Best AI customer service agents (2026)

Relevance AI$29/mo

Since late 2025 the bill has two meters: Actions (platform work, included) and Vendor Credits (the LLM cost, pass-through on top). The headline price is half the story. Full Relevance AI pricing →

Lindy$49.99/mo

Credit burn is wildly uneven: one voice call (~265 credits/min) can eat a chunk of the month. Credits do not roll over, and agents pause at zero. Full Lindy pricing →

Fin by Intercom$0.99 per resolution (50/mo minimum)

"Outcome" is broader than a clean resolution. Fin charges $0.99 not only when it resolves an issue end-to-end but also when it successfully runs a Procedure you configured to end in a handoff to a human or a workflow, so you can be billed for a "resolution" the customer still escalated. There is also a 50-outcome/month minimum floor, and if you bundle with Intercom you pay per-seat plan fees ($29 to $132/seat/mo) on top of every outcome. Full Fin by Intercom pricing →

DecagonCustom (~$50,000/yr platform fee + usage)

There is no published price and no entry tier under six figures. On top of usage you pay a recurring ~$50k+ annual platform fee plus onboarding/professional services, and a hard practical floor means contracts below ~$50k are not even a fit for their sales process. On per-resolution billing, watch how "resolution" is defined in the contract, since a loose definition can inflate the bill and make savings hard to predict. Full Decagon pricing →

SierraCustom (enterprise only); third-party estimates ~$150k+/yr plus $50k-$200k setup

"You only pay for resolutions" sounds risk-free, but the definition of a resolution is negotiated per contract and you must agree up front what counts as resolved, which is where the real cost lives. Buyers also miss the recurring platform fee and the substantial upfront implementation and professional-services spend, which can exceed licensing. It is a managed, cloud-only platform with no self-hosting, so you depend on Sierra's forward-deployed team and deep custom workflows live on their roadmap. Full Sierra pricing →

Vapi$0.05/min (platform fee; +model & telephony pass-through)

The advertised "$0.05/min" is just Vapi's orchestration fee, not your bill. STT, LLM, and TTS provider costs plus telephony are passed through on top, so real per-minute cost is typically 3x-6x higher (often $0.15-$0.33/min). HIPAA ($2,000/mo) and zero-data-retention ($1,000/mo) are expensive paid add-ons, and SOC 2/SSO/RBAC require the annual Scale contract. Full Vapi pricing →

Retell AI$0.07/min (usage-based; realistic all-in $0.13–$0.31/min)

The advertised $0.07/min is not your real cost. It is only the voice-infrastructure layer; you still pay separately for the LLM, the TTS voice engine and telephony, so realistic all-in pricing is $0.13 to $0.31/min, roughly 2 to 4x the headline number. Premium voices (ElevenLabs) and frontier LLMs (Claude) sit at the top of that range, and features like knowledge base (+$0.005/min), PII removal (+$0.01/min) and AI QA (+$0.10/min) stack on top of every minute. Full Retell AI pricing →

Bland AIFree, then $299/mo + $0.12/min

The headline '$0.09/min' you still see quoted around the web is outdated. 2026 self-serve plans run $0.11 to $0.14/min, and the paid tiers add a $299 to $499/mo platform fee on top of usage, with the cheap $0.09 rate now reserved for custom Enterprise volume contracts. The real per-minute cost also climbs with add-ons: human transfers ($0.03 to $0.05/min on Bland numbers), a $0.015 minimum charge on every call attempt including failed calls, SMS at $0.02/message, and web-widget messages at $0.01 each. Full Bland AI pricing →

Chatbase$32/month (Hobby, monthly billing)

Billing is message-credit metered, not flat: a single conversation can consume multiple credits (premium models burn up to 5 each), and once you exhaust the monthly allotment you auto-recharge at $40 per 1,000 credits, so cost scales with traffic rather than seats. Voice, telephony, API access and outbound campaigns are gated behind the $120/mo Standard tier, and removing Chatbase branding is a separate $1,188/year add-on. Free-tier agents are deleted after a period of inactivity, so the $0 plan is for testing, not running anything live. Full Chatbase pricing →

Tidio Lyro$32.50/mo (Lyro AI add-on, 50 conversations/mo on annual billing)

"Conversations" is the billing unit and it is easy to misread. The Free and Starter plans only include a one-time, lifetime allotment of 50 Lyro AI conversations, not 50 per month, so the AI stops once it is used up unless you upgrade to Growth+ or buy the Lyro add-on. Lyro Connect (attaching Lyro to Zendesk, Intercom, or Salesforce) and the strongest action and MCP capabilities are gated to the higher Plus tier, which starts at $749/mo. Full Tidio Lyro pricing →

Synthflow$0.00/mo base (Pay As You Go); pay per min

The advertised per-minute rate ($0.09 voice engine) is NOT your real cost, because LLM and telephony minutes stack on top, so budget $0.15 to $0.24/min all-in. Optional add-ons like Performance Routing and Global Low Latency Edge each add $0.04/min, quietly pushing the rate higher. White-label is a $2,000/month standalone add-on (only included inside Enterprise), and in-house native telephony is Enterprise-only. Full Synthflow pricing →

Manychat$14/mo (Essential)

The cheap headline no longer buys much. On March 2, 2026 Manychat moved to a four-plan model (Free, Essential, Pro, Business), and the Free tier dropped from 1,000 contacts to just 25, so anyone serious is pushed onto a paid plan fast. Cost then scales automatically with active contacts via per-contact overage, and AI is a paid add-on (about $29/mo) only on Pro and Business, not included in any base plan. Full Manychat pricing →

WonderfulCustom (quote-only)

No public pricing, no self-serve, and no free trial. It is a sales-led, deployment-heavy enterprise engagement where Wonderful embeds its own engineers, so it is overkill for SMBs and anyone wanting to spin up an agent without a vendor implementation team. The localization-first pitch is strongest in EMEA, LATAM, and APAC and in non-English markets, and it is a very young company (founded 2025) still scaling its delivery footprint. Full Wonderful pricing →

Avoca AICustom

Zero pricing transparency plus a hard audience gate. There is no public price, no free trial, and no self-serve sandbox, so you must go through enterprise sales just to see numbers and can't model TCO before committing. It's also gated to roughly $3M+ revenue operators with 2+ CSRs on ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro, so solo operators, sub-$1M shops, and teams on Workiz or FieldEdge are effectively out of scope. Full Avoca AI pricing →

Lorikeet$1,500/mo (Start, billed annually)

Published Start/Scale prices require annual commitment, and the headline monthly number is only the platform fee. Actual spend is dominated by per-resolution credits that stack per channel (voice costs ~50 to 60% more per ticket than chat), plus separate per-ticket charges for routing/tagging and automated QA. There is no free trial; you must book a demo, and onboarding is implementation-heavy since the agent has to be wired into your workflows and systems before it resolves anything. Full Lorikeet pricing →