Everything You Need to Know About Chatbot Pricing for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
Small businesses and new businesses that are growing know a secret. So, how much doest a chatbot costs?
To grow, you need to be efficient and automate as much as possible. If you can’t be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to answer questions from new leads and process orders, you can get software to do it for you.
Business chatbots are now a thing.
Chatbots are the new technology that is being used by SMBs at the fastest rate. 27% of SMBs say they use chatbots in their business.
How much does an SMB chatbot cost for marketing and sales or customer service?
If you’re a small or medium-sized business and you want to know how much a chatbot costs, use a chatbot cost calculator to determine the development cost.
If you want the one-minute version, skip to the end of the article, where we tell you exactly what you need to know and do. It starts at $0 per month.
How much does it cost to make a chatbot?
Chatbots can cost anywhere from $0 to $1,000 or more per month, depending on what you tell them to do.
That is the most straightforward answer we can give in one sentence. (If you read the rest of this article, you’ll have a much better idea of what I mean.)
Here’s a 3-tiered way to think about how much a chatbot costs. Again, this is very simple but tl;dr:
Free + Your Time
Make a chatbot in-house, and you’ll have a basic, functional chatbot that can answer customer questions and requests.
Software + Your Time
$0–$49 per month – Use visual chatbot building software to make a chatbot in-house. This gives you a powerful chatbot that can bring in new business, capture leads right away, improve Facebook ads, and increase sales.
The free starter plan from us for a chatbot that works in both Facebook Messenger and native website chat is suitable for an unlimited number of contacts.
$500–$5000/month
Hire a chatbot agency to make and maintain chatbots that generate leads, run sales funnels, help customers, and do remarketing for you.
Now, let’s talk about the essential details.
How much a chatbot cost depends on what your business goals are.
Before you can get a good idea of how much your dream bot will cost your business, you need to answer this question:
What do you want from your chatbot?
It’s important to decide what your chatbot is for and how it will work.
Here are some things small businesses can do if they want to invest in chatbot technology:
Chatbots For Customer Service
Chatbots for customer service can be used for many things, like answering frequently asked questions, giving directions, answering questions about services, etc. Often, these chatbots look and act a lot like a phone menu, but they are way more interesting.
Website Chatbot
One of the best ways to use chatbots is to help users and point potential customers in the right direction while they are on your website. This can be done with a simple plugin and a chatbot.
Chatbots For Making Plans or Signing Up
Want to make setting up appointments for your beauty shop, coaching sessions, or dentist’s office easier and less time-consuming? All of this can be done by a chatbot, which gives your office staff more time to work on more important projects and saves your business the cost of hiring people to do these administrative tasks.
Transactions Chatbots
Chatbots can help with e-commerce transactions by giving discounts and coupons, sending receipts, tracking shipments, etc.
Lead Generation
Lead generation chatbots are marketing-focused chatbots that usually include prospecting, lead capture, and lead nurturing techniques like drip campaigns.
At this point, it’s important to note that all chatbots can be made with chatbot templates.
Using a template can save you dozens of hours of work and setup time. It’s also cheap and easy to get into the chatbot game.
These chatbots can work in both Facebook Messenger and your site for people who aren’t using Messenger (we call it native web chat).
You can also make chatbots for services like Slack, Kik, Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp, LINE, Skype, and others that use chat messaging.
Most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) choose Facebook Messenger as their platform because most of their customers use it.
Chatbots have a lot of valuable features that are used in all kinds of small business situations. If you’re starting with chatbots, you should begin with a chatbot development company that works on native web chat and Facebook Messenger.
Most customers can reach through Facebook Messenger (there are 1.3 billion active users on Messenger)
Facebook bots can access much helpful information about customers, and businesses can get this information automatically on the first connection.
Messenger bots work directly with Facebook ads and have shown to lower CPA and raise AOV.
With a chatbot development company, even if a website visitor doesn’t use Facebook Messenger, they can still talk to your bot through native web chat. Building a bot on a platform that works on the most popular chat app in the U.S., Facebook Messenger, and for non-Facebook users visiting your website is the cheapest way to make a bot that works on both.
There are two main ways to figure out how much a chatbot will cost:
Do it yourself or hire a company.
In general, the next choice you’ll have is whether to build the chatbot in-house or hire an outside agency.
That could be you, as the owner or “person in charge of marketing” for your SMB. Or, you can have a worker, your tech-savvy kid, or an intern make the chatbot. Or by Hiring an IT company from the outside that does marketing and chatbots well.
