Customer Support
Canonical scenario page for high-volume conversational support workloads.
Customer Support Chatbot (≈50k MAU)
Stable usage patternA customer-facing support assistant handling FAQs, account issues, and basic troubleshooting at scale.
Recommended setup
Model: GPT-5 Mini
Strong balance of quality and cost for customer-facing text, predictable latency under sustained load.
Monthly cost (directional)
Expected
$12,000–$15,000 / mo
Spiky / peak usage
$22,000–$26,000 / mo
Typical failure modes
- Context waste grows silently as conversations extend.
- Retries amplify cost during incidents.
- Output length creep increases spend over time.
When this breaks
Becomes inefficient when conversations exceed ~8–10 turns or require large knowledge injections.
How experienced teams mitigate this
- Cap conversation length and escalate to humans early
- Trim system and instruction prompts aggressively
- Treat retries as a cost multiplier