Before committing to either Gorgias AI or Intercom Fin, here are the costs and catches that won't be obvious from their pricing pages.
Gorgias AI โ what to watch for
- As your AI resolution rate improves, your per-resolution costs increase โ creating a perverse incentive
- Base Gorgias helpdesk subscription required on top of per-resolution AI costs
- Monthly vs annual pricing gap ($1.00 vs $0.90 per resolution) incentivizes annual lock-in
- Primarily designed for ecommerce/Shopify โ limited utility for SaaS or non-ecommerce use cases
Intercom Fin โ what to watch for
- Unpredictable monthly bills โ as your AI resolution rate improves, costs go up proportionally
- You're charged $0.99 even if the AI's answer didn't actually solve the customer's problem, as long as they didn't escalate
- Reddit users report 120% billing increases after enabling Fin (e.g. $4k to $9k/month)
- Copilot is an additional $35/agent/month on top of resolution costs
The cost nobody talks about: what happens when the AI can't answer?
Both Gorgias AI and Intercom Fin use per-resolution pricing, but the way each defines a billable "automated resolution" differs โ and this is where costs can surprise you.
Gorgias AI: Gorgias charges per automated resolution โ $0.90 (annual) or $1.00 (monthly) each time the AI resolves a ticket without human intervention. If the conversation is escalated to a human agent, it shouldn't count as an automated resolution, but the definition of 'resolved' is determined by Gorgias.
Intercom Fin: Intercom Fin charges per resolution โ if a customer asks a question and gets an AI response but doesn't escalate, you're billed $0.99 regardless of whether the answer was actually helpful. If the customer does escalate to a human, you're not charged for a resolution, but you are paying for the human agent's time.
This is why comparing headline per-automated resolution vs per-resolution costs is misleading. The metric that matters isn't how much each billable event costs โ it's what each platform counts as a billable event in the first place, and whether you're paying for outcomes (successful resolutions) or activity (any AI interaction).