How much does an AI chatbot cost a small business?
A custom AI chatbot for a small business typically costs £750–£5,000 to build, plus £20–£150 a month to run. Off-the-shelf tools start around £30/month but need setting up. The build cost depends almost entirely on how many systems it has to connect to — a chatbot answering questions from your website is cheap; one that books appointments in your calendar and reads your CRM is not.
Nobody publishes prices for this, which makes it very hard to tell whether a quote is fair. Here is what the numbers actually look like.
The three cost layers
Every chatbot has three costs, and quotes often only mention the first.
1. The build. A one-off fee for designing it, training it on your information and putting it live. This is where the range is widest.
2. The running cost. Every message costs a fraction of a penny in AI usage, plus hosting. For most small businesses this lands between £20 and £150 a month.
3. The maintenance. Your prices change, your opening hours change, you add a service. Someone has to keep the chatbot's knowledge current, or it starts confidently telling customers things that stopped being true months ago.
What drives the build price
The single biggest factor is how many systems it has to talk to.
| Type | Typical build | What it does | |---|---|---| | Answers questions | £750–£1,500 | Replies using your website, FAQs and documents | | Captures leads | £1,500–£3,000 | Above, plus qualifying enquiries and emailing you | | Takes actions | £3,000–£8,000+ | Above, plus booking appointments, checking stock, updating your CRM |
A chatbot that only answers questions is genuinely straightforward. One that does things — books the appointment, raises the ticket, checks the order — has to connect safely to live systems, handle failures, and never double-book. That's real engineering, and it's where the cost sits.
The cheap option, honestly assessed
Tools like Intercom, Tidio and Chatbase start at roughly £30–£100 a month and you can set them up yourself in an afternoon.
They're a reasonable choice if your needs are simple. The catch is that "set up yourself" means you write the knowledge base, you test the awkward questions, and you keep it current. Most owners do this enthusiastically for two weeks and then never touch it again. A neglected chatbot is worse than no chatbot, because customers trust it and it's wrong.
Be honest about whether you'll maintain it. If you won't, pay someone to.
The costs nobody mentions
- Content preparation. If your information lives in three people's heads and a shared drive, someone has to write it down first. This is often the biggest hidden time cost.
- Testing the awkward questions. "Do you take dogs?" "Can I get a refund after 40 days?" The edge cases are where chatbots embarrass you.
- Handover to a human. A chatbot that can't say "let me get someone" and actually do it will lose you customers. Budget for this properly.
Is it worth it?
The rough test: count the enquiries you get outside working hours, and be honest about how many go cold before you reply. If you're losing even two jobs a month to slow replies, a £1,500 chatbot pays for itself quickly.
If your enquiries are low-volume and high-value — you get six a month and each is worth thousands — a chatbot is usually the wrong investment. Answer those yourself. The right tool for you might be automation behind the scenes instead.
That's the question worth asking first: not "how much does a chatbot cost", but "what is slow response actually costing me?" If the answer is "not much", spend the money elsewhere.