How much does an AI agent cost for a business?
An AI chat agent is $3,500 to set up and an AI voice agent is $5,000, both fixed before work starts. Both include training on your own material, testing against your real cases, and documentation. Most go live within 10 business days.
Provider costs are separate, go to the providers rather than to us, and we take no margin on them. Model usage is charged per token or per minute of audio. A voice agent also needs telephony, a number and call minutes. For a chat agent handling a few hundred conversations a day, model usage is usually tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds; voice is meaningfully more because audio is billed by the minute in both directions.
There is no monthly fee per agent. Every setup includes 30 days of support after go-live. After that you choose pay as you go at $175 a change, or a plan from $700 a month with changes included. Monitoring and fixes come with a Growth or Scale plan; on pay as you go, fixes are billed as changes. The choice matters more for an agent than for a workflow because agents need retraining as your pricing, scripts and edge cases change.
What the build price covers
The engineering is the smaller half. Wiring a language model to a chat widget is an afternoon; making it reliable enough to put in front of customers is the actual work.
| Included in the build price | Why it is not optional |
|---|---|
| Training on your own material | Your pricing, your services, your policies. Without it you have a generic model guessing about your business. |
| An evaluation set from your real cases | The only way to know the accuracy rather than assume it. See below. |
| Confidence thresholds and a handoff path | An agent that cannot say "I don't know" and pass to a person will invent something instead. |
| Structured output | The agent returns typed fields your systems can act on, not a paragraph someone has to read. |
| Logging of every exchange | So you can see what it said when a customer disputes it, and so retraining has something to learn from. |
| Documentation and handover | It runs in your accounts. You can take it elsewhere. |
A quote that is materially cheaper than this is usually leaving out the evaluation set and the review path, which are the two things that decide whether the agent survives month three.
Why voice costs more than chat
$5,000 against $3,500 to set up, with the same options after launch, and the gap is not margin. Voice carries four problems chat does not have.
- Latency is a product requirement. A caller will tolerate perhaps a second of silence. Text has no such constraint, so a voice build has to be engineered around response time in a way a chat build does not.
- Speech recognition is a second failure surface. Accents, background noise, hold music, a bad line. The model can be right about an utterance it was given wrong.
- Interruption handling. People talk over each other. A voice agent that cannot be interrupted feels broken within ten seconds.
- Telephony. Numbers, routing, call recording, transfer to a human, and what happens when the transfer fails. None of that exists in a chat widget.
If what you actually need is answers on your website, buy the chat agent. Voice earns its price when the calls are already coming and nobody is picking them up.
What you pay the providers
These are not our fees. They continue after we finish, and most firms leave them out until the first invoice arrives.
| Cost | Billed by | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Model usage | The model provider, per token | Conversation length, how much of your material the model has to read each time, and which model tier the task needs |
| Speech in and out | The voice provider, per minute | Call volume and call length. Both directions are billed. |
| Telephony | The carrier | Numbers held, and inbound minutes |
| Platform subscription | The workflow vendor | Usually $30 to $150 a month, shared with your other automations |
We model all of it against your actual expected volume during scoping, so you see the monthly number before you commit rather than after. We hold no reseller agreements and take no affiliate commission on any of it. You buy your own subscriptions directly, which is the only way a platform recommendation means anything.
Model cost per conversation is driven less by what the customer says than by how much context you send with each turn. An agent handed your entire price list on every message costs several times one that retrieves only the relevant section. That is an engineering decision, and it is ours to get right.
The cost everyone forgets
Building an agent that demos well takes a few days. Building one that is still right in month three takes an evaluation set: a body of real historical cases with known correct answers, which you measure against before launch and after every change.
Without it you have no way to answer the only question that matters. How often is it wrong, and wrong in what direction. You find out from customers instead. That is the difference between an agent and a demo, and it is why an agent costs more than an equivalent rule-based workflow where the same logic would do.
When an agent is the wrong purchase
Three cases where we would tell you to buy something cheaper.
- The task follows rules. If the decision can be written as a rule, a workflow does it deterministically, cheaper, with no running cost per use and no chance of invention. Routing by value and territory is a $1,500 system, not a $3,500 agent.
- The volume is low. An agent carries fixed build and ongoing retraining. A handful of inquiries a week rarely justifies either; a shared inbox and a good template will serve you better.
- Being wrong is expensive and invisible. Anything that commits money, changes a record of account, or produces an answer nobody will check. Agents belong where a mistake surfaces quickly and costs little. See what should not be automated.
Which of the two you actually need is covered in do I need an AI agent or just a workflow, and the full menu is on the pricing page.
Want the running cost modeled for your volume?
Tell us how many conversations or calls you expect and we will put a monthly figure against it before you commit to anything.
You will talk to Fayez or Kareem. Nobody else.