Chatbot pricing – most suitable pricing options in the market

Chatbots have many solutions that could solve specific business needs and it is very hard to say how much it would cost in general. It depends on so many things, that you have to answer some questions before answer this. In this article, I will share some of the most important things you should know about the price of chatbots and what determines its cost.

I‘m going to talk more about the main types of services you can find on the market and how approximately it costs. This will help you to choose the best option for your business and workflow model. With this report, my goal is to provide business owners with an idea of what they can currently expect from chatbots solutions for customer service. I hope that this article will allow getting some insights they can confidently relay to their executive teams when making informed decisions and thinking about their customer support. The price of the chatbot is usually determined by the work that goes into building it and the value it creates. Let‘s get started!

1.First option is to build yourself – with self-service platforms, you can easily build a chatbot by yourself. Some platforms require a bit technical skills, while others let you craft a bot without coding. This option often involves paying a monthly subscription for a platform where you can build your chatbot. In return for paying the monthly subscription, you get a framework to build upon, as well as support and maintenance from the vendor.

If you have the programming capabilities or have developers on your team, then you have the option to build one based on your needs and preferences. The obvious drawbacks here is cost and the time needed to build. Plus, ongoing maintenance will be fully your responsibility. Also, the difference in the business models of competing for bot platforms can be confusing and the tools you can find not always will help you to achieve desired goals. Prices depend on the number of bot rules you need, messages per month, integrations, and support. For example, if you need to build one chatbot it will cost you from $15 to $500+ on a monthly basis. And most of them won‘t give you advice or support related to chatbot improvement.

2. Already made solution – there already exist a lot of ready solutions on the market that solve specific business needs. Just as there’s an App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android, there are also marketplaces for chatbots. Currently, you can find bots on the Telegram and Kik Bot Stores. Slack for example have a list of their bots in their App Directory together with all other tools. Facebook, Viber, and Line don’t have bot marketplaces yet, but we think they will appear in the near future. Also you can search for chatbots across all current platforms and categories using Botlist, a catalog of bots. Some bots listed on Botlist serve multiple purposes and run on multiple platforms. So you can try this way to look for a bot that will fit your business needs, but it is very hard to do that, because everybody has its specific business ‘voice‘. Prices are very very different.

3. If previous options are not attractive to you, you can craft a chatbot from scratch. And if programming isn’t your thing, you can hire a software development team. By that I mean a company that offers web and mobile application development services. A chatbot for an existing chat service is simply a server-side app that implements chat through an API. To implement this server-side app, software development teams can use various technologies. Integration with one chat and its the duration depends on bot complexity, but on average it takes 40-56 hours, sometimes up to 160 if there are very specific technical solutions. Chatbot adaptation of existing business logic, if there already are web applications or APIs for mobile app depends on the amount of logic. On average it takes 120-160 hours. And the approximate cost to build a chatbot from scratch can be anywhere from $5000 to $13000. If there are very complicated decisions and actions to make it can cost up to $100,000! It takes more time to develop a chatbot from scratch than it does to build a chatbot with self-service platforms. And you will need your own server infrastructure (hosting).

We are similar to the last one, just we made a very suitable and insanely cost-friendly solution for almost every business model. We have a subscription-based pricing model and maintain our customers‘ chatbots all the time since they register, this means our customer can contact us every day by asking to improve its chatbot, what is more, we consult our customers with proven marketing strategies according to their niche – no one on the market is doing that. If you’d like to learn more how this feature would serve to your business, you’re welcome to talk to our chatbot assistant, who will willingly share demo versions and help you to get in touch with us if you need help with getting your own chatbot. You can find it here.