What an AI support assistant costs, what the other tools charge for, and how to train one properly — with calculators you can put your own numbers into.
Fin charges $0.99 when nobody asks a follow-up question. Eight alternatives, compared on the event that triggers a charge rather than the headline price — because that is what decides the invoice.
What an assistant costs, worked out rather than asserted.
Past a few thousand answers a month the model is most of the bill, and buying it directly beats buying it bundled. Work out your own break-even, and see where the tokens in one reply actually go.
Worked out rather than asserted: what a thousand support conversations cost under per-resolution, per-message and per-reply pricing, with a calculator you can put your own numbers into.
What the other tools charge for, in their own units.
A help-centre page costs nothing per visit and resolves far less than you think. Work out which of the three channels should take each question, and what the mix actually costs you per month.
Intercom Fin, Zendesk, Gorgias, Tidio, Chatbase, SiteGPT, CustomGPT and Crisp bill for different events. Here is what each one charges for, what that does to your invoice, and when each model is the right one.
How to set one up, and what it does with what you give it.
A deflection rate is a definition before it is a number, and the flattering definition is always available. The four metrics worth tracking, and the containment trade-off a randomised trial actually measured.
Retrieval cuts invented answers by more than half and does not eliminate them. What the measured numbers are, why a confident wrong answer is the dangerous kind, and what to do about the remainder.
Order status is 18% of ecommerce questions and answering it is a lookup. Here is what an assistant can read from your catalogue, what it must never read, and what the dull questions are worth.
87% of customers say a company using AI for support must still offer a human. What that means in practice: the three endings a stuck conversation can have, and what each one costs you.
An assistant is not trained on your site in the way people assume. Here is what retrieval actually hands the model, which pages earn their place, and why the dull documents beat the marketing ones.