An AI agent that answers your customers is priced one of two ways. Intercom, Tidio, Botpress and Zendesk sell it per conversation or per resolution, on top of a seat or a plan. Chatfuel SDK builds the same agent as an app you run yourself, and the bill is the AI tokens it uses plus a workspace plan.
This page puts the two side by side: each vendor's published rate, the same month on Chatfuel SDK at 500, 2,000 and 10,000 conversations, and a calculator for any other volume.
The short version:
- Intercom Fin, Tidio Lyro, Botpress: $0.50 to $0.99 a conversation at published rates, plus a seat or a plan. Zendesk publishes no rate.
- Chatfuel SDK: about a dime of tokens a conversation, plus the workspace plan. $100 a month at 500 conversations, $225 at 2,000, $850 at 10,000.
- The vendors include email, a help centre and resolution reporting. The SDK is an app your team runs.
- Under a hundred conversations a month every option is under $140; choose by channel. From a few hundred up, the SDK is the cheapest by a wide margin.
What the vendors charge
Monthly billing throughout; ours is monthly too. Prices move, so check the vendor's page before quoting these.
| Vendor | Bills per | Counts when | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intercom Fin | outcome | the customer confirms it's resolved, stops asking for help, or Fin completes a workflow, hand-offs included | $0.99, plus one seat from $39 |
| Tidio Lyro | conversation | the AI replies at least once | $39 for 50, up to $700 for 1,000; above that, sales |
| Botpress | conversation | the customer sends two or more messages in the month | free to 100; $189 for 250; $939 for 1,500; packs of 100 at $65 or $50 |
| Zendesk | resolution | the AI resolves it without escalating to a person | not published |
Three things the table hides:
- Fin's second condition means a customer who gives up is an outcome.
- Lyro's ladder ends at 1,000 conversations. Past that there's no published number.
- Botpress's page steers you to Enterprise above 3,000.
What it costs on Chatfuel SDK
The SDK is free and the app it generates is yours. You pay for the Chatfuel workspace it runs on: two meters and a plan.
| Meter | Rate |
|---|---|
| AI input | $2.75 per million tokens |
| AI output | $16.50 per million tokens |
| Conversion events reported to Meta | a cent each |
| Inbox, contacts, knowledge base, hand-off rules | in the plan |
A support conversation where the agent reads 30,000 tokens (your instructions, the knowledge base and the history, re-sent each turn) and writes 1,000 costs $0.099. Call it a dime. That's an assumption, and it's the second knob on the calculator.
The dime isn't the bill. The plan is. Business is $20 a month with $20 of credits and one bot; the agency ladder runs $100 to $2,050. You're on the smallest plan whose credits cover the month, and the pricing post covers what that step does to a margin:
How to Price a White-Label WhatsApp SaaS: Three Models That Actually WorkTen customers at $99 a month is either a 77% margin or a $1,060 hole, and the only difference is how usage moved. Here's the arithmetic behind the three pricing models.500, 2,000 and 10,000 conversations
A dime a conversation on the SDK side. Fin is billed on every conversation, because by its own definition a customer who stops replying is an outcome. Zendesk isn't drawn; there's no number to draw.
- Chatfuel SDK$100
- Intercom Fin$534
- Tidio Lyro$350
- Botpress$384
- Chatfuel SDK$225
- Intercom Fin$2,019
- Botpress$1,189
- Chatfuel SDK$850
- Intercom Fin$9,939
- Botpress$5,189
| Conversations a month | Chatfuel SDK | Intercom Fin | Tidio Lyro | Botpress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 | $100 | $534 | $350 | $384 |
| 2,000 | $225 | $2,019 | contact sales | $1,189 |
| 10,000 | $850 | $9,939 | contact sales | $5,189 |
The gap widens with volume: the vendors price per conversation, the SDK per token, and a token is cheap.
The small end is less flattering. At 200 conversations you're on the $20 plan. At 250 you're on the $100 one, paying a hundred dollars for under twenty-five dollars of tokens. It's still the lowest number at that volume, but the step is the cost, not the tokens.
Run your own numbers
What each side includes
| Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio, Botpress | Chatfuel SDK | |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | Intercom and Zendesk are helpdesks: email, tickets, a help centre, telephony. Tidio has a help desk with email and ticketing. | WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and the web widget. No email, no phone. |
| Reporting | Fin reports outcomes. Zendesk's whole price is a resolution count. Botpress has team analytics. | No AI analytics, dry run or audit log in the API. You query your own inbox. |
| Documents | Lyro scrapes your site and imports Zendesk articles. Botpress stores PDFs with vector search. | Give Copilot the PDFs or the link; it reads them and writes the knowledge base, with an approval step before anything changes. |
| Guarantees | Tidio's top plan guarantees a 50% resolution rate. | Tokens. No promise attached. |
If your support queue is email, we're not in this comparison yet.
What running your own agent takes
- The wizard. About three minutes from the command to a running app, most of it installing dependencies. Node 20.18.1 and a Chatfuel token.
- What you get. A Vite + React + TypeScript app, the modules you picked, a proxy that keeps your token server-side, and a skill per module for Claude Code or Codex.
- What stays yours. Deploying it (Vercel's free tier, a box you own, Docker), keeping dependencies current, and writing the reporting we don't have.
No engineering estimate is going to make that a number. If nobody on the team wants to touch a React app, that's the cost, and it isn't in the calculator.
Why we meter tokens, not resolutions
A resolution is whatever the vendor says it is. For Fin, the customer stopped replying. For Botpress, the customer sent two messages, helped or not. For Lyro, the AI replied once.
Tokens are the thing that costs money. A bad answer costs a fraction of a cent, and the answer that fixes it costs the same.
Which one, by volume
- Under a hundred conversations a month. Every option here is under $140; ours is $20. Choose by channel: if the queue is email, it isn't us.
- A few hundred to a couple of thousand. Chatfuel SDK. $100 to $225 against $350 to $1,189 for the cheapest vendor at the same volumes, and the inbox for hand-offs is in the plan.
- Above that. Chatfuel SDK. At 10,000 conversations it's $850 against $5,189 and up.
Corrections go to Discord. A vendor invoice that disagrees with the vendor's pricing page gets the table updated.
More on Pricing
WhatsApp Business API Pricing: Meta's Rate Card, the Provider's Fee and What Chatfuel SDK Charges
WhatsApp Business pricing, layer by layer: Meta's rate card by country, what eight providers add on top of it, and what Chatfuel SDK charges: Meta's rate plus 10% out of your balance. 1,000 marketing messages are $62.50 in Brazil and $11.80 in India, and from 1 October every reply is billed too.
Read itHow to Price a White-Label WhatsApp SaaS: Three Models That Actually Work
Ten customers at $99 a month is either a 77% margin or a $1,060 hole, and the only difference is how usage moved. Here's the arithmetic behind the three pricing models.
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