AI Agent Pricing: Agentforce, Copilot Studio, Fin, Zendesk

Short answer. AI agent pricing now runs on a handful of meters: per action, per credit, per outcome or resolution, per conversation and per user. On their own pages on 10 November 2026, Salesforce sells Agentforce Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000, which works out to $0.10 for a standard agent action, Microsoft bills Copilot Studio at $0.01 per Copilot Credit on pay as you go, and Intercom charges $0.99 per Fin outcome. Zendesk bills its AI agents by automated resolution and gives each plan a dollar allowance per agent seat.

In our hypothetical, the same 1,000 customer chats cost about $110, $300 or $594 a month depending on the meter, so the meter matters more than the headline rate. This guide reads each vendor's own pricing page, runs the arithmetic on a hypothetical small support team, and lists what each price leaves out.

How vendors meter AI agents

Every vendor below sells roughly the same job: an agent that answers a question, looks something up and takes an action such as updating a record. What differs is the unit on the invoice.

1. Per action. You pay for each step the agent takes. Salesforce's Flex Credits work this way: one action, such as answering a product question or updating a record, draws a fixed number of credits.
2. Per credit, weighted by feature. Microsoft charges a different number of credits for a scripted answer, a generative answer and an action, so cost depends on how the agent is built.
3. Per outcome or resolution. You pay when the agent resolves the conversation, as the vendor defines it. Intercom's Fin and Zendesk's AI agents both bill this way, with different rules for what counts.
4. Per conversation. A flat price per customer conversation. Salesforce offers this as Agentforce Conversations, priced through sales.
5. Per user. Licenses for employees who use agents inside their own work, such as Salesforce's $125 a user a month Agentforce add-on.

Consumption meters are used for both customer and employee agents. Per-user licenses cover employee use.

Salesforce Agentforce: $0.10 an action on Flex Credits

Salesforce's Agentforce pricing page offers consumption pricing (Flex Credits or Conversations) or per-user licensing. Flex Credits cost $500 per 100,000, which is $0.005 a credit. The page says "Agentforce actions are 20 Flex Credits, while Agentforce Voice actions are 30 Flex Credits," so a standard action costs $0.10 and a voice action $0.15.

Salesforce publishes worked examples, and we rechecked three of them in Python. A "Where is My Order" agent that takes 2 actions per request, 20 times a day for 30 days, uses 24,000 credits and costs $120 a month. A voice agent that takes 4 actions per call on 300 calls a month uses 36,000 credits and costs $180, which is $0.60 a call. Salesforce calls these illustrative and says actual usage may vary.

The Conversations option, a flat price per customer conversation, is listed as "Contact us" with no public rate. For employees, the Agentforce add-ons for Sales, Service and Field Service list at $125 a user a month with unmetered Agentforce usage for employees, and the Agentforce User License is $5 a user a month but still requires Flex Credits. Salesforce also offers Agentforce on its Foundations tier for $0 to get started.

Microsoft Copilot Studio: $0.01 a credit

Microsoft prices Copilot Studio agents in Copilot Credits. The Azure pay as you go page lists $0.01 per credit, and the Copilot Studio plans page also offers a $200 license and a pre-purchase plan that it says can save up to 20%. An Azure subscription is required, and agents on outside channels need a standalone Copilot Studio plan.

The credits per feature come from Microsoft's billing rates page, last updated 31 October 2026:

Microsoft's own example: an agent grounded in the tenant graph can use 12 credits (10 for grounding and 2 for the generative answer) on one complex prompt, which is $0.12 on pay as you go. Use by employees who hold a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is marked No charge in the same table, under conditions in its footnotes.

Intercom Fin: $0.99 per outcome

Fin's pricing page lists $0.99 per outcome, charged "at most once per conversation, even if Fin takes multiple actions or answers multiple questions." If the conversation is later reopened, the outcome is refunded. Fin Voice is sold through sales at $1.99 per voice outcome. Intercom says Fin works with other helpdesks, including Salesforce and Zendesk.

