The AI Agent Pricing Ledger: Every Dated Switch From Seats to Tokens to Outcomes

Support AI agents have settled on a price for their work: between 50 cents and two dollars per billed outcome or conversation. Coding agents are moving the other direction, dismantling the flat monthly seat into token meters. The six major products this ledger tracks record five pricing-model switches in the 22 months from August 2024 to June 2026, and every switch splits by vertical: support bills outcomes, code bills inputs.

Four prices anchor the support side. Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per outcome 1. Zendesk charges $1.50 per automated resolution 2. HubSpot's Breeze Customer Agent dropped to $0.50 per resolved conversation effective April 14, 2026 3. Salesforce's Agentforce Service Agent has been priced from $2.00 per conversation since its October 29, 2024 general availability 45. By ProvenBrief arithmetic, the median price of one billed support interaction now sits near $1.25, and four of the six products in this ledger bill per outcome or conversation: an Outcome-Pricing Share of about 67 percent at first reading.

Four prices, four different definitions of "outcome"

The price list looks like a converged market. The billing triggers underneath it do not agree. Salesforce's original meter is the conversation itself, priced from $2, and since May 15, 2025 it has also sold per-action Flex Credits (20 credits, $0.10 per action) alongside it 45. Zendesk charges only when a ticket is handled with no human intervention and stays closed through what Zendesk typically defines as a 72-hour quiet period 2. Intercom charges once per conversation when the customer confirms the issue is resolved, stops asking for more help, or when Fin completes a workflow 1. HubSpot halved its unit price while tightening its trigger, from $1.00 per conversation to $0.50 per resolved conversation, paid as 50 credits per resolution; its chief customer officer compresses the pitch to "You pay when it works, full stop" 3. A buyer comparing these four quotes is comparing four different meters wearing the same label, and Salesforce has sold a fifth, per-action meter alongside its own since May 2025.

Coding agents turned the seat into a prepaid token voucher

GitHub switched Copilot's billing model twice in under a year. Billing for premium requests began June 18, 2025 across paid plans on GitHub.com 6; on April 27, 2026, GitHub announced that premium request units would be replaced on June 1, 2026 by GitHub AI Credits, consumed per token, input, output and cached alike, at each model's listed API rates, with one credit worth $0.01 78. The seat survives as a voucher: Copilot Pro at $10 a month includes $10 in monthly AI Credits, Pro+ at $39 includes $39, Business at $19 per user includes $19, and Enterprise at $39 per user includes $39, while code completions stay unlimited and unbilled 7. GitHub's stated reason is that agentic usage made the old model unsustainable, since a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session could cost the user the same 7.

Devin made the same move in the same month. On April 14, 2026, Cognition announced it was retiring Devin's Core and Team plans for a new lineup: Free, Pro at $20 a month, Max at $200, and a usage-based Teams plan with an $80 monthly minimum replacing the old Team plan's $500 entry point 9. For self-serve plans, overage beyond included quota is now billed in dollars at the underlying model cost instead of the earlier ACU accounting, and enterprise billing continues on ACUs 9. Previously free products, including Ask Devin, DeepWiki and Devin Review, began charging so that pricing reflects the real compute they consume 9.

The dated ledger, every switch with its page

• August 28, 2024: Zendesk announces outcome-based pricing for AI agents, billed per automated resolution 10.
• October 29, 2024: Agentforce reaches general availability with Service Agent pricing from $2.00 per conversation 4.
• May 15, 2025: Salesforce introduces per-action Flex Credits (20 credits, $0.10 per action, $500 per 100,000) alongside $2-per-conversation pricing, an addition, not a switch 5.
• June 18, 2025: Copilot billing for premium requests begins across paid plans on GitHub.com 6.
• April 14, 2026: HubSpot moves Breeze Customer Agent to $0.50 per resolved conversation and Prospecting Agent to $1.00 per recommended lead 3.
• April 14, 2026: Cognition announces the retirement of Devin's Core and Team plans for seat-plus-quota billing with dollar-metered overage 9.
• April 27, 2026: GitHub announces the June 1 replacement of premium requests with per-token AI Credits 7.
• June 1, 2026: AI Credits take effect; premium requests survive only as legacy billing for annual Copilot Pro and Pro+ subscribers 11.

Two directions, one logic: bill the thing you can verify

The split is not a contradiction. It is accounting. A closed support ticket is a verifiable event, so support vendors can sell the result and define it contractually, down to a 72-hour quiet period 2. Nobody has agreed on what a verified unit of coding work is, and the vendors say so plainly: GitHub repriced because agentic sessions vary enormously in compute 7, and Cognition repriced so pricing reflects real compute 9. So coding bills the input. April 14, 2026 compresses the whole story into one day: the same morning HubSpot tightened its outcome trigger, Cognition bolted a meter onto Devin's seats 39.

For buyers, the consequence is two budget shapes. Support automation is becoming a cost per ticket that falls as resolution rates rise. Coding agents are becoming utility bills that rise with ambition. The ledger's open question: which coding vendor first dares to bill per merged change.

Every figure above was read from the vendor's own pricing, newsroom or documentation page, and every ledger entry carries the date the vendor stated, whether announcement or effect. Figures verified September 2026.