We have now scored four AI customer support platforms on what they publish. Somewhere in the middle of doing it, a problem showed up that none of the comparison articles mention, and it makes almost all of them wrong.
Every one of these vendors bills you twice. Seats, then AI. The seat number is easy and everybody prints it. The AI number is the one that decides your year, and here is what the four of them charge:
| Vendor | AI price | Unit | Included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freshdesk | $49 per 100 | session | First 500, every plan |
| Help Scout | $0.75 | resolution | None, but you can cap it |
| Intercom (Fin) | $0.99 | resolved outcome | None |
| Zendesk | Not published | automated resolution | Varies by plan |
Four vendors. Four different units. Three of them look like the same kind of number and are not.
Freshdesk looks cheapest and that is not a fact
$49 per 100 sessions works out at $0.49 each, roughly half of Intercom’s $0.99. If you are building a spreadsheet, that is where you stop and Freshdesk wins.
The spreadsheet is wrong, because a session and a resolution are not the same event. A resolution bills when the AI actually finished the job. A session bills when a conversation happened. If your customer asks something the bot cannot handle and gets passed to a human, Intercom has nothing to charge you for. Whether Freshdesk does depends entirely on what it counts as a session, and its pricing page does not say.
That is not us being pedantic. It is the whole bill. On a support desk with mediocre deflection, the gap between paying for attempts and paying for successes is most of the invoice, and it runs in the direction the vendor chose when it picked the unit.
To be fair to Freshdesk, it is the only one of the four that includes anything: the first 500 sessions come free on every plan, including the $19 one. Nobody else gives you a single free resolution.
Zendesk is not in this comparison at all
Its seat prices are published, at $19, $55 and $115 per agent per month. The per resolution rate is nowhere on its site. Enterprise with Copilot says Talk to Sales.
Third party blogs will tell you Zendesk lands somewhere around $1.50 to $2.00 per resolution. Maybe it does. We do not score numbers a vendor has not published, because the point of publishing is that you can hold someone to it, and a figure sourced from somebody else’s blog post is not a commitment anyone made to you.
What we can say is that Zendesk’s consumption charges for App Builder, Action Builder and Voice bill above plan allowances at rates it also does not disclose. So there are at least four unpublished meters running on the largest platform in the category.
Only one vendor lets you put a ceiling on it
This is the finding we did not expect and the one worth taking to a procurement conversation.
Help Scout lets you set a monthly cap on AI Answers resolutions. You pick a number, the meter stops there. It is one line on a pricing page and it is the only published spend control any of the four offer.
Zendesk sits at the other end. Its AI resolution overage has been automatically charged and uncapped since January 2026. If a marketing campaign triples your ticket volume in a week, nothing in the product stops the bill following it.
Nobody writes comparison posts about spend caps because they are boring. They are also the difference between a surprise and a budget.
What to actually ask
Four questions. Put them in writing, because a rep answering out loud is not a published rate.
- Define the unit. What starts one and what ends one? Get it in a sentence you could hold them to.
- What happens when the AI fails? If it cannot answer and hands off to a human, does that bill? This single question separates the four vendors more than the headline prices do.
- Is there a cap, and can I set it? If the answer is no, ask what happens on a bad month.
- What is included? Freshdesk gives 500 sessions on every plan. If a vendor includes nothing, that is a real difference in a small account.
Where the four sit overall
Pricing is one criterion of six. Across the whole index, weighing model training, data export, subprocessor notice, uptime history and attestations as well:
- Help Scout, 72.8 on 6 of 6 assessed
- Freshdesk, 71.4 on 5 of 6 assessed
- Intercom (Fin), 70.5 on 6 of 6 assessed
- Zendesk, 61.2 on 6 of 6 assessed
Read the coverage figures next to those numbers. Freshdesk rests on five criteria, not six, because we could not verify its status page from anything a reader can open. Its page renders entirely in the browser and serves nothing to somebody without JavaScript, so we left that criterion unscored instead of guessing at it. A composite built on five is a smaller claim than one built on six, and printing both is the only honest way to put them in the same list.
The pricing detail behind every figure above, with a source link on each one, is on the AI customer support ranking. Scoring rules and weights are on the methodology page.
If any of these vendors publishes a rate we said was missing, send us the URL. It goes up as a new dated score with the old one still beside it.