02In build
Agent Cost Governor
Per-task cost ceilings enforced inside the agent loop, with a server-side circuit breaker and nightly reconciliation against the provider bill.
Product details →Product 03 · Packaging — pilots from November 2026
Support-Surge Reliability
Your support agent survived the demo. We make sure it survives the outage, the launch day and the invoice.
The problem
Support is the most-bought agent. Nobody independent checks it.
The vendors sell the agent and the dashboard that grades it. When traffic spikes — an outage, a product launch, a billing run — rate limits and capacity errors do the damage, and the vendor's own dashboard never runs against itself. Rainkernel does not build another support agent; we make the one you bought measurably reliable, and we report cost per resolution the way your CFO wants it.
26.5%
of agent deployments are customer service — the most common use case among 1,340 teams surveyed.
~5%
of production AI requests fail, and about 60% of those failures are rate-limit or capacity errors — a systems problem, not a model problem.
69%
of input tokens in production are system prompts; only 28% of cache-capable calls use caching — the cheapest reliability win there is.
The place nobody else holds
What we publish that the alternatives do not.
Independent measurement of a purchased support agent. The vendors sell the agent and the dashboard that grades it; the open work the market review found is set-up, integration and independent QA for mid-size companies — exactly the layer this package occupies, with cost per resolution reported under the Governor.
From the Lab's October 2026 review of the market — the six open places, and how we earn them.
What it does
Six things the Support-Surge Reliability does that the alternatives do not.
- 01
Surge and rate-limit chaos tests
We replay your busiest hour at 3×, 5× and 10×, inject provider rate limits and timeouts, and record what the customer saw — before a real outage runs the test for you.
- 02
Fallback routing and model tiering
A second provider or a smaller model behind a circuit breaker, with the hand-off tested, so the queue degrades to slower answers rather than silence.
- 03
Prompt and cache audit
System-prompt weight, caching coverage, retrieval payload size — the three places where support agents waste most of their budget and most of their latency.
- 04
Containment and resolution QA harness
An independent evaluation set of your real conversations scored for correct resolution, safe escalation and policy adherence — run by us, against the vendor's agent, every week.
- 05
Cost per resolution under the Governor
Per-conversation budgets and model locks from the Agent Cost Governor, so peak traffic cannot become peak spend.
- 06
Vendor-neutral
Works on Intercom Fin, Sierra, Decagon, Parloa, ElevenLabs voice agents or a custom stack. We do not sell an agent, so we have no reason to grade one kindly.
What you receive
Deliverables
- Surge test report with the customer-visible failure modes
- Fallback routing design and tested hand-off
- Prompt and cache audit with projected savings
- Weekly containment and resolution QA score
- Cost-per-resolution baseline and monthly trend
- Runbook for the next peak
Who buys it
Built for
- Heads of support and CX who already bought an agent and own its numbers
- Operations leaders in SaaS, fintech, telecom, retail and travel with predictable peaks
- Vendors' customers who want an independent number before renewal
Mapped to
Pricing
Published prices. A quote never exceeds the price on this page for the scope on this page.
Pilot — the two-week sprint
$7,500
Surge tests, audit and the first QA baseline on your live agent.
Ask about this tierRun fee — monthly
retainer band
Within the $8,000–15,000 a month Run and Improve band, reported against cost per resolution and containment at peak.
Ask about this tierPrices in USD and exclusive of applicable taxes; Indian clients are invoiced in INR with GST. Window: Packaging November 2026–January 2027 · pilots run as the two-week sprint. Our public commitment for this product: By 31 January 2027: a paid pilot converted to a run fee, with a published containment and cost-per-resolution baseline.
FAQ
Questions we are asked
Our vendor says they handle reliability.
They handle their platform's uptime. Your rate limits, your retrieval sources, your escalation policy and your bill are yours — and the vendor's dashboard grades the vendor's agent. An independent harness is how you know.
Can you build us a support agent instead?
If you have none yet, that is an ordinary Build to Production engagement — six to ten weeks, $35,000–60,000, with the evaluation suite included. Most clients already have one; this package is for them.
Works with
Related products
Talk to us about the Support-Surge Reliability.
A 30-minute call with the engineers who build it, no deck, no charge. If it fits, a fixed-price proposal within 48 hours.