Why we charge by resolution, not by seat
Seat pricing is a tax on having a support team. We chose a model that pays Chatified only when the agent actually answered.
Open most help-desk pricing pages and the first number you see is per seat per month. Intercom Advanced starts at $85. Zendesk Suite Team is $55. Every operator you add — even the working-student you hired for weekend overflow — becomes a recurring line on your invoice.
The logic is straightforward from the vendor's side: more seats mean a bigger customer, which means more revenue. The logic from your side is different. You're paying more because you take support more seriously. That's the wrong incentive to create.
Seat pricing taxes the act of caring about your customers. We don't want to be in that business.
What "a resolution" actually means
A resolution at Chatified is a conversation where the agent answered the visitor's question with sufficient confidence and the visitor didn't escalate to a human. Three things have to be true: the retriever found relevant content, the model produced a grounded reply, and nobody hit the "talk to a human" button.
Conversations that end in handoff don't count. Failed retrievals don't count. Out-of-scope rejections don't count. The merchant pays for the work that actually got done — not for the attempt.
What this changes
A few things, all in the merchant's favour. Adding a teammate to the inbox is free up to the seat cap on the plan (5 on Scale). A bad week of misses costs us, not you. The agent getting better lowers our margin per resolution, which is exactly the alignment we want — we can't make money by shipping a worse product.
The flat rate also changes the marketing math. Intercom at $85 / seat / month for a five-person support team is $425. Chatified Scale at $50 / month for the same team plus 5,000 grounded resolutions plus 250 knowledge sources is $50. Until you cross 5,000 resolutions in a month, the difference is exactly $375. After 5,000, you pay $0.02 per additional resolution. You hit a parity with five Intercom seats around 23,750 resolutions a month — by which point your support volume justifies the conversation about the Business tier anyway.
What this doesn't change
We still meter usage. We still cancel at end-of-month if you stop paying. We still keep the lights on with a healthy gross margin — that's in our cost model, openly published in our pricing docs. The point isn't that pricing is altruism. It's that the wedge of value between "we resolved your visitor's question" and "you employ a person who looks at a dashboard" should accrue to you.