Cost Controls

Cove AI is billed per reply, not per conversation or per seat. A “reply” is one bot response sent or drafted (in Suggest mode, a draft counts even if an agent rejects it).

Cost is tracked per interaction and visible in the AI agent analytics dashboard.

What drives the cost

Each reply involves:

1. Embedding the customer’s question - converts the text to a vector for retrieval (small, fixed cost).
2. Retrieving relevant knowledge chunks - no LLM involved, just a vector similarity search (negligible).
3. Generating the answer - the main cost, driven by the model you choose and the length of the answer.

Escalated conversations where the bot decides to hand off are cheaper than full answers because the generation step is shorter.

Which model Cove uses

Cove AI runs on the latest Claude models for every app - there is no model setting to manage. We pick and upgrade the models based on accuracy testing on real support conversations.

Keeping costs predictable

A few settings that directly affect per-reply cost:

• Mode - Suggest and Auto generate a reply for every eligible message. Auto when offline generates replies only during off-hours. If you want to limit bot activity, Auto when offline keeps volume lower.
• Max replies before handoff - setting a limit (for example, 5 replies) caps how many bot turns can happen in one conversation, so a long unresolved thread does not rack up charges.
• Confidence threshold - a higher threshold means more escalations and fewer generated replies, which reduces cost. A lower threshold means more answers (and more cost).

Seeing your spend

The Cost hero stat in the AI agent analytics dashboard shows total spend in dollars for the selected date range, with a comparison to the previous period so you can see whether it is trending up or down.

The daily activity chart also shows cost per day alongside answered and escalated counts.