The cheapest looking plan is not necessarily the cheapest way to finish a job. Use the relevant guide to check the unit you pay for and the limits that affect your task.

Your job	Compare the billing unit	Check before buying	Research
Customer support	Resolution, outcome, seat or quote	What counts as solved; escalation rules	Support comparison ↗
Coding	Seat, usage allowance or task consumption	Limits, autonomy and review effort	Coding comparison ↗
Voice calls	Minutes plus underlying services	Telephony, model and speech costs	Voice comparison ↗
Workflows	Executions, credits or platform usage	Failed runs, included allowances and overages	Workflow comparison ↗
Assistants	Seat, task or pooled credits	Integrations, access and recurring use	Assistant comparison ↗
Enterprise agents	Credits, actions or negotiated terms	Governance, consumption and licensing	Enterprise comparison ↗

What to compare before choosing an AI agent

These are comparison questions, not performance rankings or price quotations. For current published figures, use the AI Agent Pricing Tracker.

How we label evidence

Guides distinguish documentation from independent evaluation and our testing. Vendor documentation is not proof of product performance.

Documentation researched

Claims supported by dated official or vendor sources, with their limitations noted.

Independently evaluated

A named external test or evaluation with an attributable method.

Hands-on tested

Tests conducted by Industry Contents, with inputs, conditions and failures recorded.

See How We Report for our editorial approach. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework offers additional context for evaluating AI risks.

Short answer for buyers

Pick the agent by the work you need done, then compare what each vendor counts as billable. Support agents usually bill per resolution or outcome, voice agents per minute, workflow tools per execution or credit, assistants per seat with pooled credits, and enterprise platforms per credit or negotiated contract.

The same 1,000 support resolutions cost about $500 at HubSpot’s published $0.50 rate, $990 with Intercom Fin at $0.99, and about $2,000 at Salesforce’s $2 rate. Those figures exclude seats, platform fees and minimums, and each vendor defines a resolution differently, so read them as scenarios rather than quotes. Vendor pages were checked on 12 October 2026.

Divide total monthly cost by work that was completed, not by credits bought. Ask each vendor in writing what counts as billable, whether a handoff to a human still counts, and which costs sit outside the listed rate.

Current rates and check dates are in the AI Agent Pricing Tracker. The full method is in Which AI Agent, and What It Really Costs.

By Yajush Gupta, Founding Editor & Business Journalist. Last reviewed 12 October 2026. Documentation researched, no hands on test. Our corrections policy and method are on How We Report.

Frequently asked questions

Which AI agent should I start with?

Start with the job. Customer support, coding, voice calls, workflow automation, personal assistants and enterprise platforms each have different billing units and different questions to settle before buying. Pick the task above, then read the comparison for that task.

Is the cheapest published rate the cheapest agent?

Not necessarily. Published rates can exclude seats, platform subscriptions, minimum commitments, model usage and telephony, and each vendor defines a billable outcome differently. Compare total monthly cost against completed work, using the same set of real conversations or tasks for each product.

Can I compare agents that bill by credits, minutes and resolutions?

Only after converting them to one workload. Define a month of work, estimate the billable events each product would generate, add seats, platform fees, model usage and retries, then divide by successful results. Salesforce lists 100,000 Flex Credits at $500 and a standard action uses 20, which covers about 5,000 standard actions.

Do all vendors publish their prices?

No. Our guide to quote only support agents covers Decagon, Ada, Sierra and Forethought and the points to pin down in a contract. ServiceNow publishes its Assist unit but no standard dollar price. Treat a missing price as an unknown.

Are these guides based on hands on testing?

The pricing guides are documentation research. They use dated vendor pages, attribute vendor claims to the vendor and label third party figures as unconfirmed. Each guide states whether it is documentation researched, independently evaluated or hands on tested.

Which page shows current prices and check dates?

The AI Agent Pricing Tracker links each price to the vendor’s page and shows the date we checked it. Prices change, so confirm contract terms with the vendor before you buy.

Explore the research

Analysis, AI agents and SaaS pricing · Growth Signal experiments · IC Lab comparison benchmarks

Across Industry Contents All Analysis · Resources