Intercom's own cost estimator on that page turns your conversation volume and Fin's resolution rate into a count of outcomes, so in practice you pay for the chats Fin resolves. The catch is that a resolved chat costs the same $0.99 whether it took one answer or ten actions. We cover Fin alongside Tidio, Chatbase and Botpress in our breakdown of AI chatbot costs for business.

Zendesk: a resolution allowance per seat

Zendesk's pricing page says its AI agents "are included in every Suite and Support plan, with pricing based on the successful outcomes they deliver," billed in automated resolutions, meaning requests the AI agent resolved "without any escalation to a human agent."

Since 18 May 2026, Zendesk sorts those into tiers, according to its help article on resolution tiers. Assisted escalations and contained resolutions do not count against your allowance. The article describes the third tier, a verified resolution, as one the AI agent resolved that also passes a check by a large language model. On email, a conversation ends 72 hours after the first email; on messaging the default is 2 hours, adjustable up to 72.

Each plan includes a dollar allowance, per the resolution allowance article: $10 per agent seat a month on Suite Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, $5 on Suite Growth and Professional, and $2 on Suite Team and on Support Team, Professional and Enterprise, capped at $5,000 a year. Zendesk's own example: 20 seats on Suite Enterprise get $200 a month. Past the allowance you can buy add-ons, allow overage billing, or pause the AI agent. We did not find the dollar rate per resolution tier on the pages we read.

The same 1,000 conversations on each meter

To compare, take a hypothetical small support team with 1,000 customer chats a month and a customer-facing agent. On Copilot Studio we assume three generative answers and one action per chat; on Agentforce, three actions per chat on pay as you go; on Fin, that 60% of chats are billed as outcomes. These assumptions are ours, not the vendors', and the meters do not count the same events.

What the arithmetic says

Per-action and per-credit meters reward a well-built agent: fewer steps per chat means a smaller bill, whether or not the customer's problem was solved. Per-outcome meters reward a high resolution rate, and every outcome is billed at the full rate however many steps it took. On these assumptions Copilot Studio pay as you go is cheapest, and it requires an Azure subscription.

Voice shows the gap more sharply. Salesforce's own voice example costs $180 for 300 calls. The same 300 calls billed as Fin Voice outcomes would be 300 x $1.99 = $597 if every call counted as an outcome. We did not check whether telephony is included in either price, and neither includes platform seats. For phone-first teams, see also our page on AI calling for home services.

None of these numbers is a quote. They show how the meters behave, and we suggest running the same arithmetic on your own chat volume, steps per chat and resolution rate before you sign.

Costs not on the price card

• The platform underneath. Agentforce runs on Salesforce, Copilot Studio needs Azure, Zendesk's allowance comes with Zendesk seats, and Fin runs on Intercom or on another helpdesk such as Salesforce or Zendesk.
• Building the agent. Knowledge sources, actions that touch your systems and testing are work that no meter covers. See what the tools and the build cost in our business process automation guide.
• Model and token costs on custom builds. If you build on a model API instead, OpenAI's own figures on what an AI agent costs to run and our note on OpenAI Agents API costs are a better starting point for custom builds.
• Prices not on the page. Agentforce Conversations has no public price, Fin Voice is sold via sales, and Zendesk's add-on and per-tier resolution prices were not on the pages we read.

How to choose a meter

We would start from the system you already pay for. A team on Salesforce or Zendesk gets an agent where its data already lives, and Zendesk includes an allowance with every plan. A team on Microsoft 365 can look at Copilot Studio, which had the lowest per-chat cost in our hypothetical. A team that wants to pay only for resolved chats, on any helpdesk, has Fin.

For sales rather than support work, see our comparison of sales automation software, and for phone agents our ranking of the best AI voice agents.

How imisofts can help

imisofts is an AI automation agency for small businesses and agencies. We build AI voice agents, WhatsApp chatbots, n8n workflows and CRM automation. If you are choosing a platform, we suggest running your own chat volume through the arithmetic above, and we can do that with you.

Prices in this guide were read on 10 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Check current prices before you buy. This is general information, not financial advice.