AI assistant or a person on live chat: the money, worked out

Every store owner who looks at AI assistants does the same sum: how much do we pay people to answer chat, and how much would a bot cost instead. The sum is simple. The trap is in what goes into it.

This note works through it with published prices from three common setups, and a made-up store with round numbers you can replace with yours.

The store

A home electronics shop gets 1,500 chat conversations a month. Most are the same questions: delivery times, returns, whether a charger is included, order status. Today two part-time staff cover chat during opening hours. Out of hours, questions wait until morning.

We assume a person costs the shop €20 an hour all-in (wage, tax, software seat) and handles six chat conversations an hour on average, including the quiet stretches. Your numbers will differ; the method is the same.

Option 1. People only

1,500 conversations at six an hour is 250 hours of chat a month. At €20 an hour, that’s €5,000 a month, or about €3.33 a conversation.

What you get for it: answers that are usually right, the ability to fix an order on the spot, and nobody at night or on Sunday.

Option 2. A per-outcome AI agent

Intercom’s Fin charges per outcome: $0.99 each time it resolves a conversation or completes a defined action, and nothing when the customer asks for a person. Used with another helpdesk, there is a minimum of 50 outcomes a month; with Intercom’s own helpdesk, seats start at $19 per person per month.¹

Say the assistant resolves 60% of conversations, a common target. That’s 900 outcomes at $0.99, about $890 a month, roughly €770 at today’s rates. The other 600 conversations go to people: 100 hours, €2,000. Total roughly €2,770 a month, and questions get answered at night.

Option 3. A flat-price chatbot

Tools like Chatbase charge by plan, not by outcome. Its Standard plan is listed at $150 a month, or $120 a month billed yearly, with a set number of message credits.² Tidio’s plans include a number of Lyro AI conversations, with larger volumes and pay-per-resolution billing on its top plan.³

With a flat plan, the AI part costs about €130 a month whatever it resolves. People still take the conversations it can’t handle. If it resolves 60%, the total is about €2,130. If it resolves 30% because nobody tuned it, people handle 1,050 conversations: 175 hours, €3,500, plus the plan.

Side by side

	Monthly cost	Per conversation	Night and weekend
People only	€5,000	€3.33	No
Per-outcome AI, 60% resolved	≈ €2,770	≈ €1.85	Yes
Flat-price AI, 60% resolved	≈ €2,130	≈ €1.42	Yes
Flat-price AI, 30% resolved	≈ €3,630	≈ €2.42	Yes

The cheapest line depends almost entirely on the resolution rate. That’s why the vendor calculators ask for it first.

The cost the sum leaves out

“Resolved” means the customer didn’t ask for a person. It doesn’t mean the answer was right. A customer who is told returns are free when they aren’t, or that the charger is in the box when it isn’t, leaves satisfied and comes back angry. On a per-outcome plan, you also paid for that answer.

Put a number on it. Say 3% of the AI’s answers are wrong in a way that costs something: a refund honoured to keep the peace, a return shipping fee waived, an order cancelled. In our store that’s 27 conversations a month. At €25 each, it’s €675 a month, more than the AI agent’s own bill on a flat plan. And that ignores the customers who simply didn’t buy because the bot said a product wasn’t available when it was.

We collected the common shapes of these mistakes, each retold with a made-up business, on what goes wrong.

What actually moves the numbers

1. The resolution rate. It depends mostly on your content, not the vendor. Clear pages with one rule per paragraph push it up; see what to put in the knowledge base.
2. The wrong-answer rate. You only know it by asking the assistant real questions and checking the answers against your pages. Dashboards don’t show it.
3. What the person does with the rest. If the assistant hands over well, with the order number and the question already collected, a person’s six conversations an hour become eight or ten.

How to decide

If you get fewer than a few hundred conversations a month, a flat-price tool is usually cheaper, and the money question matters less than the time: someone has to set it up properly and keep checking it. Above a few thousand, per-outcome pricing is easier to justify because you pay only for what it handles, and the platforms around it tend to be stronger.

In both cases, budget for the checking. An assistant that resolves 60% and gets 3% wrong is cheaper than one that resolves 70% and gets 8% wrong, and only one of those numbers is on the dashboard. That’s the part Assistant Care does: a person asks your assistant what customers ask, every week, and fixes the pages behind the wrong answers.

Footnotes

1. Fin by Intercom, pricing, as of September 2026, fin.ai/pricing. ↩

2. Chatbase, pricing, chatbase.co/pricing. ↩

3. Tidio, pricing, tidio.com/pricing. ↩