Customer Support Chatbot — 50,000 Tickets/Month
LLM cost for an AI-first customer support system handling 50,000 support tickets per month.
Assumptions
- 50,000 tickets/month
- 3 turns avg per ticket (shorter than general chat)
- System prompt: 2,000 tokens (product knowledge)
- Customer message: 200 tokens avg
- Response: 350 tokens avg
- No RAG (knowledge embedded in prompt)
Base model: GPT-5 mini — $0.25/M input · $2/M output · 2026-08-19
Cost breakdown by component
How to cut this cost by 50%+
These are estimates based on typical patterns. Enter your specific token counts and volume for a precise calculation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does an AI customer support chatbot cost per ticket?
With GPT-5 mini and prompt caching, roughly $0.003–0.006 per ticket at 50k/month volume. The biggest variable is system prompt length — a 5,000-token knowledge base costs 2.5× more per turn than a 2,000-token prompt.
Should I use GPT-5.4 or a cheaper model for customer support?
Start with GPT-5 mini or Claude Haiku 4.5. Customer support has high volume and relatively simple task requirements (FAQ matching, issue routing, empathetic responses). Frontier models cost 10× more with marginal quality improvement for these tasks.
Pricing verified 2026-08-20. All figures are estimates with stated assumptions. See methodology.