a good month, and hitting one is a conversation rather than an invoice.
Three questions before you sign anything
1. What does this cost at three times my current volume?
Not the list price — the actual number. Any vendor who cannot answer it in one sentence is telling you something.
2. Does the bill go up if the agent gets better?
If the answer is yes, you are being asked to pay for your own improvement work. That may still be worth it. It should be a decision rather than a surprise.
3. What counts as a billable event, exactly?
A resolution and a ticket can be the same conversation counted twice. A "monthly active contact" may include someone who messaged once in week one. Ask for the definition in writing.
The uncomfortable one
Flat pricing has a failure mode too, and it is only fair to name it: a vendor who has underpriced will eventually reprice, and existing customers are the ones who pay for that mistake. When ManyChat cut its free plan from 1,000 contacts to 25 in March 2026, the people affected were the ones who had already built on it.
So the real question underneath all three above is a question about the company, not the plan: do they know their own unit costs, and will they tell you what happens when those costs move? A vendor who can answer that is safer on any pricing model than one who cannot.
Common questions
What does per-resolution pricing mean?
You pay a fee each time the AI resolves a conversation without a human. Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per resolution on top of per-seat costs. The model is intended to align price with outcomes, but it means your bill rises as the agent improves and as your volume grows.
Is per-resolution cheaper than a flat plan?
It depends entirely on volume and resolution rate. At 400 resolutions a month, $0.99 each is about $396 plus seats. A flat plan including AI can be a fraction of that at the same volume. Per-resolution tends to look cheaper on the pricing page and more expensive on the invoice.
Why do support tools charge more during peak season?
Because most of them bill on volume: tickets, resolutions or active contacts. A promotion that triples conversations triples the variable part of the bill. Reviewers of ticket-priced helpdesks report plans in the $300 range producing invoices over $1,000 during peak months.
What should I ask a vendor before signing?
Three things: what this costs at three times current volume, whether the bill increases as the agent gets better, and the exact definition of a billable event. A conversation can be counted as both a ticket and a resolution on some plans.
Published 13 September 2026. Competitor pricing is as published at the time of writing and is linked at each mention; these figures change, so verify against the vendor’s own pricing page before relying on them.