Per-agent vs per-resolution pricing: modelling 12 months of support cost

Support software used to be priced one way: per seat, every month, whether the queue was busy or empty. Now most vendors bill the AI separately and charge for volume — so the first thing to pin down is what is an AI resolution, because that is the event tripping the counter. The headline rate is the part everyone compares and the part that tells you least. What decides the invoice is which events trip the counter, how much allowance comes with each seat, and what your volume does in November.

The two shapes, and why the rate is not the model

A fixed cost is easy to budget and indifferent to how well you do. If the AI resolves most of your queue this month, a per-seat bill does not move; you keep the saving as freed-up agent time rather than as money back. A variable cost does the opposite: it falls in a quiet quarter and rises exactly when you are busiest, which is when a surprise costs the most.

Most vendors now sell a hybrid of the two, with the components hidden inside one monthly figure. These are the shapes you will be quoted, in the units each vendor publishes.

Read that as different counters rather than different prices. A per-session counter trips more often than a per-resolution counter, so a lower session rate can produce a higher invoice at identical performance. That is a definition problem, not a pricing problem, and it is unpacked vendor by vendor in what counts as an AI resolution.

Five inputs, and one trap

1. Seats in twelve months, not today — including the part-time and seasonal ones, because most tools bill a seat the same either way.
2. Conversations in a real month. Not an average of a good one and a bad one.
3. The share answerable from documented knowledge. People guess at this and it moves the answer more than anything else. Count it on fifty real tickets.
4. Growth. A per-seat model reprices when you hire; a per-resolution model reprices every month.
5. Your peak multiplier, from your own history. In e-commerce it is usually the largest term in the model.

Scenario one: a three-agent webshop

Three agents, roughly 1,000 conversations in a normal month, of which the AI closes 550 without a human. November runs at 2.2 times normal, December at twice, January carries the returns wave at 1.3 times. Professional costs least in a normal month at that ratio: €49.99 per agent per month, 150 resolutions included per agent, €0.56 after that.

Three things fall out of that. Seats are €1,799.64 of a €3,241.64 year — a little over half of it, so at this volume the fixed half is the larger half. The three peak-affected months carry €1,387.91 — over two fifths of the annual bill in a quarter of the calendar. And Standard, whose seat price is half as much, would have cost €7,012.89 across the same twelve months, because its €0.99 rate applies to nearly three quarters of a normal month's resolutions once the 50-per-agent allowance is gone. A seat price €25 lower per agent bought a bill €3,771.25 higher.

Premium is worth checking too: it comes out lower than Professional in all three peak-affected months — €333.37 against €575.57 in November, €279.47 against €513.97 in December, €254.97 against €298.37 in January — because 350 included resolutions per agent absorb the peak outright. Switching plan for exactly those three months saves €520.10 over the year; staying on Premium all twelve months saves only €79.10, because the €49.00 a month it costs more in a normal month eats almost all of that back. Pick the plan that fits your normal month, and only move up for the peak if you will remember to move back.

Scenario two: a ten-agent scale-up

Ten agents, no seasonal peak, volume compounding at 5% a month from 2,400 AI-closed conversations in month one. This is the shape where a variable bill hurts, because the thing driving it grows on its own.

Staying on Professional all twelve months costs €17,310.80, so starting on Premium instead is worth €6,483.33 — here the plan choice, not the volume, is the expensive decision. The other thing the model shows is where the variable half actually begins: 3,500 included resolutions across ten Premium seats absorb the first eight months of compounding entirely, and only from month nine does the bill move, rising 35% between month one and month twelve while headcount does not move at all. On a pure per-seat contract that growth would have cost nothing extra, and the AI would have earned you nothing back. Both statements are uncomfortable, and choosing between them is the actual decision.

The crossover, stated as a ratio

Because the allowance on our plans scales per agent, the point where one plan overtakes the next does not depend on team size. It is a ratio — resolutions per agent per month — and it comes out the same for a solo founder and a fifty-person team.

A one-agent workspace closing 90 resolutions a month is already past the first crossover: €64.59 on Standard against €49.99 on Professional. That is the counter-intuitive part — the plan with the higher seat price can be the lower total from a very small volume onwards, because the seat comes with a cheaper unit rate. The same arithmetic works on any vendor that publishes a computable formula, which our comparison pages do; where a vendor documents a mechanic without a rate, no figure gets invented for it.

The variables outside the rate card

• Does the included allowance scale with seats? Ours does, so a five-person team on Professional starts each month with 750 resolutions before anything is charged. A flat workspace allowance behaves very differently as you hire.
• Is there a monthly minimum? Some standalone AI products carry one, which turns a variable cost back into a fixed one at low volume.
• Are the AI and the helpdesk billed separately, and can one conversation generate a charge in both?
• What is the unit — a session, a conversation, or a resolved conversation? A session counter trips on every attempt, including the failures.
• What does the free tier let you run? Ours is a testing tier, honestly: €0, one agent, and a one-time grant of 25 AI resolutions rather than a monthly allowance — enough to check your content against real questions, not enough to run a queue on.

Which downside would you rather own?

Per-resolution punishes a volume spike that arrives without matching content: the counter runs on every conversation the AI handles, including the ones it handled badly, unless the definition excludes them. Per-seat punishes a quiet quarter and, worse, punishes success — the better your automation gets, the more you pay per human conversation handled. For most teams a variable cost tied to a strict outcome is the easier risk to own, because it moves with revenue: a peak that doubles the support bill is a peak that doubled the orders. The volume side of that same week is in the peak-season preparation guide.

That only holds if the definition is strict, which is why two vendors quoting €0.50 per resolution are not quoting the same price when one of them never reverses a count. If one counted resolution in six turns out to be a conversation the customer reopened, a rate that never reverses is effectively 20% higher at the same headline number. Ours is written out on how we measure AI resolutions, and every counted resolution is visible with its full conversation history, so the invoice can be audited against transcripts rather than trusted. The plan rates used throughout are on the pricing page.