Enterprise support chat pricing example
This example shows pricing for enterprise customer support chat with 50,000 customers, with 5 conversations per customer, per month. It uses Ably's per-message and per-minute billing model.
Scenario
- Customers: 50,000
- Conversations: 5 per customer/month (250,000 total)
- Per conversation: Average 20 minutes long with 20 messages exchanged
Total cost: $52.50/month
Cost breakdown
The following breakdown shows the cost of connections, channels and messages in this scenario.
How messages are counted
Every chat message counts as a billable message. Messages are counted when they're sent to Ably and when they're delivered to users. Usage is billed in increments of one million messages, rounded up.
A support agent sends one message to a customer it equals three messages (one sent to Ably + one received by the customer + one echoed back to the agent).
In 1:1 chat, there's no fan-out - each message goes to one recipient.
Messages generated by this scenario
| Feature | Calculation | Messages |
|---|---|---|
| Messages sent | 250,000 conversations × 20 messages | 5,000,000 |
| Messages delivered | 250,000 conversations × 20 messages × 2 | 10,000,000 |
| Total messages | 5,000,000 + 10,000,000 | 15,000,000 |
| Total message cost | 15,000,000 × $2.50/M | $37.50 |
How connection and channel minutes are counted
Both connection minutes and channel minutes are rounded up per million minutes used.
Connection minutes
Connection minutes are billed based on how long users remain connected.
| Item | Calculation | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Customer connections | 250,000 conversations × 20 mins | 5,000,000 mins |
| Agent connections | 250,000 conversations × 20 mins | 5,000,000 mins |
| Total | 5,000,000 + 5,000,000 | 10,000,000 mins |
| Cost | 10,000,000 mins × $1.00/M | $10.00 |
Channel minutes
Channel minutes are billed based on how long channels are active for.
| Item | Calculation | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Channel minutes | 250,000 conversations × 20 mins | 5,000,000 mins |
| Cost | 5,000,000 mins × $1.00/M | $5.00 |
Total cost
The total monthly cost of this support chat.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Messages | $37.50 |
| Connection minutes | $10.00 |
| Channel minutes | $5.00 |
| Total | $52.50/month |