Per-resolution AI pricing, in plain English

Seat pricing is predictable and slightly wrong. You pay per person, whether the software does anything or not. Per-resolution pricing is accurate and slightly terrifying, because the invoice now moves with your ticket volume.

Most of the category has switched. Your budget probably has not.

What the numbers are today

• HubSpot Customer Agent, $0.50 per resolved conversation, billed as 50 HubSpot credits. Changed from $1.00 on April 14, 2026. Note the product is now called Customer Agent inside Agent Hub. The Breeze branding was retired in July.
• Intercom Fin, $0.99 per outcome. Lead qualification is billed separately at $9.99.
• Salesforce Agentforce, $2.00 per conversation, or a credits model working out around $0.10 per action.
• Zendesk, outcome-based, but they do not publish a rate. It is sales-quoted.

HubSpot is genuinely the cheapest of the four right now.

The word that decides your bill

A resolution is not a conversation. Each vendor decides what counts, and that definition is the entire budget.

HubSpot's version: the agent gave at least one reply that shared a content source or took an action, and no human picked it up within 72 hours. The status then locks. Nothing after that changes it, including a customer telling you afterwards that it did not help.

Read that twice, because it means a conversation can be billed as resolved and still be a bad experience.

Why this is a configuration problem, not a finance problem

Under seat pricing, an over-eager bot costs you goodwill. Under per-resolution pricing it costs you money twice: once for the resolution it claimed, and again for the human who handles the ticket when it comes back.

• The questions the AI is allowed to close should be the ones it closes cleanly, not the ones it can technically answer.
• Reopen rate stops being a quality metric and becomes a cost metric.
• A deflection target without a quality gate is just a target to spend money against.

The maths to run before you renew

Take last quarter's conversations. Split them by topic. Mark the topics you would genuinely let software close without a human reading it. That subset times the per-resolution rate is your realistic floor. Then add the reopen rate you already see on those topics, because those get handled twice.

Compare that against what an agent costs you per conversation. Most teams find the model works. It just works differently from the sales deck, and only if escalation is set up tightly.

What we will not do

We will not quote you a deflection percentage before seeing your data, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What we will do is measure containment and reopen rate so the number you give your CFO is measured rather than guessed.

Verified against

• HubSpot announcement, $0.50 per resolved conversation, effective April 14, 2026.
• HubSpot knowledge base, definition of a resolved conversation and the 72 hour lock.
• HubSpot Agent Hub launch, July 23, 2026.
• Intercom pricing page and Salesforce Agentforce pricing page.

Checked against vendor documentation on August 6, 2026.