In 2026 most AI chatbots charge you twice: once for the plan or seat, and again every time the AI handles a conversation. That usage fee runs from $0.50 (HubSpot) to $2.00 (Zendesk pay-as-you-go, Salesforce Agentforce) per conversation. The AI model underneath costs a tiny fraction of that: 1,000 conversations on a small current model costs about $1.35 in raw API fees. Below is what 15 platforms charge, with every price taken from the vendor's own pricing page on October 28, 2026.

The short version

  • Help desks (Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Gorgias, Salesforce) charge per resolution or per AI session, on top of per-seat fees.
  • Chatbot builders (Chatbase, Botpress, Landbot) sell a monthly allowance of conversations or credits, then charge for packs.
  • Social DM tools (ManyChat, Chatfuel, ChatGenius) price by contacts, chats or conversations per month.
  • Building your own on an LLM API costs $1.35 to $135 per 1,000 conversations in model fees alone, depending on the model. Development and hosting come on top.
  • Ada and Voiceflow don't publish prices. Drift is no longer sold on its own.

AI Chatbot Pricing at a Glance

Platform How AI is billed AI price Base price
Intercom Fin Per outcome $0.99 $29 / $85 / $132 per seat/mo, or no seat when used with another help desk
Zendesk Per automated resolution $1.50 committed, $2.00 pay-as-you-go From $19 per agent/mo (yearly)
HubSpot Customer Agent Per resolved conversation (credits) $0.50 Service Hub Professional or Enterprise
Freshdesk Freddy AI Agent Per session $49 per 100 From $19 per agent/mo (yearly)
Gorgias AI Agent Per automated interaction $0.85 to $1.00, then $1.50 over allowance From $10/mo by ticket volume
Salesforce Agentforce Per conversation or per action $2.00 per conversation Salesforce licenses
Tidio Lyro Per conversation tier From $32.50/mo for 50 Free plan available
Chatbase Message credits $40 per 1,000 extra credits From $32/mo (yearly)
Botpress Per conversation $0.50 to $0.65 in packs of 100 Free, then $150/mo (yearly)
Landbot AI chats per plan Extra AI chats €0.10 From €32/mo (yearly)
ManyChat Active contacts AI included on Pro, in beta Pro $39/mo
Chatfuel USD credits per reply About $0.0093 per bot reply From $18/mo (yearly)
ChatGenius Conversations per month Included, $0.03 per extra if you turn on overage Free, then $29/mo
Ada Contact sales, no public pricing
Voiceflow Prices shown only inside the dashboard

The Four Ways AI Chatbots Charge in 2026

1. Per resolution. You pay when the AI closes a conversation without a human. Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot, Gorgias and Salesforce all work this way now. HubSpot moved to it on April 14, 2026, cutting Customer Agent from $1.00 per conversation to $0.50 per resolved conversation. The upside: you mostly don't pay for conversations the AI fails on. The catch: the vendor decides what counts as resolved, and your bill grows with every customer the AI helps.

2. Per session or conversation. You pay for every conversation the AI takes part in, resolved or not. Freshdesk (per session), Botpress and Tidio work this way.

3. Credits. You buy a balance and each AI reply spends some of it. Chatbase, Chatfuel and HubSpot use credits. Credits make it hard to predict a bill in advance, because the cost per conversation depends on how long it runs and which model answers.

4. Flat allowance. A plan includes a set number of conversations or contacts a month. ManyChat (active contacts), Landbot and ChatGenius work this way. Your bill only moves when you change plans or go over.

Help Desk AI Agents

Intercom Fin

Price: $0.99 per Fin outcome, on top of seats. Essential is $29 per seat a month ($19 for new customers right now), Advanced $85, Expert $132. Fin also works on top of another help desk with no Intercom seats, with a minimum monthly commitment (Intercom's example is 50 outcomes).

Intercom counts an outcome when the customer confirms the issue is resolved, doesn't ask for more help after Fin answers, or Fin completes a workflow, including a handoff to your team. You're charged once per conversation, even if Fin answers several questions.

Zendesk

Price: Support Team $19, Suite Team $55, Suite Professional $115 per agent a month, billed yearly ($25, $69 and $149 monthly). AI agents are billed per automated resolution: $1.50 each if you commit in advance, $2.00 pay-as-you-go.

