Glassdesk vs Gorgias AI Agent

The short version

• Gorgias AI Agent is built into the helpdesk: nothing to install, one vendor, one bill, and you pay only when it succeeds. Pricing is per outcome — "Each resolved conversation costs $0.90 on most plans. Starter plans begin at $1 per resolved conversation."^{(gorgias.com/blog/ai-agent-pricing, 2 Sep 2026)} Plans bundle roughly 90 to 2,500+ automated interactions a month, with overage rates above that.^{(source, 2 Sep 2026)}
• Glassdesk is an app on the Gorgias marketplace that does one thing: Tier-1 ticket deflection from your own help center. Every reply shows the passages it cited and a confidence score, it grades itself on your docs before going live, and the price is flat — $79, $199 or $449 a month, published, with a 14-day self-serve trial.

The bill: one flat line vs two meters

Gorgias bills the helpdesk and the AI Agent separately, and their billing docs are direct about what that means: "An automation fee and a ticket fee may apply to the same ticket only when the ticket is entirely resolved by AI Agent, without human intervention."^{(docs.gorgias.com, 2 Sep 2026)} In other words: the AI's cleanest wins — the tickets it fully handles — are exactly the ones that can bill on both meters. To be fair, the reverse case is handled kindly: if the AI hands the conversation to a human, you're charged only a ticket fee, not both.^{(source, 2 Sep 2026)}

With Glassdesk you still pay Gorgias for your helpdesk plan — any agent that answers tickets in Gorgias, human or AI, makes those tickets billable there, ours included. The difference is the second meter. Instead of $0.90–$1.00 per success plus overage, the automation line on your budget is one flat number: $79 / $199 / $449 per month. Starter and Growth are hard-capped — the bill cannot exceed the sticker. Scale includes 3,000 resolutions, then $0.15 per resolution — published, not quoted.

Worked example, using Gorgias's own headline: their pricing page claims "60% of inquiries resolved instantly."^{(gorgias.com/pricing, 2 Sep 2026)} On a store with 1,000 tickets a month, 60% is 600 AI resolutions: $540–$600 a month on their meter at the base rates^{(source, 2 Sep 2026)} — more if you exceed your bundle — versus $199 flat on Glassdesk Growth, which includes 1,000 resolutions. And that's before any same-ticket ticket fee. Run your own numbers, or read the full cost breakdown.

Where the built-in agent is genuinely ahead

Credit where it's due — these are real advantages, not spin:

• Zero integration. It's already in your helpdesk. No app to evaluate, no second vendor to trust with your data, one invoice.
• You pay nothing when it fails. Outcome pricing is fair in that direction: a quiet month, or a badly-performing month, costs little. Flat pricing means we get paid either way — that's the honest flip side of a predictable bill, and it makes the meter cheaper than Glassdesk at low volume. Below roughly 88 resolutions a month, $0.90 each beats our $79 Starter.^{(rate: gorgias.com, 2 Sep 2026)}
• Wider surface. Their AI family spans support, a Shopping Assistant that sells, and voice/SMS add-ons^{(gorgias.com/pricing, 2 Sep 2026)} — Glassdesk deliberately does Tier-1 support deflection only.
• It's Gorgias's own data. Nobody knows the platform's internals better than the platform.

Where Glassdesk is different

• Every reply shows its evidence. Your team sees the exact help-center passages each answer cited and its confidence score, on the ticket itself. Gorgias reports automation performance in aggregate — useful, but aggregate metrics tell you it's usually right; citations let you check this reply.
• Accuracy proven before launch, on your docs. Glassdesk generates an eval suite from your own help center — including prompt-injection attacks — and shows you the score before a single customer sees it. Our own accuracy is tested in public, versioned, not claimed.
• A bill you can predict in January for December. The flat price is the whole point: your best month — peak season, viral spike, launch week — costs the same as your slowest on Starter and Growth, and on Scale it's $0.15 per resolution past its included 3,000. A success meter bills you most exactly when your cash is busiest.
• Escalation on purpose. Below its confidence threshold Glassdesk hands the ticket to a human with context instead of guessing. That's a design position, not a limitation we hide.

⚠️ Rates move. Gorgias's published per-resolution and overage rates vary by plan tier, billing interval and AI product mix — "$1.00 to $2.00 per interaction on monthly plans, and $0.83 to $1.67 on annual" for overage on support-only tiers when we checked.^{(gorgias.com/blog/ai-agent-pricing, 2 Sep 2026)} Always price your own volume on their current page — and ours.

Which should you pick?

• Low ticket volume, want the simplest possible setup, happy to pay per success → the built-in AI Agent is cheaper than us at low volume and needs zero setup. Use it.
• Real volume, want a support-automation bill you can budget, and want to audit what the AI tells your customers → Glassdesk.
• Not sure → our 14-day trial runs in shadow mode first — it drafts, your team reads the drafts and the citations, nothing reaches a customer until you flip it on. You'll know your real automation rate before you pay either of us a dollar you can't predict.