So you’ve decided to get a chatbot cost estimation for your business.

Now you want to know how much this technology is likely to cost. Or maybe you’ve already looked around, but figuring out how much chatbots cost is too hard.

Prices for chatbots can be anywhere from $0 to $10,000/mo.

Oh, really?

Well, that depends on several things.

Let’s look at the different options, models, and plans to find the correct price tag for your business.

This article talks about pricing in general for chatbots. You can go here to find out how much the chatbot costs – Using the Chatbot cost calculator.

How much do chatbot cost?

Whether you make the chatbot yourself or pay a monthly fee for the software depends. And if you choose a chatbot provider, your plan and company are also essential.

The price of a chatbot depends on how you want to use it at your business. You can go one of three ways:

• Buy a subscription from someone who sells chatbots.
• Create a chatbot on your own.
• Get a chatbot you pay for as you go.

Here is how these three pricing models for chatbot cost are different from each other:

Subscription Model

This is the most common and most straightforward way for a business to get a chatbot. You get a ready-made product that you can change to fit your needs.

You should know, though, that the price of a chatbot can be anywhere from $0 to $1,000 or more. It all depends on what you want the chatbot to do and what you need it to do.

Chatbots For Free

This is an excellent plan if you want to automate customer service and self-service with a chatbot but don’t have the money yet. You can make a chatbot widget and use it for free to help with customer service.

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In terms of functionalities, you can expect:

• Customer segmentation
• Chats without limits
• Personalised design of chatbots
• Unique visitors you can reach
• Desktop & Mobile Apps
• Adding Third-Party Apps
• NLP (Natural Language Processing)

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How does it work?

Most of the time, when you get a free chatbot, you’ll have to deal with limitations like:

• How many people can you reach out to?
• How many staff accounts can you create?
• The platform you can use to add the chatbot. However, you may find that the free version has all the features you need.
• Get the free plan for life and upgrade as you grow to have unlimited chatbots.

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Pro Level Chatbots  

When your business grows to the point where you need more features and bots to use, it’s time to switch to a paid plan. You should take advantage of the free trial periods that most chatbot platforms offer to see if the software is right for your business.

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So, how much does a pro plan for a chatbot cost?

The fee you pay each month could be anywhere from $15 to $1,000. You’ll get some of the following features:

• You can change everything and use templates.
• AI that can have conversations and machine learning
• The numbers on chatbots
• Unlimited bots in use
• Unlimited reachable unique visitors
• Information for visitors
• Different kinds of chatbots

Business Chatbots 

Companies like Ada, Imperson, and Genesys DX offer enterprise-grade chatbots to large organisations.

You can expect some great extra features from them, such as:

• Booking meetings
• Paying on the chatbot itself
• Technology for deep conversational context
• Chatbots that can speak more than one language
• Log of video and interactive content
• A critical account manager for you
• Your Own SSO (single sign-on)

That’s all there is to the pricing for chatbots based on subscriptions. But you should remember that most well-known chatbots used by well-known brands are usually made from scratch. So, let’s find out how much it costs for your company to build a chatbot on its own.

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In-house programmer

If you build a chatbot yourself instead of using an external platform, the costs will be much higher at first.

So, how expensive is it to make a chatbot? Here are the main points:

The average salary for a developer is $82,585 per year or about $47 per hour.

The average salary for a graphic designer is between $33,000 and $76,000 per year.

Integrations have extra costs, like Zapier, which costs between $19.99 and $599 per month.

This adds up to about $130,000 per year for one developer and one graphic designer. Also, it doesn’t include the costs of maintenance or adding new channels, or integrating them.

Also, you should think about how long it will take to plan, build, test, and train your chatbot. So, if you only hire one person, it will probably be a few months before you start to see results.

But what do you get in exchange? For instance:

• You have complete control over the features of your chatbot
• Customized functions for chatbots
• Voice-enabled devices that can be used to build your bot
• Integrations made just for you
• Full control over the chatbot’s security
• If you want to save time and money, you might want to hire an agency to build your chatbot for you.

Some of the most well-known organizations are:

• RisingMax Inc.
• BothHook
• Mindsay

And chatbot agencies range from $1,000 to $5,000/mo, and there are also costs for keeping the chatbot running in the future.