Each plan includes a few resolutions: 5 per agent a month on Team plans, 10 on Professional. A three-agent team on Suite Team gets 15 free resolutions a month, so almost all AI volume is billed.

HubSpot Customer Agent

Price: $0.50 per resolved conversation, paid as 50 HubSpot Credits per resolution. Customer Agent needs Service Hub Professional or Enterprise. Professional includes 3,000 credits a month (60 resolutions) and Enterprise 5,000 (100). Professional also carries a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee, Enterprise $3,500.

Freshdesk Freddy AI Agent

Price: $49 per 100 sessions. Growth is $19 per agent a month, Pro $55, Enterprise $89 (billed yearly). Every account gets 500 free sessions once to try it. Session packs expire at the end of your billing cycle.

Gorgias AI Agent

Price: Gorgias prices by ticket volume, not seats. With AI Agent added, monthly plans are $40 (Starter, 30 automated interactions), $90 (Basic, 30), $550 (Pro, 190) and $1,430 (Advanced, 530). After the included interactions, each one costs $1.50. Gorgias is built for ecommerce stores, Shopify especially.

Salesforce Agentforce

Price: $2 per conversation for customer-facing agents. There's also a Flex Credits model at $500 per 100,000 credits, where each action costs 20 credits ($0.10). Both sit on top of Salesforce licenses. Per-user Agentforce add-ons start at $125 per user a month.

Ada

Ada publishes no prices. Its pricing page asks for a demo.

What happened to Drift?

Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of Drift on March 5, 2026 and is referring existing Drift customers to 1mind. Drift no longer has a public price. If an older pricing guide quotes one, it's out of date.

Chatbot Builders

Tidio Lyro

Price: Free plan includes 50 Lyro AI conversations, once. The Lyro add-on starts at $32.50 a month for 50 conversations and goes up to 1,000 a month. Tidio doesn't publish the prices of the bigger tiers. Paid Tidio plans start at $24.17 a month.

Chatbase

Price: Hobby $32 a month (700 message credits), Basic $120 (4,000), Business $400 (15,000), all billed yearly. Extra credits are $40 per 1,000. Removing the "Powered by Chatbase" badge is $1,188 a year.

Botpress

Price: Free includes 100 conversations a month. Plus is $150 a month billed yearly for 250 conversations and $25 of AI usage. Team is $750 for 1,500 conversations and $150 of AI usage. Extra conversations come in packs of 100: $65 on Plus, $50 on Team. Packs are added automatically at 95% of your quota, and you can't turn that off.

Landbot

Price: Starter €32 a month billed yearly (€40 monthly) with 500 chats, 100 of them AI. Professional €80 (€100 monthly) with 2,500 chats, 300 of them AI. Extra AI chats are €0.10 each. Landbot prices in euros.

Voiceflow

Voiceflow has Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise plans, but shows prices only inside your account dashboard. Billing is usage-based on credits.

AI for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp DMs

Help desks and website builders mostly live on your website and in email. If your customers message you on Instagram and Facebook, these tools are built for that.

ManyChat

Price: AI starts on Pro at $39 a month and is still labeled beta. ManyChat bills by active contacts: each plan has a monthly quota, then charges for every extra contact ($0.05 on Pro, $0.10 on Essential). Free (25 active contacts) and Essential have no AI. We cover the plans in detail in our ManyChat alternatives comparison.

Chatfuel

Price: Business S is $18 a month billed yearly with $20 of AI credits. Business L is $81 with $100 of credits, which Chatfuel estimates at about 1,650 chats a month. A bot reply costs about $0.0093 in credits. Unused credits don't roll over.

ChatGenius

This one is ours, so weigh that. Price: Free covers 50 conversations a month with the AI on. Creator is $29 a month for 1,500 conversations, Professional $99 for 8,000 (and adds WhatsApp and SMS), Business $297 for 25,000. A conversation is one contact the AI replies to in a month, however many messages go back and forth. That's a stricter count than per resolution: we count it whether or not the AI resolves anything. On paid plans you can turn on overage at $0.03 per extra conversation, or leave it off and the AI pauses at your limit. ChatGenius covers Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS. It doesn't run a website chat widget.

