What Gorgias actually costs, including the double-billing

Gorgias does not have one price. It has a helpdesk plan priced on tickets, an AI Agent add-on priced per resolved conversation, and two separate overage meters when you blow past either allowance. Size the account on tickets alone and the invoice will still surprise you — because automation is not “included,” and both meters can run on the same conversation.

The helpdesk floor

Helpdesk plans start from $10/month for 50 tickets. Basic is $60/month for 300 tickets. Those are the plan floors. They buy you a ticket allowance and the helpdesk product. They do not buy you the AI Agent.

That distinction matters more than the sticker price. A store that looks at the $10 or $60 line and assumes automation is “in the plan” is reading a different product than the one that shows up on the bill. The helpdesk meter counts tickets. The AI meter counts resolutions. They are not the same unit, and they are not sold as one bundle.

The AI Agent is a separate add-on

AI Agent is billed on its own. The published framing is roughly $0.90–$1.00 per resolved conversation. That is not a seat. It is not a percentage of the helpdesk plan. It is a per-resolution charge for conversations the agent closes.

If the agent handles a conversation end to end, you pay the AI resolution. If a human handles it end to end, you pay the helpdesk ticket (against plan or overage). If the agent starts and a human finishes, both meters can move. The invoice lists them on separate lines, so it does not read as double-billing. Operationally, it is still two charges against one customer thread.

You cannot size the stack from ticket volume alone. You need an expected AI resolution volume as well — and an honest guess at how often a conversation will touch both.

Two overage meters, not one

When volume exceeds the plan, Gorgias does not have a single “extra usage” line. There are two:

• Helpdesk overage is roughly $40 per additional 100 tickets.
• AI overage is roughly $150 per additional 100 AI resolutions.

Those are different rates for different units. Crossing the ticket cap and crossing the AI cap are independent events. A quiet month on tickets with a busy month on automated resolutions can still spike the bill. A BFCM ticket spike with AI turned down can spike the other line. Treating “overage” as one number is how people under-forecast November.

The practical check before peak season is not “are we under 300 tickets?” It is “what is our ticket forecast, what is our AI resolution forecast, and what do both overage rates do to the total if either forecast is wrong by a third?”

What “up to 60%” actually means

Gorgias markets an automation rate of “up to 60%.” That is a ceiling in marketing language, not a promise for your store. Published case studies sit in a wider, lower band: 26–56%.

Those two facts should sit next to each other when you model cost. If you plug 60% automation into a spreadsheet and multiply by the AI per-resolution rate, you are modelling the marketed upper bound, not the published case-study range. A store that automates closer to the low end of that case-study band will see a very different mix of human tickets and AI resolutions — and a different overage risk on each meter.

None of this means the product is a bad fit. It means the marketing rate and the invoice are different documents. Forecast with a range, not a slogan.

How double-metering shows up in practice

A useful way to read the bill is to stop asking “what is our cost per ticket?” and start asking three questions:

1. How many helpdesk tickets did we consume against the plan (and at what overage)?
2. How many AI resolutions did we consume (and at what rate / overage)?
3. How often did a single conversation contribute to both?

You may not get a perfect overlap report from the dashboard. You can still approximate it. Export or sample a week of conversations. Mark which ones closed with AI only, human only, or both. Apply the helpdesk plan/overage logic to the human-touched set and the AI rate to the AI-resolved set. The sum is closer to reality than either meter alone.

The failure mode is optimistic: you assume AI reduces helpdesk tickets one-for-one, so the $60 Basic plan “covers” growth. AI can reduce human load and still add its own line item. On conversations that bounce between agent and human, you did not replace a ticket — you added a resolution beside it.

Sizing before you commit

A sizing pass that survives contact with an invoice looks like this:

• Pick the helpdesk plan from ticket volume you can defend from a real week of data, not from a blog’s average. Fifty tickets at $10/month is a different world from 300 at $60/month.
• Estimate AI resolutions separately. Use a conservative automation rate inside the published case-study band (26–56%), not “up to 60%,” unless you have your own measured rate.
• Price the AI line at roughly $0.90–$1.00 per resolved conversation, then stress-test overage at roughly $150 per additional 100 AI resolutions.
• Stress-test helpdesk overage at roughly $40 per additional 100 tickets.
• Add a buffer for overlap — conversations that hit both meters — instead of assuming every automated close removes a billable ticket.

If that total is uncomfortable, the levers are volume, automation aggressiveness, and which work you refuse to put in the helpdesk at all. Turning AI up to chase the marketed rate can raise the AI line faster than it lowers the ticket line. Turning AI down can protect the AI meter and leave you exposed on tickets in a spike week.

Peak season makes the two meters diverge

Black Friday week is when the double-meter story stops being theoretical. Ticket volume rises because customers ask where orders are. AI resolution volume rises if you leave the agent aggressive on those same threads. Helpdesk overage at roughly $40 per additional 100 tickets and AI overage at roughly $150 per additional 100 resolutions do not move in lockstep. A store that “turns AI up for BFCM” can protect the human queue and still open a second hole on the AI line. A store that turns AI down to save the add-on can watch Basic’s 300-ticket allowance disappear into WISMO.

The honest pre-season exercise is not picking a single automation percentage. It is writing two forecasts — tickets and AI resolutions — each with a low and high case inside the published case-study band of 26–56%, not the marketed “up to 60%.” Price both cases with plan floors ($10/month for 50 tickets, $60/month for 300) plus the AI per-resolution band of roughly $0.90–$1.00, then apply both overage rates if either high case clears the allowance. If either high case is unaffordable, change the policy before the week starts: which intents the agent is allowed to close, which must go straight to a human, and which should never create a ticket at all because the shipping email should have answered them.

What to re-check on your own account

Before you trust any public pricing article — including this one — open your Gorgias billing view and confirm three things against your plan:

• The ticket allowance and the overage rate on tickets.
• Whether AI Agent is enabled, and the per-resolution rate you are actually on.
• Whether last month’s invoice shows both a helpdesk line and an AI line.

Then rebuild next month’s forecast from those three numbers, not from a homepage. The structure above is stable: two products, two meters, two overages, a marketed ceiling, and case studies below it. The dollars on your PDF will still be yours.

If you want the wider stack view — helpdesk, email, and automation platform side by side, including where silent failures hide — that sits in Your First Ten Hires.