What is it
Per-Ticket Pricing is a billing unit where each customer support ticket handled by an AI agent is metered — common in AI customer service platforms.
A ticket is the atomic unit of support work: one inbound request — an email, a chat, a social message — that enters the queue and needs a response. Support teams already staff, forecast, and write SLAs against ticket volume, so metering tickets prices in a unit the buyer understands — which is why per-ticket pricing sits at the boundary between legacy seat-based helpdesk pricing and newer outcome-based AI pricing.
Gorgias is the clearest example in this corpus. It bills its ecommerce helpdesk on billable tickets per month with unlimited users on every plan — an explicit rejection of the per-agent model that Zendesk and Intercom built their businesses on. Forethought and Zendesk AI also list tickets among their billing units, but use them differently: tickets define the volume allowance inside a plan, while the headline price is driven by seats and by outcome-based resolution charges.
A ticket is any request received; a resolution is a ticket the AI closes without escalation. Ticket meters bill on volume that arrives; resolution meters bill only on outcomes delivered — the sibling per-resolution pricing page covers that variant. To choose between volume-based and outcome-based units, see choosing the right usage metric.
How it works
In pure per-ticket pricing, a plan includes an allotment of tickets per month, and volume above that allotment is billed as overage. Gorgias publishes the full grid on monthly billing:
| Gorgias tier | Monthly price | Included tickets/mo | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $10 | 50 | +$0.40 / ticket |
| Basic | $60 | 300 | +$40 / 100 tickets ($0.40/ticket) |
| Pro | $360 | 2,000 | +$36 / 100 tickets ($0.36/ticket) |
| Advanced | $900 | 5,000 | +$36 / 100 tickets ($0.36/ticket) |
| Enterprise | Custom | 5,000+ | Custom |
Every tier includes unlimited users (Starter caps at 3); annual billing lowers the effective monthly price by up to ~16% (roughly $10 / $50 / $300 / $750). The overage economics reward scale — the marginal ticket costs $0.40 on Starter and Basic but $0.36 on Pro and Advanced.
The unit math for pure per-ticket pricing:
Monthly bill = plan_fee + max(0, tickets − included_allowance) × overage_per_ticket
Worked example. An ecommerce brand on Gorgias Pro receives 2,300 tickets in a month. The first 2,000 are covered by the $360 base fee; the extra 300 are billed as overage at +$36 per 100 tickets = $108. Total for the month: $360 + $108 = $468, an effective rate of about $0.20 per ticket blended across the plan. Layer Gorgias’s AI Agent add-on on top and each fully automated conversation is billed separately at $0.90 per resolved conversation ($1.00 on Starter) — an outcome charge that is not also billed as a helpdesk ticket.
The other two companies treat tickets as an allowance rather than the primary meter. Forethought describes its model as “a blend of platform access fees and an outcome-based pricing cost,” with all three tiers (Team / Professional / Enterprise) quote-based; its AI QA agent scores 100% of tickets, and tier limits are expressed in QA rubrics and brand counts rather than a published per-ticket price. Zendesk AI keeps seats as its base unit — Support Team at $19, Suite Team at $55, Suite Professional at $115 per agent/month — and meters AI automated resolutions as usage above a plan allowance, with tickets flowing through the seat-priced ticketing layer underneath. For how these allowances are metered and invoiced across a billing cycle, see the guide on usage invoicing and billing cycles.
Companies using this
Three companies in the corpus meter tickets: one as the headline unit and two as a plan allowance layered over seats and resolution charges. The table below lists each with its pricing model, billing units, and verification date.
| Company | Product | Pricing model | Billing units | Free tier | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forethought | AI customer support automation | No | 2026-06-11 | ||
| Gorgias | Conversational AI helpdesk for ecommerce — ticketing, chat, and an AI Agent that automates support and drives sales | No | 2026-07-14 | ||
| Klaviyo | B2C marketing CRM for email, SMS, and push, priced on active profiles plus channel volume, with bundled predictive analytics and Klaviyo AI. | Yes | 2026-07-12 | ||
| Zendesk AI | Zendesk AI agents, Copilot & Advanced AI for customer service | No | 2026-07-29 |
Explore this theme in the knowledge graph
FAQ
What is per-ticket pricing?
Per-ticket pricing meters each customer support ticket as a billing unit — either as a plan's core scaling dimension or as the allowance a tier includes. It is common in AI customer-service platforms because a ticket is the unit support teams already track in their SLAs. Gorgias bills its helpdesk tiers on billable tickets per month; Forethought and Zendesk AI use tickets as an allowance alongside seats and outcome-based resolution charges.
How is a ticket different from a resolution?
A ticket is any inbound support request that enters the queue; a resolution is a ticket the AI closes end to end without human escalation. Every resolution starts as a ticket, but not every ticket becomes one. Ticket meters bill on volume received, while resolution meters bill only on outcomes delivered — the resolution variant is covered on the sibling per-resolution pricing page.
How much does Gorgias per-ticket pricing cost?
Gorgias publishes four ticket-metered tiers on monthly billing: Starter $10/mo (50 tickets), Basic $60/mo (300 tickets), Pro $360/mo (2,000 tickets), and Advanced $900/mo (5,000 tickets). Overage runs +$0.40 per ticket on Starter and Basic, dropping to +$36 per 100 tickets (~$0.36) on Pro and Advanced. Enterprise is custom-quoted for 5,000+ tickets/mo.
Do Forethought and Zendesk AI charge per ticket directly?