When you use these services, you get a fully customized chatbot, you don’t need to hire more people, and you get a fully customized user interface. The downsides are that you will have to pay more for maintenance, and it will take longer to put the chatbot on your site.

Use this chatbot cost calculator to get a rough idea of how much it will cost to hire a company to build your bot.

The last model we’ll discuss is based on how much you use the chatbot. It’s called “pay-as-you-go.”

The last way to get a chatbot is to use a “consumption-based model,” in which you pay an outside provider only as much as you’ve used your chatbot in a given month.

Google’s DialogFlow is one of the most popular chatbots in this category, costing $0.007 per text input request. And if you want to add audio, it costs $0.06 per minute to use this chatbot.

Google’s DialogFlow is just an engine. It is not a chatbot that you can put on your website right away. You will still need a developer or agency to write the code for your chatbot. You won’t be able to take advantage of everything Google offers until you do this.

So, if you add up all of these extra costs, the price of this type of chatbot will be:

• Developers make between $30 and $50 per hour.
• $70 a month for 10,000 text messages
• $60 for audio inputs or outputs for 1,000 minutes.

Unlike the first two models, this one changes over time. One month, you might pay $10 for the service, but the next month, your bill could be as high as $100. All of it depends on how often your virtual assistant talks to clients over the month.

Let’s see if chatbots are worth the money and look at what they can do for us.

Cost-benefit analysis of chatbots

Time to figure out if it’s even worth it to start building chatbots and automating your business’s workflow.

It’s easy to see how chatbots could be helpful:

• 87% of the time, chatbots can solve customer service problems.
• About 40% of clients would rather talk to a chatbot than a person.
• Over 87% of customers have either no reaction or an excellent reaction to chatbots.

At first, it might seem like chatbots are cheaper than live reps. But to know for sure, you need to find out how well they handle customer service problems at your company. 

Follow these 5 easy steps to do that:

1. Identify Queries

Check out what requests your reps are getting right now. Then, figure out which simple questions a chatbot could answer.

You can do this with the help of your text analysis tools or with the use of free text analysis tools.

2. Figure out how many questions a chatbot could answer.

Find out how many of your chats are simple questions and how many are hard ones. This is the number of questions that chatbots could answer, freeing up your representatives’ time.

You can do this by hand or use Voyant to put all the queries in. So, you can see how many times a particular word or phrase appears in the text sample you add.

3. Figure out how much time agents spend on queries that are eligible.

Find out how long it takes your customer service reps to answer simple questions.

Let’s say it takes your employee about 3 minutes to check the status of an order, and they have to do this 10 times a day, on average. This means you lose 50 minutes daily or 17 hours monthly. Chatbots can do this in just a few seconds, so your employees can work on more complicated and essential tasks.

4. Figure out how much it will cost to handle the simple chats each year.

Find out how much a live chat agent costs on average per hour. Multiply that by the number of hours per month that was spent on eligible queries. The annual cost is found by multiplying that number by 12.

So, let’s say your live agent makes about $17 an hour and spends about 3 hours daily on qualifying queries. This gives you 60 hours per month and 720 hours per year. So, it costs $12,240 per year to handle the simple chats.

5. Look at the prices

Compare how much you pay for a representative to answer simple questions to how much it would cost for a chatbot to do the same thing.

If you get the paid plan that enables you to reach out to an unlimited number of unique visitors, it will cost you about $39 per month. You’ll get $468 a year from this. So, if you spend $12,240 per year on simple questions, but a chatbot can do the same thing for $468, you should use the chatbot. We think that’s a great deal!

Just keep in mind that chatbots are not always easy to use. They need time to learn, so you’ll need a lot of help from your reps at first.

When your customers are sent to a human rep, the chatbot’s cost goes up, but it speeds up the time it takes to solve the customer’s problem. The only time a person needs to get involved is when the question is too hard for the bot to answer. This still saves them a lot of time.

Think of chatbots as online helpers. They are part of your team of people who help and serve your customers. And they only save you money if they cost you less than they keep you.

You can also calculate the cost of your crypto banking software using our cost calculator.