What 1,000 AI Conversations a Month Actually Costs

Here's the same workload on each platform: one human seat, and the AI handling 1,000 customer conversations a month. For the per-resolution tools we assume the AI resolves all 1,000, which is the most you'd pay. Prices are monthly unless noted.

Platform and plan The math Monthly cost
Salesforce Agentforce 1,000 × $2.00, plus Salesforce licenses $2,000+
Zendesk Suite Team, pay-as-you-go $55 seat + 995 × $2.00 $2,045
Gorgias Pro with AI Agent $550 (190 included) + 810 × $1.50 $1,765
Zendesk Suite Team, committed $55 seat + 995 × $1.50 $1,547.50
Intercom Essential + Fin $29 seat + 1,000 × $0.99 $1,019
Botpress Plus $150 (250 included) + 8 packs × $65 $670
HubSpot Customer Agent Service Hub Pro seat + 1,000 × $0.50, minus 60 included About $470 plus the seat
Freshdesk Growth + Freddy $19 seat + 10 × $49 (after the one-time 500 free) $509
Chatfuel Business L Plan covers about 1,650 chats $81 (yearly)
ChatGenius Creator Plan covers 1,500 conversations $29

This isn't apples to apples, and it isn't meant to be. Zendesk, Intercom and Salesforce sell a whole support desk: email, ticketing, website chat, reporting, and seats for a team of humans. If you need that, the per-resolution fee is part of a bigger product. If your customers mostly message you on Instagram or Facebook, you're paying for a lot you won't use.

What It Costs to Build Your Own on an AI API

The model is the cheap part. We priced 1,000 conversations of 6 messages each, with about 1,500 tokens going in (instructions plus chat history) and 150 coming out per message. That's 9 million input tokens and 900,000 output tokens. No prompt caching, so real bills can be lower.

Model Input / output per 1M tokens 1,000 conversations
OpenAI gpt-6-luna $0.10 / $0.50 $1.35
Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 $0.10 / $0.50 $1.35
Google Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite $0.25 / $1.50 $3.60
Google Gemini 3.8 Flash $0.75 / $3.75 (doubles January 1, 2027) $10.13
OpenAI gpt-6.1-sol $2.00 / $10.00 $27.00
Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5 $2.00 / $10.00 $27.00
Google Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $2.00 / $12.00 $28.80
OpenAI gpt-6-astra $10.00 / $50.00 $135.00
Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 $10.00 / $50.00 $135.00

So a conversation that costs $0.99 to $2.00 on a help desk costs between a tenth of a cent and 13.5 cents in model fees. What you're paying the platform for is everything around the model: connecting to your channels, keeping it on topic, handing off to a human, staying inside Meta's and WhatsApp's messaging rules, and keeping it running. That's where a homegrown bot gets expensive. We broke those costs down in build vs buy an AI chatbot and the real cost of AI for small business.

How to Pick

  • Customers mostly email you or use your website chat: a help desk. Freshdesk is the cheapest per conversation here, Intercom the most polished.
  • You already pay for HubSpot Service Hub Professional: Customer Agent at $0.50 a resolution is hard to beat.
  • Shopify store: Gorgias is built around orders and returns.
  • Customers message you on Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp: a DM tool with a flat allowance will cost a fraction of a help desk at the same volume.
  • You have developers and a narrow use case: build on Haiku 5.5, gpt-6-luna or Gemini Flash-Lite. Budget for the engineering, not the tokens.

FAQ

How much does an AI chatbot cost per month?

From free to several thousand dollars. A small business handling 1,000 AI conversations a month pays about $29 to $81 on a flat-allowance DM tool, about $500 to $1,000 on a per-resolution help desk, and $1,500 to $2,000 or more on Zendesk or Salesforce.

What does "per resolution" pricing mean?

You pay only when the AI closes the conversation without a human stepping in. Each vendor defines "resolved" its own way. Intercom, for example, also charges when Fin hands a conversation to your team as part of a workflow, so read the definition before you compare prices.

Why are AI chatbots so much more expensive than the AI models?

Because the model is a small part of the work. The platform fee pays for channel connections, the help desk around the AI, handoff to humans, analytics and support. A 1,000-conversation month costs $1.35 on the cheapest current models and $990 on Intercom Fin.

Sources

Prices checked October 28, 2026 on each vendor's own page. Prices change, so confirm before you buy.