An AI chat agent is sold one of two ways: a flat monthly fee, or a charge for each conversation it settles on its own. The per-conversation rates printed on vendor pages run from $0.90 to $1.00, and one vendor charges $9.99 when the agent qualifies a lead. Under those rates sits a monthly minimum. On a site that gets a few chats a week, the minimum is your real bill.
What four vendors print on their own pages
Four vendors print a figure you can read without booking a sales call. These four pages were opened in August 2026.
Fin, the AI agent sold by Intercom, charges “$0.99 per outcome”. Under its heading for running Fin on the helpdesk you already own, the page sets a “50 outcomes per month minimum”. That page carries no update date.
Gorgias charges $0.90 for each resolved interaction on most plans and $1 on Starter. Go past your monthly allotment on its Support plus Shopping Assistant plans and the overage is $1.50 per interaction across all paid tiers. That page was updated May 28, 2026.
Tidio sells its Lyro AI agent as an add-on starting at $32.50 a month, from 50 Lyro AI conversations. Its Starter plan is listed at $24.17 a month with 100 billable conversations, and the billing switch on that page offers two months free on annual. That page carries no update date.
Zendesk says its AI agents are included in every Suite and Support plan, with pricing based on the successful outcomes they deliver. Nowhere on that page is there a dollar figure per resolution. The desk prices are printed: $19 per agent per month for Support Team, $55 for Suite Team, $115 for Suite Professional, all paid yearly. That page carries no update date.
The floor is the real price
Do the arithmetic yourself. Fifty outcomes at $0.99 is $49.50 a month at Fin, and you owe that in a slow month too. Tidio’s smallest Lyro pack is $32.50 for fifty conversations. Use all fifty and each one cost $0.65. Use five and each one cost $6.50.
That gap is the whole trap. Look at who these prices were written for. Gorgias calls itself the conversational AI platform for ecommerce and names one of its plans after a shopping assistant. A drain cleaning site fielding four chats a week pays the same floor as an online store fielding four hundred.
So count before you shop. Add up your form fills and chat requests over thirty days. That number is the only honest input here, and no vendor can supply it for you.
The desk under the chat can cost more than the chat
The chat charge is often the smaller half of the bill. Fin’s page says pairing it with the Intercom helpdesk adds “$29 per helpdesk seat per month” on top of the outcome charges. Intercom’s own page prints seats at $29, $85 and $132 per seat per month, and one full seat as the minimum.
Same agent, same usage, and your floor is either $49.50 or $78.50 a month depending on what sits behind it. Neither figure includes the website itself.
A metered bill and a flat bill also pull apart over a few years, the same way a monthly website plan and a one-time build do. Ask for both shapes and hold them against the same twelve months.
What counts as a billable chat is not obvious
Every vendor draws that line somewhere different, and the line moves your bill more than the rate does.
- Gorgias counts an interaction when the AI resolves a conversation entirely on its own. Its page says emails nobody replies to, spam and filtered messages, and conversations a person resolved do not count.
- Zendesk sorts automated resolutions into tiers it introduced on May 18, 2026. Its help center page names three of them: assisted escalation, contained resolution and verified resolution. It says assisted escalation and contained resolution do not count against your resolution allowance.
- Fin charges $0.99 for a resolution, a procedure handoff or a disqualification, and $9.99 for a qualification, which is when the agent matches a prospect to criteria you set. Its page says you are charged for one outcome per conversation even after the agent takes several actions.
Read that last one twice. At a support desk, a qualified lead is a rare event. For a contractor it is the only event worth paying for. A chat that answers “yes, tankless too” is pleasant. A chat that takes the address, the job and a time window is the one you wanted, and at that vendor it is priced ten times over the headline rate.
The costs no price page lists
Three costs sit outside every quote you will be handed.
- Writing down what it may say. Hours, service area, brands you work on, jobs you turn down, the point where it hands off to a person. Somebody has to write that, and no vendor prices it. It is worth settling what the AI assistant is allowed to do before money changes hands.
- Reading what it said. Chat logs need a look every week for the first month. A wrong answer costs less to catch on day three than on day ninety, and whether you are bound by it is its own question.
- The rate a vendor will not print. Zendesk names automated resolutions as its billing unit and prints no dollar figure for one. Get the rate and the overage rate in writing before you sign.
One limit sits on all of the above. Gorgias sells to online stores, and the rest sell to support desks. A settled conversation there is a tracking number. Yours is a truck in a driveway, so the per-conversation math does not carry across cleanly, and none of those pages was written with a roofer in mind.
What to do next
If your phone gets answered and your form works, a paid chat agent may not be your next best dollar. A contact form that emails you the moment somebody fills it in has no monthly meter on it, as long as it is still sending. Fix that first, then come back to this.
If you still want one, work in this order.
- Count thirty days of form fills and chat requests. Write the number down.
- Ask every vendor for three figures in writing: the price per settled conversation, the monthly minimum, and the overage rate above the allotment.
- Ask what a month with five conversations costs. That is your January.
- Ask what counts as billable and what does not, in a sentence you could read out to your bookkeeper.
- Run a free tier or a trial for a month before you pay for anything.
Then set the answers side by side, the same way you would put three website quotes on the same footing. Same twelve months, same conversation count, everything in.
The agent Galloping puts on a site is billed inside a monthly plan rather than per conversation, so a quiet month costs what a busy one costs. The pricing page lists the three plans and what each includes. What no plan of any kind will do is promise you a lead.