AI resolution pricing compared: what 10 support tools charge per answer, and what counts

Fin (formerly Intercom, acquired by Salesforce in September 2026) charges $0.99 when its AI resolves a conversation. Help Scout charges $0.75. Zendesk charges $1.50 or $2.00. Talvo charges $0.49. Those numbers are most of what any article on AI resolution pricing will tell you, and they are the least useful part, because each vendor decides for itself what a "resolution" is.

This guide puts ten vendors' rates and definitions side by side, then prices the same four volumes (100, 500, 1,000 and 5,000 AI-handled conversations a month) on every one of them. After that comes the harder question: when does paying per resolution actually beat a human, and how do you avoid paying for answers that were wrong?

We make Talvo, which is one of the ten. We kept it fair by taking every other vendor's number from its own pricing or help page, checked on October 21, 2026, and by labeling anything that came from somewhere else. Pricing pages change often, so recheck the figures that matter before you sign.

The rate card: what each vendor charges per AI answer

Two vendors bill per resolution in the strict sense (Help Scout, Zendesk). Several bill per "outcome", "interaction" or "session". A few bill on usage and don't care whether the customer got helped. The table sorts out the units, the allowances and the minimums.

Sources: the vendors' own pages, such as Zendesk's pricing, Help Scout's pricing, Gorgias, Tidio and Crisp's Hugo billing article, with the rest linked at the bottom. Where a figure is less solid, it is flagged below rather than buried in a table cell.

A few of those rows need a caveat. Gorgias's pricing page carries two sets of prices in its underlying data, and the Advanced rate reads as $0.85 in one place and $0.90 in another. The rest of this guide uses $0.90, which is also the rate on the Basic and Pro cards. HubSpot's own page stops at "credits"; third-party write-ups put a resolved Customer Agent conversation at 50 credits, about $0.50, but HubSpot's rate sheet wasn't available to confirm it, so treat that one as reported rather than verified. Tidio and Crisp bill on usage, not on whether the conversation was resolved, which is why their rows look so different.

If you're pricing Fin specifically, including seats and add-ons, our Intercom pricing breakdown has the full bill.

One word, three families of billable events

A "resolution" is not a fact about the conversation. It's a rule in the vendor's billing system, and the rules differ in exactly the way that moves your invoice.

Read down the "billable" column and three families appear.

The first family is pay when the AI spoke. Tidio, Crisp and Freshworks charge for activity. If Lyro replies, that's a conversation. If Hugo starts a chat, it burns credits even when the customer ends up with a person. These models are honest about what they measure, and they tend to be cheap per unit, but a bad answer costs the same as a good one.

The second is pay when nobody objected. Fin and the other "no further help needed" definitions bill when the conversation ends without the customer pushing back. Fin's page spells out the consequence: a customer who simply stops replying after Fin responds is billable, and so is a completed Procedure that ends in a handoff. That isn't a trick. It's the simplest way to bill without asking customers to rate every chat, and the trade-off is that some billed "resolutions" are customers who gave up.

The third is pay when it's verified. Zendesk's tiers, introduced in May 2026, are among the strictest in the table: a second model checks the transcript, and resolutions that fail the check aren't counted. Help Scout gets to a similar place the other way round, by voiding the charge when the customer signals they need more help. You pay a higher rate at Zendesk, but for a narrower set of events.

Talvo's definition sits in the same family as Fin's. It counts an answered conversation that no teammate touched, and a hand-off never counts. We are not claiming that makes it tighter than Fin's; the two are comparable. The honest difference between them is the price, $0.49 against $0.99.

The Talvo help article on what counts as an AI resolution has the full wording.

AI resolution pricing at 100, 500, 1,000 and 5,000 conversations

Here is the same exercise for every vendor. The assumptions matter more than any single cell, so they come first.

