The success tax in support AI pricing
There is a name for what per-resolution pricing does to your bill: a success tax. The better the AI performs, the more you pay, because you are billed per outcome and the outcome you are buying is more resolutions. It is the single most counterproductive incentive in the category. This page explains the mechanism and how flat pricing turns it into a competitive advantage.
How the success tax works
Every serious per-resolution vendor charges per outcome: Fin around $0.99 per resolution plus a base and outcome fees, Zendesk near $1.50 per automated resolution, Lorikeet about $0.80. The mechanism is simple and perverse. You adopt AI to resolve more tickets automatically. Each resolution adds to the bill. So the exact result you are optimizing for, higher auto-resolution, is the thing that raises your cost. You are taxed for success.
Why it is worse than it looks
The success tax compounds with growth. As your business scales, ticket volume rises, and as your AI matures, resolution rate rises too. Both push the meter up at once, so the fastest-growing, best-automated teams get the steepest bills. That is backwards. It also creates a quiet incentive to under-tune your automation to control cost, which is the opposite of what good support should do.
Flat pricing removes it
How Resolve prices instead
Resolve decouples price from resolutions entirely. You pay a flat monthly rate for a band of inbound contact volume, with unlimited seats and unlimited AI resolutions inside that band. The published tiers are Launch at $250 a month for roughly 750 inbound contacts, Growth at $900 for roughly 3,000, and Scale at $2,500 for roughly 10,000, with a custom flat Enterprise tier above that. If you go over a band, you bump to the next band, never a per-unit surprise.
The promise is one sentence: your bill never goes up because the AI did its job. It only changes when your business grows. That is the opposite of a per-resolution meter, where the better the automation performs, the more you owe.
Flat pricing turns the incumbents' model into your advantage. Inside your band, every additional resolution is free, so improving automation lowers your cost per ticket. The promise is exact: your bill never goes up because the AI did its job, only when your business grows. That single change realigns the entire incentive, so you are free to push resolution as high as the trust stack safely allows.
One caution on any cost-per-resolution math: a "resolution" is only worth paying for if it actually solved the customer. Resolve reports verified resolution (confirmed by survey, confirmation, or no 72-hour recontact) separately from deflection, and treats reopen rate as the lie detector. A per-resolution bill that counts deflections, where the customer simply gave up, charges you for tickets that were never really solved. Grounding the price in verified resolution is the only honest way to compare cost.
Frequently asked
What is the success tax in support AI?
It is the penalty built into per-resolution pricing: because you pay per resolution and the goal is more resolutions, the better the AI performs, the more you pay. Flat pricing removes it by including unlimited AI resolutions in your band.
Why does per-resolution pricing get worse as I grow?
Because growth raises both your ticket volume and, as the AI matures, your resolution rate, and both multiply the per-resolution meter. The fastest-growing, best-automated teams get the steepest bills. Flat pricing fixes cost per band, so growth changes your bill only when you outgrow the band.
How does flat pricing change the incentive?
It flips it. Under flat pricing, every extra resolution inside your band is free, so improving automation lowers your cost per ticket. You are free to push resolution as high as the guardrails safely allow instead of throttling it to control cost.