An AI chatbot can cost €200 or €50,000. The difference comes down to a simple question: what does it rely on to answer? A general-purpose chatbot readily makes things up; an assistant connected to your documents gets it right.
The three price levels
- €200 to €1,000: a chatbot set up with a no-code tool and a few questions and answers. Quick, but limited and often unreliable outside the expected questions.
- €1,500 to €5,000: an assistant that answers from your documents (a technique known as RAG), with source citations and handover to a human. This is the right level for most SMEs.
- €10,000 to €40,000 and more: an agent integrated into your information system (ERP, CRM, ticketing), with automated actions.
Usage costs
On top of the setup comes the cost of calls to the AI model’s API: from a few euros to a few tens of euros per month for an SME website. Insist on a configured spending cap: without one, abusive use can drive up the bill.
Five questions to ask your provider
- What does the assistant do when the answer is not in the documents?
- How is answer quality measured before going live?
- Is the data used to train the model?
- Is the usage cost capped?
- Can I add my documents myself?
Our AI assistant for your documentation costs €1,490 excl. VAT, including setup, configuration and testing. This website actually uses a variant of it: describe your project in the instant quote to see the pre-analysis in action.