• Every figure is the monthly cost of the AI line only: the per-resolution, per-session or credit charges. Seats, helpdesk plan fees and add-ons come on top, and they differ wildly. The one exception is Talvo, where the number is the whole bill (plan and overage together), because Talvo has no per-seat charge to separate out. That choice works against Talvo in the comparison, not for it.
• We assume every AI-handled conversation is billed. That is a ceiling. Vendors with stricter definitions (Zendesk, Help Scout) will bill fewer of them, and anything the AI hands off is free on resolution-priced plans.
• Zendesk assumes a five-agent team on Suite Team, so 25 resolutions a month are included. Committed pricing needs a commitment of 100 or more.
• LiveChat assumes the Essential plan (10 included) and whole packs of 50 at $49.50.
• Freshworks shows the steady-state month, after the one-time 500 free sessions are used up.
• Crisp shows Crisp's own estimate of $0.05 to $0.10 per conversation, as gross usage. Plans include $5, $25 or $75 of credits, which you'd subtract.
• Gorgias uses $0.90 per interaction with no allowance deducted, and ignores the ticket each interaction also consumes.
• HubSpot uses the reported 50 credits per resolution at $0.01 a credit, with no included credits applied.
• Talvo uses monthly billing and the cheapest plan that fits the volume, assuming the team is within that plan's teammate cap (5, 15 or 25).

The Talvo row is built like this. At 100, Starter at $49 includes 100. At 500, Growth at $149 includes 500. At 1,000, Growth plus 500 extra resolutions would be $149 + 500 × $0.49 = $394, but Scale at $299 includes 2,000, so Scale is cheaper. At 5,000, Scale at $299 plus 3,000 extra at $0.49 ($1,470) comes to $1,769.

A few things the table says plainly. Zendesk is the most expensive per unit at every volume, and the gap widens as volume grows, though it is also the only one that verifies the transcript before charging. Crisp's usage model is the cheapest by an order of magnitude, and the cost of that is that you pay whether the AI helped or not. Fin and LiveChat land on essentially the same number, because their rates are the same $0.99. Freshworks's $0.49 per session matches Talvo's overage rate, but a Freshworks session is a 24-hour window, not a conversation, and the bill is the AI line only, with seats on top. And at 5,000 conversations the per-resolution vendors cost between about $1,800 and $10,000 a month, which is where the human-labor comparison below starts to matter.

Two more notes on the totals. Gorgias's real number is higher than its table cell, because every AI interaction also consumes a ticket, and past a plan's ticket volume tickets cost $0.36 to $0.40 each. And Help Scout's three-month free trial of AI Answers is the longest free ride in the table: you can run real traffic through it before paying.

Try your own numbers. The calculator uses list prices for five of the vendors above, with seats included, so it shows whole monthly bills rather than the AI line alone. That is why its numbers differ from the table above, which is AI line only. The calculator also prices Zendesk at the $2.00 pay-as-you-go rate, not the $1.50 committed one, and Talvo on monthly billing.

When per-resolution pricing beats a human

Run it with numbers you can change. The ones below are an illustration, not data: a teammate costs $30 an hour fully loaded, and a routine question takes six minutes to read, look up, write and send. That is $3.00 per conversation.

At 1,000 conversations a month, that is 100 hours and $3,000 of human time. Fin's $990, Help Scout's $750 and Talvo's $299 all come in well under it, assuming the answers are right. Even Zendesk's $1,462.50 committed rate comes in under half.

Per-resolution pricing has a real structural advantage here. You aren't charged for conversations the AI couldn't finish, so a hard question that gets handed to a person costs you the person and nothing else. On resolution-priced plans the vendor is paid for finished conversations rather than activity, which lines up better than a flat AI subscription, subject to how loosely a vendor defines "resolved".

It also turns a fixed cost into a variable one. A person on payroll costs the same in a quiet month and a busy one. Per-resolution charges shrink in a quiet month, which suits a business with seasonal swings.

When it doesn't

Where the answer quality slips, the math flips faster than most buyers expect. Say 20 percent of billed resolutions were wrong and the customer came back to a human. You paid $990 for 1,000 billed conversations and spent $3.00 on each of the 200 redos: $990 + $600 = $1,590. Still below $3,000. Now say half were wrong: $990 + $1,500 = $2,490. The saving is almost gone, and you have 500 customers who got a bad answer first. The break-even is where the wrong share reaches about 67 percent ($3.00 minus $0.99, divided by $3.00), and long before that, you have a churn problem the invoice doesn't show.

A few other cases where the bill doesn't pay off.

If you answer very little, the AI saves time rather than money. A founder who handles 40 chats a month in spare minutes, and nobody is on payroll for it. The AI is still worth a look, but there's no labor bill to shrink.

Some questions aren't answer-shaped. Refunds, account-specific lookups and anything that needs an integration the AI doesn't have will be handed off. You don't pay for those, which is the good news, and you don't save anything either.

