Which AI Support Agents Skip the Sales Call? 4 of 9

Nine tools make up the Support agents category in our index: Zendesk AI Agents, Auto-Respond, Botsify, Ada, Cresta, Crescendo, Decagon, Fin and Sierra. We read what each one actually requires before a buyer sees a working agent or a real price, not the marketing copy. The split is stark: four publish a price and let you sign up today. The other five require a sales conversation before you see either.

The four you can start today

Agent	Entry price	Trial	What you’re actually buying
Fin	$0.99/resolution	14 days, no card	Self-configured software, on your own helpdesk
Zendesk AI Agents	$55+/agent/month (Suite), plus $1.50 to $2.00/resolution overage	14 days, no card	Self-configured software, inside Zendesk’s Suite only
Botsify	$149/month	None stated	A managed build, assembled by Botsify’s own team
Auto-Respond	From $19/month per channel	7 days, per location	Self-configured software

Fin is the cleanest case. It publishes a flat $0.99-per-resolution rate, runs a 14-day free trial with no card required, and layers onto nine helpdesks a team may already run rather than only Intercom’s own.

Zendesk AI Agents is also self-serve to sign up for, on the same 14-day, no-card trial, but the agent itself is not sold standalone. It rides on top of a paid Suite plan starting at $55 per agent per month, and the per-resolution overage above that plan, $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go, is a second meter Zendesk only started publishing on its pricing page in August 2026.

Botsify publishes a flat $149-per-month price for its Done-for-You plan, no sales call needed to see it or pay it. The catch is what that price buys: Botsify’s own team assembles the agent, so self-serve here describes the checkout, not the configuration. Its second product, a White Label tier built for agencies that resell Botsify agents, drops back into the sales-led half of this list; its price is not public.

Auto-Respond is built for a different buyer entirely, local service businesses rather than enterprise support desks, but clears the same bar: per-channel pricing starting at $19 a month for Facebook Lead Ads, a 7-day trial per business location, and an account a business owner creates without talking to anyone.

The five that start with a sales conversation

Ada, Cresta, Crescendo, Decagon and Sierra all require talking to sales before a buyer sees a working product or a number to budget against. None publishes a rate card. Third-party purchase data is the only public figure any of them has: Vendr puts Ada’s median contract at $72,000 a year across 114 tracked purchases, and a separate Vendr figure cited by Fin’s own research team puts Decagon’s median closer to $386,000. Crescendo is the partial exception: it quotes a starting rate of $2.99 per resolution on its own site, but access still runs through what the vendor calls a “proof of value” pilot rather than a signup form.

Cresta has one further exception worth naming precisely. Agent Assist alone, a narrower slice of Cresta’s platform, is listed on AWS Marketplace at $150,000 a year for one channel, a fixed 12-month, non-cancellable commitment. That is a real, purchasable listing with a public price, and buying it does not itself require a sales call. It is also the single largest number on this page, for a fraction of what Cresta sells. The rest of the platform, the AI Agent, Conversation Intelligence and the newer Knowledge Agent, stays fully custom-quoted. We count Cresta on the sales-led side because that is true of the product a support team is actually shopping for.

What the line actually tracks

Price is not what separates these two groups. Botsify’s $149 a month is the cheapest number on this page; Decagon and Sierra, both funded past nine figures, sit at the other end, and neither states a number before a call happens. The line that matters is whether a prospective buyer can reach a working answer, either a live trial or a firm price, without first being qualified by a sales team. Fin, Zendesk and Auto-Respond clear that bar outright. Botsify clears it for price, though not for a self-configured product. Ada, Cresta, Crescendo, Decagon and Sierra do not clear it at all.

That split tracks who each product is built for more than it tracks quality. The five sales-led names sell into enterprise procurement, where a multi-week pilot and a named account team are an expected part of the sale, not friction to remove. Duolingo and ClassPass, two of Decagon’s own published case studies, are large consumer brands running high-volume deployments that were never going to be configured by one person off a pricing page. The four self-serve names are built to be evaluated by one person before a contract exists at all, which is also why three of the four, Fin, Zendesk and Auto-Respond, offer a genuine trial rather than only a published price.

Method

Checked 24 August 2026 against the 9 listings Published in our Support agents category on that date. A tool counted as self-serve only where a prospective buyer can create an account or see a firm price without first speaking to a salesperson; a published starting rate that still requires a sales-led pilot to activate, as with Crescendo, does not clear that bar. Pricing, trial terms and access model are each read from the tool’s own listing on this index, sourced in turn from the vendor’s own pricing and signup pages. Third-party contract figures for Ada and Decagon come from Vendr’s tracked-purchase data. For the full decision tree across all nine, including which one fits a specific job, see our AI support-agent comparison guide.