What does each pricing model actually charge for?
Usage pricing charges for work done: an answered message, a started voice minute. Wiredesk prices usage at $0.02 per agent reply on chat and email and $0.20 per started voice minute, with no seats. Its plans are bundles of that usage, not of features: Free includes 500 replies or 50 voice minutes a month, Growth ($49) and Scale ($199) include more, every feature is on every plan, and anything past the allowance is billed at the same rates. If the queue is quiet, the bill is the plan; if a product incident triples your volume for a day, the bill moves with it — which is why every workspace has a hard monthly spend cap on usage past its plan.
Per-resolution pricing charges a fixed fee, commonly around a dollar, each time the agent closes a conversation without a human. It is easy to reason about and it rewards a vendor for closing conversations, which is not always the same as answering them well — the definition of 'resolved' is the vendor's, and it is worth reading closely.
Per-seat pricing charges for the humans, monthly, whether or not the AI answers anything. Deflection makes the seats quieter but not cheaper, so savings only arrive when you eventually run fewer seats.
A mixed month, priced three ways
Take a mid-market support org: 25,000 agent replies on chat, 5,000 answered emails, and 8,000 started voice minutes in a month. At published rates that is $500 + $100 + $1,600 = $2,200 of usage. On the Scale plan, the first $300 of it is included in the $199 plan price, so the bill is $199 + $1,900 = $2,099.
Turn that into conversations. At roughly four replies per chat that is about 6,250 chat conversations; emails answered in one reply, 5,000; voice at about four minutes a call, 2,000 calls. Call it 13,250 conversations for about $2,100 — near 16 cents each, including the voice.
The same month on a per-resolution plan: if the agent resolves 60% of those conversations without a person, that is roughly 7,950 resolutions. At a dollar each, about $7,950 — more than three times the usage-priced bill for identical work. On a per-seat suite the arithmetic doesn't even reference the 13,250 conversations; it references how many people you employ, and the AI is an add-on line on top.
| Pricing model | What the bill follows | This month |
|---|---|---|
| Usage (Wiredesk Scale) | Replies and voice minutes | about $2,100 |
| Per resolution, at about $1 | Conversations closed without a person | about $7,950 |
| Per seat | How many people you employ | not the 13,250 conversations |
Why is voice priced per started minute?
Because that is what it costs to run. A live voice session holds a realtime model, speech in both directions and a telephony leg open for as long as the caller is talking, so the honest unit is time, not outcomes. Per started minute means a 2.2-minute call bills as three — the same rounding your telephony provider uses, and the same rounding our own calculators apply so the estimate never comes in under the invoice.
It also makes the cheapest optimisation obvious: answer on chat and email where the unit is two cents, and keep voice for the conversations that need a voice. Most teams that start on chat find the phone volume falls on its own.
What actually moves the number?
Three things, in order. Replies per conversation: an agent that answers in one well-sourced message costs a quarter of one that needs four. Grounding does most of this work — retrieval that returns the right passage the first time ends the conversation the first time.
Call length: at $0.20 a minute, an agent that answers a question in ninety seconds costs half of one that spends three minutes getting there. And deflection: every conversation your team handles instead is priced at their fully loaded hourly rate, which is where this stops being a line item and starts being a staffing question. The support ROI calculator puts both sides of that on one screen.
How do we stop the bill from surprising us?
Set the cap. Every workspace has a hard monthly spend cap on what it pays past its plan's included usage — $50 by default for a pilot, raised to whatever finance signed off on — and when it is reached the agent stops answering billable conversations rather than running past it. You are notified at 80% and again at the cap, so it is a decision and not an accident.
Then watch a real month. If you are past your allowance every month, the next plan up often costs less than the overage. Volume rates come with Enterprise, and the number that matters for negotiating them is your own — conversations, replies per conversation, and voice minutes — which the dashboard shows from the first week.