Why most help desks hide the cost of "unlimited" AI
Onsites AI ·
Ask a typical help desk platform for its price and you get a smile: "it depends." Then the line items arrive — per agent, per resolution, per integration, per feature tier. AI adds a new classic: $0.99 per resolution. The math people never do:
A team of 10 at $25-49/agent is $3,000-5,880/year before a single AI answer.
Resolution-based AI turns your growing ticket volume into a metered bill you can't forecast.
"Unlimited" almost always has a fair-use clause and a pricing page that quietly changes.
What honest metering looks like
Three numbers, published, copy-pasteable into a spreadsheet:
Seats: first 3 free; $15/seat/month after, prorated daily.
Storage: $1/GB/month in packs. Chats and emails count too, but text is tiny — 100 MB stores countless messages.
AI: prepaid credits from $10. A Copilot draft is 3 credits (≈$0.03); a full Harness tool run is 24 (≈$0.24). Fixed, public, never expiring.
A comparable 10-person workload runs ≈$255/month here vs ≈$3,100/month on a leading per-seat platform. The point isn't the number — it's that our number is computable on day one, and yours accidentally isn't.