Support and Maintenance for Your Chatbot:
Once your chatbot is up and running, you can expect to change it over time. You could pay an agency to do this or spend a few hours a week doing it yourself. If you’re running a simple chatbot like a FAQ bot, you might only need 0–1 hour per week to look over unanswered questions and see if your bot needs any new Q&A responses. It might take longer if you have many chatbots doing different things, like drip campaigns, click-to-Messenger ad bots on Facebook, etc.
Here is the main point. When you do it yourself, you can usually take out smaller amounts of money from your account, but you have to invest your time or your team’s time.
Now, Some Caveats and Tips:
When you hire an agency to make chatbots, you and your team are free to focus on what you do best. In the long run, that could bring in the most money.
If you have a small, tight team of highly paid employees, it might be best to hire an agency. For example, from a cost point of view, it makes more sense for a small law firm, brokerage, or real estate agency to hire an outside agency to do the job.
You could also do it in-house if you have between 5 and 20 employees, including tech-savvy people or a marketing department. This marketing team (or person) might be able to create your chatbot because they have the time and technical skills to do so.
You could also hire contractors to do the work. The contract model is an alternative to using an agency. In this model, you could hire someone to set up and develop the site and train your team to take care of the ongoing maintenance.
Think about these costs to get an accurate price for an in-house chatbot.
Even if you build the chatbot in-house, there is more to the price than just the software.
Chatbot Platform: $0-$500 per month
First, you’ll need a platform for your chatbot. RisingMax Inc. is one of the most potent and affordable chatbot builders.
Even though we have a reason to recommend it, we also know how the market works.
Full-fledged chat marketing automation software with all the bells and whistles starts at $0 and goes up.
Check out all the information on our page about MobileMonkey prices.
Employee time: $50 or more per hour
If you give this job to your team, make sure you know what you’re doing.
What they won’t be doing as a result of taking on this job.Will it hurt the business or cause revenue to drop?
How much each hour costs? Making chatbots is a valuable job, but you don’t need a lot of training or a lot of money to do it. It takes more experience than sweeping the floors, but you don’t need a degree or years of experience.
People with 2-5 years of experience, a bachelor’s degree, and some technical skills are often given the job of making chatbots. These people are in the “marketing specialist” job level.
That works out to about $100 per hour. Likely, the costs of having this employee (equipment, vacation, insurance, etc.) are 1.4 times higher. So, this employee costs around $140 per hour.
Using that number, if it takes your marketing expert 10 hours to make a chatbot, it will cost you $1,400.
Think about these three costs to get an accurate price for an agency chatbot:
Here is a general idea of how much it will cost to hire an agency to make your chatbot.
One-time development costs for a simple chatbot range from $500 to $1,000.
A company will often price bots based on how well they work. The following are examples of simple bots:
FAQ bots are often built into a business website to help with customer service.
Bot for getting more and more customers and leads.
Bot to lower the cost of Facebook ads and get more leads and sales from Facebook ads.
Bots that show or suggest products for ecommerce or retail.
Most of the time, the agency will set up and implement the chatbot for a one-time fee of $500 to $2,000.
This setup cost usually includes basic chatbot creation, putting the chatbot into place, fixing problems with the chatbot, and even teaching you or your team how to use the chatbot.
Advanced chatbot development has a one-time fee of $1,000 to $5,000.
If you want to build a chatbot for a one-time campaign, you might want to find out how much it costs for the project. You can go this way as long as the deliverables are clear. Your chatbot will cost more if it needs more features and connections to other business systems.
Chatbot subscription, maintenance, and support on an ongoing basis: $50–$5,000 per month
Most agencies offer support and maintenance for the chatbot on an ongoing basis. Many agencies make this a part of the contract for constructing a chatbot.
Chatbot support is a good choice, and you should invest money. Unless you have a lot of experience making chatbots, this help is valuable.
The monthly chatbot fee often covers the subscription cost for the chatbot platform that the agency is using, so it doesn’t go to waste. You may also get support, help with problems, and improvements when you need them.
If you stop having your chatbot supported by an agency, you might lose features like integrations or monthly reports.
If you want more landing pages, campaigns, opt-in points, etc., you will have to pay more.
The price of a chatbot from a chatbot agency is often based on how many landing pages or campaigns there are.
You may find that agencies will change these prices to fit your needs or that they have different price tiers for other markets.
Keep in mind that agencies do most of the work but will need your time. Your time is another “cost” you need to consider when figuring out how much a chatbots should cost.
An IT consulting company in Nyc with a team of UX and UI designers, business analysts, and developers can help you determine the costs to develop a chatbot and build one for you.They can set up the process of making changes so that you can see the results quickly.