What an AI chatbot actually costs a UK small business

The honest answer is that nobody can tell you what a chatbot costs without knowing what you want it to do — and you should be a bit suspicious of anyone who quotes you a number before asking. What we can do is explain exactly what you are paying for, so that when you do get quotes you can tell a fair one from a bad one.

There are three separate costs, and vendors are not always careful about telling you which is which.

1. The one-off setup

Setup is the work of taking a generic chatbot engine and turning it into something that actually knows your business. In practice that means:

• Training it on your website copy, service pages and prices
• Feeding in any PDFs, brochures or price lists you have
• Configuring your call-out area, opening hours and emergency policy
• Setting the tone — formal or friendly, careful or confident, brief or detailed
• Running sample conversations for you to review and correct
• Installing it on your site (a script tag on most platforms)

What moves this number is mostly scope: how many roles the bot plays, how many sources it has to learn from, and whether it needs to talk to anything else. A single-role bot trained on an existing website is at the cheap end. A bot that quotes from your price list, books into your diary and hands off to your CRM is a different job entirely.

If someone offers to set up a chatbot for a token amount, they are either giving you a generic template with no real training on your business, or the real cost is buried in the monthly. Ask what happens if you cancel after month one.

2. The monthly fee

This covers two things that are worth separating:

Hosting and upkeep — where the bot runs, plus keeping it current as your prices and services change. A good monthly fee includes some retraining. A bad one charges you every time you want to fix a wrong answer.

AI provider fees — nearly every modern chatbot runs on OpenAI or Anthropic underneath, and somebody has to pay them. This should sit on a subscription in your own account, billed to you directly. If a vendor is reselling it to you at a markup, that is worth knowing about, and it is a fair question to ask outright.

3. The costs that hide

Three things worth checking before you sign anything:

1. Per-conversation pricing. Some vendors charge a few pence per conversation. It sounds trivial and it is fine at low volume, but it means your bill grows exactly when the bot is working well. A fixed monthly fee protects you from that.

2. Add-on fees for basics. Transcript emails, retraining, connecting to a booking tool — some vendors class these as premium features and bill separately. Ask what is in the base fee, in writing.

3. Bots only the vendor can edit. If you cannot log in and see the training data, you have no say at all when things go wrong, and no way to take it elsewhere. Insist on a dashboard you own.

How to work out whether it is worth it for you

Forget the industry averages — the sum is simple enough to do on your own numbers:

• What is one job worth to you? Not turnover; the profit on one average job.
• How many enquiries do you currently miss? Evenings, weekends, and while you are on a job with your hands full. Most people underestimate this. Check your missed calls for a fortnight.
• How many of those would a bot realistically have caught? Some, not all. Assume the pessimistic end.

Then compare the annual cost of the chatbot against the profit on the jobs it would need to save. For a trade where one job is worth several hundred pounds, the break-even is usually a small number of jobs a year. For a business where the average sale is a fiver, it is a much harder sum, and we would tell you so.

The other half of that sum matters too: if your website gets very little traffic, a chatbot has nothing to work with. It cannot capture enquiries that never arrive. If that is you, spend the money on getting found first — the bot will still be there in six months.

What we actually charge

Consulting is the part with a published price, because it does not vary: £150 for four hours, £250 for eight, £400 for sixteen. You can see it on the pricing page and buy it without talking to us.

Chatbot builds we quote after a free call, and we would rather explain why than pretend that is evasive. The honest reason is that "a chatbot" covers everything from a single-role bot answering six questions to something that quotes, books and syncs with your diary. Publishing one number would mean either overcharging the simple cases or bait-and-switching the complex ones. You get a fixed price in writing before anything starts, and it does not move unless you change what you asked for.

If you would rather see one working before any of that, there is a free 30-day trial with no card required.