Two billing shapes, three worked scenarios and the exact ratio where each one starts to win. Real arithmetic on published rates, including what a peak month does to a variable bill.
Also available in Dutch: Per medewerker of per oplossing: reken twaalf maanden klantenservice door
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. 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.
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.
| Shape | What you pay for | A published example |
|---|---|---|
| Seats only | Configured users, regardless of volume | The classic helpdesk model: fully predictable, and it does not fall when automation removes work. |
| Seats plus an AI allowance and packs | A seat price, an included AI quota, then blocks of extra capacity | LiveChat's Growth tier at $79 per agent per month billed annually includes 200 AI-agent resolutions, then packs of 50 at $49.50. Freshdesk's Growth tier at $19 per agent per month annually includes the first 500 Freddy sessions, then 100-session packs at $49. |
| Volume bundles plus a per-conversation surcharge | A conversation bundle for the whole workspace, then a fee per AI-handled conversation | Trengo's Boost at €349 per month covers 10 users and 500 conversations, with extra conversations at €18 per 100 and an AI surcharge of €0.30 per AI-handled conversation. |
| Volume only, no seat component | Tickets, with the plan sized by ticket allowance | Gorgias sizes plans by billable tickets — $60 for 300, $360 for 2,000, $900 for 5,000 — and adds $0.90 per resolved conversation on those tiers. |
| Seats plus a per-agent resolution allowance | A seat price whose included AI allowance also scales per agent, then a per-resolution rate | CustomerEagle: €24.99, €49.99 or €84.99 per agent per month, with 10, 25 or 50 AI resolutions included per agent per month, then €0.99, €0.56 or €0.49 per resolution above that. |
Third-party figures were read from each vendor's own public pricing page on 26 and 27 July 2026 and are quoted in the currency that page publishes; they are not converted, and figures in different currencies are not compared against each other. Vendors change prices without notice — check the source before relying on any figure. CustomerEagle is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with any vendor named here; all product names are the trademarks of their respective owners.
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.
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 at that ratio: €49.99 per agent per month, 25 resolutions included per agent, €0.56 after that.
| Month | Resolutions | Seats (3 × €49.99) | Above the allowance (75) | Month total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Each of nine normal months | 550 | €149.97 | 475 × €0.56 = €266.00 | €415.97 |
| November (2.2×) | 1,210 | €149.97 | 1,135 × €0.56 = €635.60 | €785.57 |
| December (2.0×) | 1,100 | €149.97 | 1,025 × €0.56 = €574.00 | €723.97 |
| January returns wave (1.3×) | 715 | €149.97 | 640 × €0.56 = €358.40 | €508.37 |
| Twelve-month total | 7,975 | €1,799.64 | €3,962.00 | €5,761.64 |
CustomerEagle figures computed from the per-agent prices, per-agent allowances and per-resolution rates published on the pricing page; volumes are illustrative and should be replaced with your own. Prices exclude VAT.
Three things fall out of that. Seats are €1,799.64 of a €5,761.64 year, under a third of it. The three peak-affected months carry €2,017.91 — over a third of the annual bill in a quarter of the calendar. And Standard, whose seat price is half as much, would have cost €8,438.49 across the same twelve months, because its €0.99 rate applies to nearly every resolution once the 10-per-agent allowance is gone. A seat price €25 lower per agent bought a bill €2,676.85 higher.
Premium is worth checking too: it is lower than Professional in November and December — €774.37 against €785.57, €720.47 against €723.97 — because 50 included resolutions per agent and a €0.49 rate bite harder at peak. Switching plan for exactly those two months saves €14.70 over the year. That is the honest size of the plan-optimisation prize at this scale. Pick the plan that fits your normal month and leave it alone.
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.
| Month | Resolutions | Lower-cost plan | Seats | Above the allowance | Month total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,400 | Professional | €499.90 | 2,150 × €0.56 = €1,204.00 | €1,703.90 |
| 6 | 3,063 | Professional | €499.90 | 2,813 × €0.56 = €1,575.28 | €2,075.18 |
| 9 | 3,546 | Premium | €849.90 | 3,046 × €0.49 = €1,492.54 | €2,342.44 |
| 12 | 4,105 | Premium | €849.90 | 3,605 × €0.49 = €1,766.45 | €2,616.35 |
| Twelve-month total | 38,200 | Switch in month 9 | — | — | €25,620.99 |
CustomerEagle figures computed from the per-agent prices, per-agent allowances and per-resolution rates published on the pricing page; volumes are illustrative. Prices exclude VAT.
Staying on Professional all twelve months costs €25,710.80, so the mid-year switch is worth €89.81 — again, small. What is not small is the shape of the year: the monthly bill rises 54% 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.
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.
| Step | Monthly billing | Annual billing |
|---|---|---|
| Standard → Professional | About 49 resolutions per agent per month | About 37 |
| Professional → Premium | 350 resolutions per agent per month | About 279 |
Derived from the per-agent prices, per-agent allowances and per-resolution rates published on the pricing page. Annual billing lowers the seat price and leaves the per-resolution rate unchanged, which moves both crossovers down. Prices exclude VAT.
A one-agent workspace closing 60 resolutions a month is already past the first crossover: €74.49 on Standard against €69.59 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.
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.
Not inherently. Per-resolution pricing converts a fixed headcount cost into a variable volume cost, so it favours teams whose ticket mix is repetitive and whose knowledge base is well documented, and penalises teams whose volume spikes without matching content. The deciding figure is resolutions per agent per month, which only your own data can tell you.
Use five inputs: seats in twelve months, conversations in a normal month, the share answerable from documented knowledge, your growth rate and your peak multiplier. Multiply conversations by the answerable share to get resolutions, apply each vendor's own formula month by month including the peak months, then compare twelve-month totals rather than headline rates.
The allowance scales with seats: 10 AI resolutions per agent per month on Standard, 25 on Professional and 50 on Premium. Resolutions above the allowance cost €0.99, €0.56 and €0.49 respectively. The Free plan has no monthly allowance at all — it carries a one-time grant of 25 resolutions at signup instead.
On CustomerEagle plans the crossover is a ratio rather than a team size, because the included allowance scales per agent. With monthly billing, Professional starts costing less than Standard at roughly 49 resolutions per agent per month, and Premium overtakes Professional at 350. Annual billing moves both crossovers down, to roughly 37 and 279.
It rises in proportion to the volume the AI handles, which is also when revenue rises, but it can be a large share of the annual total. In the worked twelve-month model of a three-agent webshop above, the three peak-affected months accounted for just over a third of the year's software cost while representing a quarter of the calendar.
On CustomerEagle it discounts the seat price and leaves the per-resolution rate unchanged, so only the fixed half of the bill moves. That matters most for teams with low resolution volume per agent, and it also shifts the point at which stepping up a plan pays for itself, because the seat premium between plans shrinks while the rate gap stays the same.
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