How Much Does an AI Chatbot or Automation Cost?

Subscriptions, custom builds and the running costs in between. Real prices for chatbots, automation platforms and AI models, and where our packages sit.

An AI chatbot can cost $20 a month or $150,000 to build, and both prices are real. The difference is whether you rent a finished product, assemble one from platforms, or pay someone to build it around your business. Each path has a build cost and a running cost, and the running cost is the one most quotes leave vague. This guide prices all of them from published rate cards and shows where our AI and automation packages sit.

Three ways to buy it

Rent a chatbot. A subscription tool you train on your site and FAQs. Fast to start, limited to what the vendor built.
Assemble it from platforms. An automation tool such as Zapier or n8n, connected to an AI model and your existing apps. Flexible, and someone has to set it up and keep it running.
Have it built. A custom assistant or agent designed around one process in your business, with its own integrations, guardrails and monitoring.

Renting: what the subscriptions cost

Intercom's pricing page charges $19, $85 or $132 per seat a month for its helpdesk plans, plus $0.99 for every outcome its Fin AI agent handles. Zapier's pricing includes a chatbot product at $13.33 a month for five bots or $66.67 for twenty, both billed annually.

Vendor surveys of the wider market land in the same place. Denser, which sells chatbot software, puts a typical small business chatbot at $19 to $89 a month with $0 to $2,000 of setup, and mid-market tools at $100 to $500 a month. Watch the per-outcome fees: at $0.99 each, a thousand Fin outcomes a month add $990 to the bill.

Assembling: what the platforms cost

Zapier: free for 100 tasks a month, then plans starting at $19.99 and $69 a month on its pricing page, priced by tasks.
n8n: cloud plans at €20 and €50 a month billed annually, priced by workflow executions, or self-hosted on your own server.
The model itself, billed by usage. Anthropic's API prices list Sonnet 5.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

Model usage is usually the smallest line. As a worked example, assume a support conversation sends about 4,000 tokens to the model and gets about 600 back. At the Sonnet 5.5 prices above that is $0.008 in and $0.006 out, about 1.4 cents a conversation, or roughly $14 for a thousand. Your numbers will differ with longer documents or chattier customers, but the order of magnitude holds for most small business use.

Building: what custom work costs

Published ranges for custom builds come mostly from companies that sell chatbots, and they run high. Quickchat's cost guide puts a typical simple custom bot at $10,000 to $30,000 and a typical custom AI bot at $75,000 to $150,000, with annual maintenance of $5,000 to $15,000. Denser prices each custom API integration at $5,000 to $25,000.

Those figures describe large teams building for large companies. A small business usually needs something narrower: one assistant that knows the business, or one workflow that removes a daily chore. Scoped that tightly, a custom build costs a fraction of those ranges, and the running cost can be lower than a subscription because you pay the model and the server directly.

Price the whole first year: build, platform, model usage, hosting and the hours someone spends keeping it right.

What moves the price

How many systems it touches. Answering questions from your website is one job. Reading your calendar, writing to your CRM and emailing a quote is four.
How much it may decide on its own. Every action an agent can take without a person needs guardrails, logging and a way to undo it.
Where your data lives. A subscription keeps your documents on the vendor's servers. A self-hosted build keeps them on yours, at the cost of running a server.
Volume. Per-seat and per-outcome pricing grows with your business. Usage-priced models grow too, usually much more slowly.
Maintenance. Models change, your prices change, your FAQ changes. Someone has to update the assistant, or it starts giving last year's answers.

What we charge

AI Roadmap Sprint, $500: a discovery call, an audit of where AI saves time or money and where it does not, one working proof of concept, and a written roadmap with costs.
AI Assistant, $1,800: an assistant built on Claude or OpenAI and trained on your content, on your site or in Slack or WhatsApp, with guardrails, human handoff, lead capture and 30 days of tuning.
Custom AI Agent, $4,500: an agent built around one business process, integrated with your CRM, calendar, email and forms, self-hosted on a VPS, with logging, a monitoring dashboard and 30 days of support.
Automation Retainer, $750 a month: up to five custom workflows across CRM, ads, email and forms, monitored and maintained.
AI Partner, $1,500 a month: continuous work on assistants, agents and workflows on a self-hosted n8n instance, with one or two new automations shipped a month.

The one-time builds sit well under the custom ranges vendors publish, because each one is scoped to a single assistant or a single process. The AI Partner plan runs your workflows on a self-hosted n8n instance, so there are no per-task platform fees on top.

Two examples of the narrow kind of system that pays off. My Challah Dealer's order form drops every order into a Google Sheet and sends two emails, a confirmation to the customer and an alert to the owner, with no one copying anything by hand. Scout, our own product, polls six listing sources four times a day and scores every listing against a client's profile with the evidence written out, so a person reviews a short list instead of six websites.

Three example budgets

Answering the same ten questions on your website: a subscription such as Zapier's chatbot plan at $160 a year, or our AI Assistant at $1,800 once, trained on your own content, plus model usage of about $14 per thousand conversations at the worked example above.
Stopping a daily copy-and-paste job, such as orders into a spreadsheet: an automation platform from $19.99 a month on Zapier or €20 a month on n8n, set up by you or delivered as the working proof of concept in our $500 AI Roadmap Sprint.
Handling new leads end to end, from form to CRM to a first reply: our Custom AI Agent at $4,500, self-hosted on a server you own. If you want us to run that server, our VPS & Self-Hosted care plan is $150 a month, with the server billed at the provider's rate.

Before you pay for anything

Write down the one task you want to stop doing, and how many times a week it happens.
Ask for the full first-year cost: build, platform, model usage, hosting and maintenance hours.
Ask where your documents and customer data will be stored, and who can see them.
Ask what happens when the assistant is unsure: does it hand off to a person, and how?
Ask who updates it when your prices, hours or policies change.

If the honest answer to the first question is "not often", you may not need AI at all, and a good studio will tell you so. Our post on AI builds that need business systems goes deeper on that test.

See the AI & Automation packagesPublished prices, from $500