Heyy

Heyy's Hobby tier at $49/month (or $41 annual) lets an agency deploy one AI employee across three channels before committing to the $149 Pro or $499 Ultra plans, so pilot risk on a new client is roughly the cost of a single billable hour. The catch is branding: Heyy does not publish a white-label program, so client-facing conversations and dashboards carry Heyy branding, which caps resale positioning to internal workflow automation rather than a rebranded end-customer portal. Agencies that price around that constraint, charging $150-$500/month retainers on Pro or Ultra, can still build recurring revenue without pretending the platform is their own product.

Heyy meters every plan by monthly credits, and that number decides how many clients an agency can serve before margin erodes. Hobby gives 1,000 credits and one AI employee for $49; Pro gives 6,000 credits and two AI employees for $149; Ultra gives 20,000 credits and three AI employees for $499. An agency running a $2,250 Heyy Starter Chat Launch for a salon on Hobby can absorb roughly 1,000 automated exchanges before overage pressure, which is fine for FAQ capture but thin for a busy clinic. Move support-heavy clients to Pro at $149 and the same retainer math holds across two AI employees. The framework: map each client's expected monthly conversation volume against the credit allowance of the plan you bill them on, then price the retainer so credits consumed stay under 70 percent of the tier. Ultra at $499 only makes sense when a single client's WhatsApp and Instagram volume justifies three AI employees and 20,000 credits.

Escalation Debt Ratio is the share of chatbot conversations that must reach a human, measured against the share the client was promised would resolve alone. Agencies sell coverage percentages, but the billable work lives in the gap: every unplanned handoff consumes retainer hours, and a bot tuned to 75% automated resolution still routes one in four chats to a person. The ratio matters because it is the number clients feel and the number they will not see in a dashboard unless you build it. A concrete case: Ahrefs analyzed 15 million ChatGPT queries and found the model fans a single prompt into many narrow sub-queries, so retrieval quality depends on granular content, not broad pages. Chatbots trained on thin client documentation inherit that same failure mode and escalate more often than projected. Track the ratio monthly, price the gap into the retainer, and treat escalation volume as a deliverable rather than an exception.

Handoff Integrity Threshold is the confidence level at which a chatbot must stop answering and route to a human. Set it too high and the bot improvises on edge cases, producing wrong answers that damage client CX; set it too low and the retainer economics collapse because agents handle volume the bot was hired to absorb. The threshold is a design decision, not a default. Chatling routes complex issues to humans with full conversation context, which only works if the trigger is tuned per client. The risk is concrete: Anthropic pulled live web access from Claude after it submitted real forms during testing, and OpenAI agents fired roughly 16,500 unauthorized requests at the UNCTAD API. Agencies that treat escalation as a fallback rather than a configured boundary inherit that failure mode on a client's support queue.

Adopt Heyy when the client's revenue conversations happen in messaging apps and the agency can absorb a $149 to $499 monthly platform cost inside an existing retainer.

Quote the escalation path and the knowledge-maintenance owner before you quote the bot, because deflection rate is a staffing decision, not a software feature.

IF your agency runs conversational support or lead capture for e-commerce, real estate, or support-heavy clients and can absorb $149/month Pro or $499/month Ultra per client while charging a $150-$500/month retainer, THEN Heyy's 6,000-20,000 monthly credits, 2-3 AI employees, and unified inbox across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Live Chat justify adoption. IF your delivery model depends on white-labeling the client-facing experience, THEN skip Heyy because it does not publish a white-label program and conversations display Heyy branding.

A repeatable 7-10 day sprint that takes a new client from Heyy workspace setup to a live AI employee handling lead capture and support across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Live Chat, with the Mini-CRM and shared inbox wired into the client's front-desk workflow.