Customer support cost calculator
What do repeat questions cost you?
See what answering customer questions by hand costs you each month, and how much of it goes on the same repeat questions.
Your numbers
The starting values are examples, not benchmarks. Change them to match your business.
Answering by hand costs you
$1,250/month
41.7 hours a month, $15,000 a year.
- Spent on repeat questions
- $750/mo
- 300 questions, 25 hours
- Wait until morning
- 150 questions/mo
- Arrive when nobody is around to reply
Gensite Starter covers this volume for $29/month.
That leaves about $721 a month ($8,652 a year) that currently goes on questions your website already answers. The agent replies 24/7 from your own pages and hands the tricky ones to your team.
Based on about 1,000 messages a month (each question and reply count as 2).
No card needed. Live in under 10 minutes.
What the numbers mean
Simple arithmetic on your own inputs, worked out in your browser.
Hours and cost
Every question takes someone a few minutes: read it, find the answer, write the reply. Questions × minutes gives the hours a month; hours × hourly cost gives the monthly figure.
Five minutes sounds small. At 500 questions a month it's over 40 hours, a full working week of someone's time.
Repeat questions
Pricing, shipping, cancellations, service areas. When the answer is already on your website, the person replying isn't solving anything new; they're finding a page and retyping it.
That share can be handed off without losing quality. A billing dispute or an unusual request still deserves a person.
After-hours questions
Questions sent in the evening, at the weekend or from another time zone wait until someone is back. A visitor comparing three options at 11 PM won't always wait.
That lost sale never shows up as a support cost, which is why it's counted separately.
Ways to bring the number down
- 01
Write down your top questions
Go through a month of messages and list the ten that come up most. If any aren't answered on your site, add them to a clear FAQ page.
- 02
Use saved replies
Most inbox and help desk tools let you save answers to common questions, so replying takes seconds instead of minutes.
- 03
Make answers easy to find
Link your FAQ, pricing and shipping pages from the places people get stuck, like checkout and the contact page.
- 04
Let your website answer
An AI agent like Gensite reads your site and answers visitors from your own pages, 24/7, in their language. It shows the page each answer came from and passes leads and anything it can't answer to your team.
Common questions
The answers to what people ask most about this tool.
How long does setup take?
Under 10 minutes. Paste your URL, Gensite learns your pages, then you add one script tag to your site.
From gensite.io/#how-it-worksAsk our agent instead
The chat on this page runs on Gensite and answers from our own website. It's the same agent you'd put on yours.
Questions per month multiplied by minutes per question gives the hours spent answering. Hours multiplied by the hourly cost gives the monthly cost. The repeat-question cost is that total multiplied by the share of questions your website already answers.
Use what an hour of the person answering really costs: their wage plus taxes, benefits and software. Customer support reps commonly cost a business somewhere between $20 and $50 an hour. If you answer questions yourself, use what an hour of your time is worth to the business.
Anything whose answer is already written down somewhere on your site: prices, plan limits, shipping times, return rules, opening hours, service areas, setup steps. If you could reply by pasting a link to one of your own pages, it's a repeat question.
Add up a typical month across your inbox, live chat, contact form and phone. Most help desk and chat tools show a monthly conversation count. If you have nothing tracked, count one week by hand and multiply by four.
Each visitor question and the agent's reply count as two messages. The calculator uses that to pick the smallest Gensite plan that covers your monthly volume.
No. Gensite answers the questions your website already covers, at any hour, and hands anything it can't answer to your team as a lead or a support ticket with the full chat attached. Your team spends its time on the conversations that need a person.
Yes. There's no sign-up, and you can copy a link to share your results with your team.
Ready when you are
Stop answering the same
queries twice.
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