How Much Does a Chatbot Cost? (2024)

The monthly fee you pay may range from $15 to $1,000. Some of the functionalities you’ll get include:

• Full customization and templates
• Conversational AI and machine learning 
• Chatbot statistics
• Unlimited active bots
• Tidio chatbot conditions depending on your business needs
• Unlimited reachable unique visitors
• Visitor’s information
• Variety of chatbot types
• Live view of site’s visitors and pages visited

And obviously, the more you pay the more functionalities you’ll get. For example, here’s what Octane offers:

And this is what Chatbot will give you:

Enterprise chatbots

Now—

There are also providers such as Ada, Imperson, and Genesys DX that specialize in serving large organizations by offering enterprise chatbots.

What you can expect from them are some great additional features, such as:

• Booking meetings
• Paying directly on the chatbot
• Deep dialogue context technology
• Multi-language chatbots
• Video and interactive content 
• Audit log 
• A personal key account manager
• Custom SSO (single sign-on)

But they all come at a price. Here’s the chatbot price list from Engati:

As you can see, to find out what their pricing for the enterprise plan is, you need to contact their representative. But you can expect it to be a four-digit number. Just to give you an example, Service Hub Enterprise costs $1,200/mo. 

At the end of the day, what you choose will depend entirely on your organization’s needs and willingness to spend.

For more details and information on features, read our article discussing the 14 best chatbot platforms. 

That’s all from the subscription-based chatbot pricing. However, you have to remember that the majority of well-known examples of chatbots used by popular brands are usually developed from scratch. So, let’s find out what the chatbot development costs if your company wants to do it on its own.

In-house developer

If you decide to develop a chatbot in-house rather than rely on an external platform, the costs will be much higher initially.

So, how much does it cost to develop a chatbot? Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Hiring a developer: the average salary is $82,585/year or around $47/hour
• Graphic designer: the average salary is between $33,000 and $76,000 per year
• Additional costs for integrations (for example Zapier costs range from $19.99 to $599 per month)

This gives a grand total of around $130,000 per year for one developer and one graphic designer. Also, it doesn’t even include maintenance costs or any additional channels or integrations’ costs. 

You should also consider the time it will take to plan, implement, test, and train your chatbot. So, if you decide to hire one person, it will most likely take months before you see any progress.

What do you get in return though? For example:

• Full control over your chatbot’s features
• Customized chatbot functionalities
• Ability to develop your bot on voice-enabled devices
• Customized integrations
• Full control over the security of the chatbot

If you want to cut a corner, you may want to consider hiring an agency and get your chatbot developed for you.

Some of the most popular agencies are:

And chatbot agency pricing ranges from $1,000 to $5,000/mo and additional costs for maintenance of the chatbot later down the line. 

The benefits of using such services include a fully customized chatbot, no need for additional employees, and a fully personalized UI. The downsides are additional maintenance costs and a longer time to implement the chatbot on your site.

Check out this chatbot cost calculator to find out an estimate of what bill you’ll run up if you want to hire an agency to build your bot.

The last model we’ll talk about is based on your usage of the chatbot—

Pay-as-you-go chatbot pricing

The final way to get a chatbot is to use the so-called consumption-based model where you pay an external provider but only as much as you’ve actually used your chatbot in a given month.

One of the most popular chatbots in this category is Google’s DialogFlow, and you’ll pay $0.007 per request of text input. And when you want to input audio, this chatbot costs $0.06 per minute.

But there’s a big catch to look out for.

Google’s DialogFlow is just an engine, not a ready-made chatbot you can pop on your website. You’ll still need a developer or an agency to code a chatbot for you. Only then will you be able to enjoy all the benefits that come with what Google has to offer.

So, if you factor in these additional expenses the cost of this type of chatbot will amount to:

• Between $30-$50/hour for a developer
• $70 for 10,000 text messages a month
• $60 for 1,000 minutes audio inputs or outputs

This model is dynamic as opposed to the previous two. One month you can pay $10 for the service, while the other month your bill can reach $100. It all depends on the number of interactions your virtual assistant had with clients throughout the month. 

Let’s find out if chatbots are even worth the investment and look at the benefits of the bots.

Chatbot cost-benefit analysis

Time to calculate if it’s even worth starting chatbot building and creating workflow automation for your business.

The potential benefits of chatbots are clear: 

• Chatbots are effective in resolving customer support issues 87% of the time. 
• About 40% of clients prefer to chat with chatbots.
• Over 87% of customers have a neutral or positive experience with chatbots. 

But what about the costs? 

It might seem at the beginning that chatbots cost less than live reps. But to make sure of that you need to determine how efficient they are in resolving customer support issues at your company. To do that, follow these 5 simple steps:

1. Identify queries 

Examine what requests your reps currently receive. Then, identify the simple questions that could be resolved by a chatbot.

You can do this with the help of your internal analytical tools, or fall back on free text analysis tools.

2. Calculate the percentage of queries chatbots could handle

Determine how many of your chats are made up of simple vs. complex queries. This is the percentage of questions that chatbots could handle to free up your representatives’ time.

You can do this by hand or insert all the queries into Voyant. This way, you can identify how many times a specific word or phrase appears in the text sample you insert.

3. Calculate the time agents spend on eligible queries

Work out how much time your representatives spend handling the simple queries.

Let’s say checking order status takes about 3 minutes of your employee’s time, and they have to do this, on average, 10 times a day. This gives you a loss of 50 minutes each day and around 17 hours each month. Chatbots can do this task in mere seconds and let your representatives focus on more complex and important tasks.

4. Estimate the annual cost of handling the simple chats

Calculate the average hourly cost of a live chat agent. Multiply that by the number of hours spent on the eligible queries per month. Then, multiply that number by 12 to find the annual cost.

So, let’s assume your live agent’s hourly wage is about $17, and they spend around 3 hours per day on the eligible queries. This gives you 60 hours a month and 720 hours a year. So, the total annual cost of handling the simple chats is $12,240.

5. Compare the costs

Compare how much you spend on simple queries handled by a representative and how much you’d spend on a chatbot handling them.

Let’s take Tidio as an example of a chatbot provider. If you get the paid plan with unlimited unique reachable visitors, then you’ll pay around $29 per month. This gives you $348 per year. So, if you’re spending $12,240/year on basic queries, but a chatbot will do the same task for $348. Seems like a great bargain to us!

Just remember that chatbots are not seamless from the start. They need time to learn and therefore, you’ll need your reps’ help quite a lot at the beginning. 

The cost of the chatbot adds up when your customers are redirected to the human rep but it also speeds up the process of solving the customer’s issue. Humans only need to get involved when the query is too complicated for the bot, which still frees up a lot of their time. 

Think of chatbots as virtual assistants. They are a part of your customer support and customer service team. And they’re only cost-effective when they save more money than they cost you. 

Key takeaway 

As a quick review, here are our estimations of how much chatbot costs:

• Standard chatbot software plan—between $0 and $500/mo
• Enterprise chatbot software plan—between $600 and $5,000/mo 
• In-house chatbot development—about $10,000/mo 
• Outsource an agency for chatbot development—between $1,000 and $5,000/mo 
• Consumption-based fee—between $0.006 and $1 per text or audio request

You should remember that chatbots have many great benefits, but their cost should not be higher than what you’re getting out of them. Make sure you make a priority list of features that are important to you and start from there.

A bot doesn’t have to break the bank. It’s there to help you make money so choosing the right platform is a very important starting point.

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