AI automation has a transparency problem. Very few agencies publish prices, and the ones that do use ranges so wide they help nobody decide anything. The result is that some companies pay double what the work is worth, and others walk away from a project that would have cost far less than they feared. So here are the numbers, the things that move them, and how to work out your own payback rather than taking ours on faith.
Price bands by solution type
These are full implementation prices: discovery, build, integration, deployment and handover. Fixed price agreed before starting, no hourly billing, no variable surprises.
| Solution | Price band | Time to live |
| FAQ chatbot (one channel, no integrations) | $2,500 – $4,000 | 1-2 weeks |
| Conversational AI chatbot (multi-channel, CRM) | $4,000 – $7,500 | 3-5 weeks |
| Automated cold outreach system (full stack) | $3,500 – $6,000 | 2-3 weeks |
| AI voice agent (inbound or outbound calls) | $4,000 – $6,500 | 2-3 weeks |
| Automated reporting dashboard | $2,500 – $4,500 | 1-2 weeks |
| Full system (2-3 integrated solutions) | $8,000 – $13,000 | 4-8 weeks |
The five factors that move the number
A chatbot can be $2,500 or $7,500. Same category, three times the price. The difference is almost always one of these:
- Number of integrations. Every connection to a CRM, calendar, ERP or legacy system is development time. A well-documented modern CRM is quick; a bespoke internal system that nobody has touched in five years is not.
- Flow complexity. A linear three-step flow is fast. Ten conditional branches with business rules that only two people in the company fully understand is where the hours go.
- Number of channels. Web, WhatsApp, email, voice. Each additional channel is a separate implementation, not a checkbox. Adding a messaging channel to an existing web chatbot typically adds $600-1,800.
- Data quality. If your customer records are clean and in one place, enrichment and routing are cheap. If they are spread across three spreadsheets and an inbox, the cleanup is part of the project and it is not free.
- Whether it has to survive contact with real volume. A demo that works for one user and a system that handles a Monday morning are different pieces of engineering: error handling, retries, rate limits and monitoring are most of the difference.
How to work out your own payback
Do not take anyone's ROI claim at face value, including ours. The arithmetic is simple enough to do yourself in two minutes:
- Count the hours. Pick one process and estimate, honestly, how many hours a week your team spends on it. Ask the person who actually does it, not the person who manages them.
- Put a cost on the hour. Fully loaded, not salary divided by hours. Add employer costs and the opportunity cost of what that person is not doing.
- Multiply by 46 working weeks. That is your annual cost for that one process.
- Divide the project price by the annual saving. That is your payback in years. Anything under six months is a straightforward yes. Anything over eighteen months deserves a hard look at whether the process should exist at all.
What the cost looks like after launch
The build price is not the whole picture, and any agency that presents it as such is being economical with the truth. Ongoing costs fall into three buckets:
- Platform and model usage. Usually the smallest line. For context, an email classification system we built for a transport marketplace in Europe runs at roughly €0.21 a month in model costs at 95% accuracy. Voice is the expensive exception: per-minute call costs are real and worth modelling before you commit.
- Maintenance. Things you integrate with change their APIs. Budget for someone to notice and fix that, whether it is us on a retainer or your own team with the documentation we hand over.
- Iteration. The first version is never the best version. The systems that produce compounding returns are the ones somebody keeps tuning against real results.
Red flags that you are about to overpay
- Hourly billing on a scoped project. It transfers all the estimation risk to you and rewards slowness.
- A quote with no written scope. If the deliverable is not specific enough to argue about, it is not specific enough to pay for.
- No access to what was built. If you cannot see the configuration, you cannot leave, and you will be charged accordingly forever.
- A percentage of revenue or savings. It sounds aligned and it almost never is, because the measurement is controlled by the party being paid.
- Refusal to name what the ongoing cost will be. Nobody can predict it exactly. Everybody competent can give you a range.
What we do
Fixed price, agreed before we start, with the scope written down. The 30-minute audit is free and you leave it with a closed number and an estimate of what you would save. If the arithmetic does not work, we will tell you that instead of selling you something.