PricingHow much does an AI chatbot cost?
9 minute read
Updated
For a chatbot built around your business, most small and mid-sized projects land between roughly 1,500 and 15,000 dollars, and the reason that range is so wide is the only thing on this page worth understanding.
The same three words, AI chatbot, describe a widget that answers five questions from a page of text, and a system that looks up a live order, checks your calendar, books an appointment, and writes the result into your CRM. Those are not the same product, and a single number covering both is either meaningless or it is bait.
So rather than give you one figure, the tables below are what the market actually publishes, read straight off the pricing pages of the companies selling it. Then we explain what pushes a project to the bottom or the top of each range, so you can place your own before anyone quotes you.
What actually moves your number
Almost all of the variation between one quote and another comes down to a handful of things. If you know where you sit on each, you know roughly what kind of project you have.
- Whether it only answers, or also acts. Answering questions is the cheap half. Booking, looking up an order, or changing a record means touching live systems, and that is where the work is.
- How many systems it connects to. Each integration is real engineering. One calendar is straightforward. A calendar, a CRM, and an inventory system that disagree with each other is a different job.
- How many channels. A website widget is one build. Adding WhatsApp, a phone line, and your support inbox multiplies the surface that has to be tested.
- How much of your knowledge is already written down. If your policies live in one person's head, someone has to get them out, and that is time nobody enjoys paying for.
- How badly a wrong answer hurts. A gift shop can absorb an occasional mistake. A clinic or a law firm cannot, so the testing and the guardrails are heavier.
- Languages. One system serving several languages consistently costs more than one that serves your own.
The two shapes of pricing you will meet
The first is a subscription tool you configure yourself. You pay monthly, often by conversation or by seat, and you do the setup. The second is a system built for your business, quoted as a project, usually with a monthly amount for hosting and upkeep.
We build the second kind, and we will still tell you plainly: if what you need is a widget answering a dozen common questions on a simple website, a subscription tool is very likely the right answer and cheaper than anything we would quote. Buy that instead. Come back when it starts costing you customers because it cannot see your calendar or your order data.
The moment a business genuinely needs the second kind is usually the moment the answer has to be true rather than generic. Looking up this customer's order. Offering the times you are actually free. Applying the policy you actually wrote.
The costs most quotes leave out
A build price is not the whole number, and a quote that only shows the build price is not being straight with you.
- Running cost. The system is hosted somewhere and it calls a language model. Both are metered. Someone pays that every month, and if it is not in the quote it is coming later.
- Maintenance. Your prices change, your policies change, and the underlying models change under you. A system nobody maintains does not stay still, it drifts.
- The cost of being wrong. An unmaintained system quietly giving out last year's returns policy is more expensive than the maintenance would have been.
- Your own time. Every build needs someone on your side to answer questions and approve the tone. It is usually less than people fear, but it is never zero.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Quotes in this market are hard to compare because they rarely describe the same thing. These questions make them comparable, and they work on us as well as on anyone else.
- What exactly is in scope, written down, and what happens when I ask for something outside it?
- What does it cost to run each month, including hosting and model usage, and who pays that?
- Who maintains it after launch, how often, and what does that cost?
- What happens when it does not know an answer? A vendor without a clear answer here is selling you a confident guesser.
- Where does my data live, and who can see it?
- What do I own at the end, and what happens if I leave?
Why the same job gets quoted three very different numbers
Send the same brief to three vendors and the quotes will not be close. That is not always someone trying it on. Usually they have each quoted a different job, because the brief left room to.
The first has priced a widget that answers from your existing text. The second has priced that plus a connection to your calendar. The third has priced the version that survives a wrong answer in front of a customer, with testing, guardrails and a handover path. All three are honest. Only one of them is what you meant.
The way to make the quotes comparable is to fix the parts that move: how many systems it touches, how many channels it answers on, who writes the knowledge, and what happens when it does not know. Once those are written down, the numbers converge and the differences that remain are real.
- A quote with no monthly figure is not cheaper, it is incomplete. Something has to pay for hosting and model usage.
- A quote much lower than the others usually excludes the integration work, which is where the effort actually is.
- A quote much higher is not automatically padded. Ask what it includes that the others do not, then decide whether you need it.
A worked example, so the range means something
Take a dental practice with one location. They want the website to answer opening hours, insurance questions and parking, and they want it to book into their real calendar rather than take a message.
The answering half is straightforward: the questions repeat, the answers are already written down somewhere, and none of it is sensitive. On its own, that is the cheapest kind of project there is.
The booking half is what changes the price. Now something has to read live availability, hold a slot, write the appointment back, and behave correctly when two people book the same time. That is a build, and it sits in the first row of the agency table above rather than the tool table.
The same practice asking for the same thing across a phone line, a website and WhatsApp, in two languages, with a rule that anything clinical goes straight to a human, is a different project again, and it moves up a row.
The cheapest sensible way to start
If your budget is genuinely tight, do not start with the build. Start with a subscription tool, point it at your existing pages, and watch what people actually ask it for a month.
That month is worth more than any quote. You find out which questions repeat, which ones the tool cannot answer, and whether the thing costing you customers is information or action. Most owners are surprised: they assumed they needed booking, and the log says four in five questions were about hours and price.
If the log says information, keep the tool and spend nothing more. If the log says action, you now have a specification written by your own customers, which is the cheapest brief anyone will ever hand a vendor, and it will take a chunk out of the build cost because nobody has to guess.
Built for you, where somebody else does the work
This is the other half of the market and the one people struggle to price, because almost nobody publishes it. These are the ranges reported across agency pricing surveys for small and mid-sized businesses, not enterprise work.
| Scope | Typical one-off build | Typical monthly after launch |
|---|---|---|
| One job, one system | 1,500 to 4,000 dollars | 500 to 1,500 dollars |
| Several jobs, three to five systems connected | 4,000 to 15,000 dollars | 1,000 to 3,500 dollars |
| Company-wide, many systems, heavy compliance | 25,000 dollars and up | 3,000 dollars and up |
Checked . Prices move, so verify before you rely on them.
How we handle it
We quote on a call, once we know which of the things above apply to you. The quote is fixed and in writing within one business day, the scope is written down, and the price does not move afterwards unless you ask for something new.
We do not bill by the hour, because hourly billing pays us for being slow. And if the honest answer is that an off-the-shelf tool solves your problem, we will say so on the call rather than sell you a build you do not need.
Still not sure which applies to you?
Fifteen minutes on a call is usually enough to settle it, and we will tell you if the answer is something we do not sell.
Book a callFAQ
Common follow-up questions.
Ready to put AI to work?
A free 15-minute AI consultation. We learn your business, you learn whether this is a fit, and your quote is confirmed on the call.