What AI Support Actually Costs You
Most AI chat support services use bundled pricing. You pay per resolution, conversation, or ticket, and the AI is included. You never think about tokens or which model ran. Pricing usually lands somewhere between $0.75 and $2.50 per resolution. Simple, and that simplicity is the whole pitch.
But that simplicity isn’t free, and the more volume you run through it, the more you overpay. We think there’s a better way to do this: bring your own AI account. You connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini account and pay the provider directly for what you actually use. Optlo handles everything around that: the agent, the inbox, routing, the tools your team needs to run support day to day. We don’t sit in the middle of the token bill.
What the model actually costs
A typical support interaction runs somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 tokens, depending on how complex the question is and how much context you feed in. At today’s prices that works out to roughly $0.02 to $0.10 per resolution.
That’s the real cost of the AI doing the work. Set it next to a bundled price of $0.75 to $2.50 and most of what you’re paying clearly isn’t the model. On a single ticket the gap is easy to ignore. Across thousands of resolutions a month it’s most of the bill.
Put rough numbers on it. Say the AI costs $0.10 per resolution and a bundled tool charges $1.00:
| Monthly resolutions | Bundled | BYO AI | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $1,000 | $100 | $900 |
| 5,000 | $5,000 | $500 | $4,500 |
| 10,000 | $10,000 | $1,000 | $9,000 |
| 20,000 | $20,000 | $2,000 | $18,000 |
Your own numbers will be different, since resolution rate, model choice, and context size all move it around. Our savings calculator takes those inputs and does the math on real usage.
The problem compounds
Two things drive the gap, and one of them grows with time.
The first is margin. A per-resolution price has the model cost baked in plus a multiple on top. That’s reasonable for the vendor, but it means you’re paying for intelligence at retail when you could buy it at cost.
The second is the one that stings later. Model prices keep falling. Bundled prices don’t. When a provider cuts token costs in half, that saving flows to whoever holds the provider relationship, and in a bundled setup that isn’t you. Your per-resolution price stays put while the thing it’s priced against gets cheaper, so the gap between what you pay and what the AI costs grows on its own over time.
The upside of bringing your own AI
When you own the AI account, a few things change beyond the monthly number.
You pay the provider’s published rate with nothing added on top, so what you spend is the actual model cost rather than a number a vendor set. You can pick the model per job, which matters more than it sounds. Routing “what are your hours” and a billing dispute through the same expensive model is a waste; cheap model up front, reasoning model only when the question earns it. And when providers drop their prices, you get the cut the same day, no renegotiation.
For most teams the savings get attention first. The control is what they end up valuing.
See where you land
The savings depend on your volume, your resolution rate, and which models you run, so the only number that really matters is yours. Run it through the savings calculator and see the gap for your own setup.