How much does an AI chatbot cost? Here are the real numbers.
A custom AI chatbot is quoted between $20,000 and $80,000 across most of the industry in 2026. A basic FAQ bot runs $5,000–$15,000. Heavily integrated assistants reach $75,000–$150,000. We charge $3,500, fixed. This piece explains what actually drives the difference, so you can judge any quote you are holding — including ours.
Published 2026 industry ranges, for reference: a basic FAQ chatbot $5K–$15K; a custom AI chatbot $20K–$80K; a heavily integrated AI assistant $75K–$150K. Subscription tools run $15–$500/month for small teams and $1,200–$5,000/month at enterprise. Freelance developers bill $60–$150/hour, and custom builds carry 15–20% of build cost per year in maintenance.
What you are actually paying for
Strip the proposal down and a chatbot quote is four things: the retrieval layer that finds the right answer in your material, the guardrails that stop it answering things it should not, the integration work that connects it to the systems where your answers live, and the evaluation harness that proves it is right often enough to put in front of customers.
Only the third one genuinely scales with price. Retrieval and guardrails are close to solved and largely reusable. Evaluation is work, but it is the same work every time. Integration is where an honest quote grows: connecting to a modern documentation site is an afternoon, connecting to a twenty-year-old practice management system with no API is a month.
The three questions that move the number
Where do the answers live? If your content is on a public website or in a document folder, the build is straightforward. If it lives behind a login in a legacy system, add integration time.
Does it need to take action, or just answer? A chatbot that answers questions is one build. A chatbot that books an appointment, opens a ticket, or updates a record is a different build — it now needs permissions, audit trails, and a human-approval path.
Who is liable if it is wrong? In healthcare, legal, and education the answer changes the architecture. You need citations on every answer, logs of who reviewed what, and a defined escalation path. That is not a feature you bolt on later.
The hidden costs that are not in the quote
Two line items get left out of most proposals. The first is maintenance: industry guidance puts it at 15–20% of build cost per year. On a $60,000 build that is another $9,000–$12,000 annually before anything improves. The second is ownership. If the vendor hosts it on their infrastructure under their accounts, your renewal price is whatever they decide it is, because leaving means rebuilding.
Ask both questions before you sign: what does year two cost, and if we part ways, what do I keep?
Why ours is $3,500
Because we have built this specific thing enough times that the reusable part is genuinely reusable. The retrieval layer, the citation system, the evaluation harness, the human-handoff path — those exist. What we charge for is fitting them to your material and your rules, which is a known quantity of work, so it can carry a fixed price instead of an hourly estimate that drifts.
The same discipline is why we publish the number at all. A price you can read without a sales call is a price we have to be able to defend.
AI Chat Assistant — $3,500, fixed, live in 2–3 weeks. Trained on your documents, with a citation on every answer and a defined path to a human when it does not know. Every build ships in your cloud, under your accounts, with the repository in your name. See your price in three questions, grade us first with the AI Vendor Scorecard, or book a call with an Applied AI Scientist.