Then there's volume. At 5,000 conversations, per-resolution pricing at $0.99 is $4,950 a month. A usage model like Crisp's, or a bundle with a large included allowance, can run a fraction of that. Whether you're willing to pay for failures to get that discount is the trade.

And watch for a generous definition. Under any "nobody objected" rule, a customer who got a wrong answer and gave up is a billed resolution. You find these only by looking.

Per resolution, per conversation, or a bundle

The three shapes are worth separating, because the right one depends on how much you trust the AI on your content.

Per resolution (Fin, Zendesk, Help Scout, Talvo's overage) puts the risk of failure on the vendor, except for the gap between "resolved" as defined and resolved as experienced. Per conversation or usage (Tidio, Crisp, Freshworks's sessions) puts the failure risk on you but charges so little per unit that it often doesn't matter. Bundles (the allowances on Talvo's plans, Zendesk's per-agent allowance, LiveChat's 200 on Growth) let you prepay at a lower effective rate and only pay list price for the overflow.

Bundles reward predictability, which is why the 1,000-conversation row above is cheaper on Talvo's Scale plan than on its Growth plan plus overage. The reverse also holds: if you buy a 2,000-resolution allowance and use 300, the unit cost is high. Pick the bundle you will actually fill.

How to avoid paying for bad answers

The cheapest resolution is the one the AI gets right, and the most expensive is the one it gets wrong and bills anyway. Most of the defense is upstream of the invoice.

Make the AI answer from your content, and show its work

Talvo's AI answers only from published knowledge base articles and shows which article it used. That does two things for billing: it narrows the room for invented answers, and it leaves a receipt. When you audit a charge, you can see the article behind it.

Make hand-off easy

When the AI isn't confident, Talvo hands the conversation to a human with the thread intact, and a hand-off isn't billed. A handoff rate of nearly zero is a warning sign, not a success; it often means the AI is answering things it shouldn't. Our guide to a knowledge base chatbot that cites sources and hands off covers the setup.

Sample what you were charged for. Once a week, read 20 billed conversations. Look for the same customer writing back within a few days, for answers that are technically on-topic but miss the question, and for conversations that ended because the customer stopped replying. That last group is the one "nobody objected" definitions bill and verified definitions don't.

Fix the source, not the symptom. Wrong answers usually trace to a missing or stale article. Talvo's self-writing knowledge base, on the Growth plan, drafts articles from questions the AI couldn't answer, which shortens the loop. See how AI auto-resolve works for the mechanics.

Set a ceiling where the vendor lets you. Help Scout lets you set a monthly cap and switches off AI Answers when you hit it. Zendesk lets you pause the AI agent at the limit rather than pay overage. Crisp's Hugo stops answering when credits run out if pay-as-you-go is off. Whichever vendor you use, know which of those three behaviors you have before the first surprise.

Measure the funnel, not the count. The number to watch is not "resolutions" but the path to it: how many conversations the AI engaged, how many it resolved, how many it handed off. Talvo's AI performance dashboard on the Scale plan shows that funnel and a grounding rate. On other plans, the standard analytics are a starting point.

Five questions to ask before you sign

These cost nothing to ask and they separate vendors quickly.

1. Is a customer who stops replying after an AI answer billable?
2. If the AI starts a workflow and then hands off, do I pay?
3. Is the included allowance per account or per seat, and does it expire?
4. Does each AI conversation also count against a ticket, seat or conversation quota?
5. What happens when I hit the cap: does the AI stop, or does the meter keep running?

Where Talvo fits, and where it doesn't

Talvo's pricing is a flat plan per workspace with AI resolutions included, then $0.49 for each one beyond the allowance. That is cheaper per resolution than Fin, Help Scout, Zendesk and LiveChat in the table. It is not the cheapest line in it: Crisp's usage-based Hugo is lower per conversation, and HubSpot's reported rate is close.

The caveats are the usual ones for a product in beta. Talvo is new, with no review-site history. It has no WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram or Messenger channel yet, no phone, and no native Shopify or HubSpot integration. It has no SOC 2 report or SAML single sign-on. If any of those are requirements, Fin, Zendesk, Help Scout or Crisp may be the better fit regardless of the per-resolution price. If they aren't, the full plan details are on the pricing page, and the cheaper Intercom alternatives roundup prices the whole stack, not just the AI. For how seats and flat plans interact with AI costs, see per-seat vs flat pricing.