Not as a published list price. Forethought describes its model as a blend of platform access fees plus outcome-based resolution cost across three quote-based tiers, with tickets as one of its billing units. Zendesk AI keeps seats as its base — $19 to $115 per agent/month — and meters AI automated resolutions as usage above a plan allowance, with tickets flowing through the seat-priced ticketing layer underneath.
Is per-ticket pricing better than per-seat pricing?
It depends on the ratio of agents to volume. Gorgias explicitly rejects the per-agent model — every tier includes unlimited users and bills on tickets instead — which favors small teams handling high volume. Zendesk AI keeps seats as the base and layers ticket and resolution usage on top, which favors teams that want predictable per-agent budgeting.
Related billing units
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- Token-Based PricingA billing unit common in LLM and AI products, where customers are charged per input and output token processed.
- Per-Seat PricingA billing unit where the vendor charges a fixed fee per named user, regardless of how much each user consumes.
- Per-Resolution PricingA billing unit unique to AI customer-support products, where the vendor charges only when an AI agent resolves a customer issue without escalation.
- Bandwidth-Based PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data transferred out of the platform.
- Per-Function-Invocation PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per serverless function invocation, often combined with a separate compute-time charge.
- CPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the CPU time their workloads consume, typically measured in vCPU-seconds or vCPU-hours.
- GB-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the memory their workloads consume over time, measured in gigabyte-hours.
- GPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for GPU time consumed, typically measured per-second or per-hour by GPU type.
- Per-API-Call PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per API request, regardless of payload size or processing time.
- Per-GB Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data stored on the platform per month.
- Media-Minute PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per minute of audio or video processed — used by speech, voice, and video AI vendors.
- Per-Request PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per request served — the generic meter for inference endpoints, search, scraping, and browser infrastructure.
- Per-Event PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per event ingested — the native meter of observability and billing-infrastructure platforms.
- Vector Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for vectors stored or indexed — the storage dimension of vector database pricing.
- Per-Character PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per character of text processed — the standard meter for text-to-speech and translation.
- Per-Document PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per document processed or generated — common in AI writing, SEO, and document-intelligence tools.
- Per-Page PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per page crawled, parsed, or rendered — the meter for web scraping and document parsing.
- Per-Transaction PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per financial or billing transaction processed — the meter of billing and accounting platforms.
- Active-User PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per monthly or daily active user rather than per provisioned seat.
- Per-Task PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per task an automation or agent executes — Zapier's historical unit, now spreading to AI agents.
- Per-Unit PricingA billing unit used by robotics, hardware AI, and some SaaS companies where the metered object is a physical or abstract 'unit' — a robot deployed, a device sold, or a defined deliverable.
- Workflow Execution PricingA billing unit where each end-to-end workflow or automation run is metered and billed, regardless of the compute steps it contains.
- Per-Message PricingA billing unit where each individual message or reply in a conversation is metered, common in AI chat and voice platforms.
- Per-Invoice PricingA billing unit used by billing infrastructure platforms where each invoice generated or processed is metered as the primary cost driver.
- Per-Action PricingA billing unit where each discrete action taken by an AI agent or automation is metered — common in browser automation and agentic workflow tools.
- Per-Image PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated image is metered, common in image generation APIs and multimodal AI platforms.
- Per-Conversation PricingA billing unit where each complete customer conversation — from first message to resolution — is metered as a single chargeable event.
- Per-Record PricingA billing unit where each data record processed, labeled, or extracted is metered — common in data platforms and web scraping services.
- Per-Word PricingA billing unit common in translation and localization platforms where the metered object is the word count of content processed.
- Per-Video PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated video is metered, common in video generation and synthetic media platforms.
- Milestone-Based PricingA billing unit used in drug discovery and biotech AI where payment is tied to achieving defined research milestones rather than time or compute consumed.
- Per-Outcome PricingA billing unit where payment is triggered by verified outcomes delivered — distinct from outcome-based pricing models, this refers specifically to 'outcomes' as a countable billing unit.
- Per-Datapoint PricingA billing unit where each individual data measurement or signal ingested is metered — common in cloud cost intelligence and ML evaluation platforms.
- Per-Interaction PricingA billing unit where each patient-agent or user-agent interaction is metered, common in healthcare AI and customer engagement platforms.
- Data Licensing PricingA pricing structure where access to proprietary datasets or data assets is licensed separately from the software or services, common in AI training data and clinical data platforms.
- Robot-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour a robot or autonomous system operates is metered — the robotics equivalent of a GPU-hour.
- Per-Contact PricingA billing unit where each contact or lead in the database is metered, common in AI sales development and outbound automation platforms.
- Per-Mailbox PricingA billing unit where each connected email mailbox or sending account is metered, common in AI outbound sales and email automation platforms.
- Browser-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour of headless browser compute time is metered, common in web scraping and browser automation platforms.
- Per-Generation PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated creative asset — image, video, or design — is counted as a 'generation' and metered accordingly.
- Per-Log PricingA billing unit where each LLM request log ingested or stored is metered — common in AI observability and evaluation platforms.
- Per-Trace PricingA billing unit where each distributed trace — a complete record of an LLM request chain — is metered, common in AI observability platforms.
- Per-IP PricingA billing unit where each IP address or proxy endpoint allocated is metered — used by web scraping proxy providers.
- Per-Device PricingA billing unit where each hardware device or endpoint connected to the AI platform is metered.
- Per-Case PricingA billing unit used in legal AI platforms where each case or matter processed by the AI is metered.
- Per-Report PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated report or analysis document is metered as a discrete output.