AI chatbot for a small business website: what it really costs

Short answer

There are three kinds of chatbot for a small business website:

The range is wide because “chatbot” covers very different things: from a pop-up with five fixed answers to an assistant that knows your whole price list, checks free slots and books a customer in.

Ready-made tools: cheap only at the start

Tidio is a popular ready-made tool. The Starter plan costs $29 a month (about $24 billed annually), but that only covers conversations handled by people. AI answers (Lyro) are billed separately: the smallest pack is $39 for 50 conversations, about $0.78 per conversation, and around $0.70 at higher volumes.

With a few hundred conversations a month, the bill quickly goes over $100. Price comparisons put the real cost of Tidio with AI above $100 a month, not the $29 on the price list.

A ready-made tool makes sense if you want to start today and do not get many questions. The downside: you pay per conversation, so the better the bot works and the more people use it, the more you pay.

What the AI model itself really costs

My website sitebest.eu runs Bit, an AI assistant I built to answer questions about my services. While building it I measured what the language model, the bot’s “brain”, actually costs:

• The main model (Gemma 4 on Cloudflare) uses about 30 units of the free daily allowance per answer. That is about 330 free answers a day.
• The backup model (the same Gemma 4 through a paid provider) costs about $0.16 per 1,000 answers.
• An answer usually arrives in 1-2 seconds.

A good assistant still costs more than pennies, because most of the price is work: collecting and organising your business knowledge, writing rules about what the bot must not say, testing on real questions, protecting it from bots that would run up costs, and fixing it later. With a ready-made tool you do this work yourself and pay a large mark-up on the model.

You can see how it works in practice:

Talk to Bit →

Where bots most often fail

Making things up. While building Bit I tested several cheap models on the same questions about my business. Some of them invented facts, and one gave a non-existent contact email address that looked very similar to the real one. A customer who writes to it simply never gets an answer. That is why the model should be chosen after testing it in your language, and the bot should answer only from your business knowledge and say “I don’t know” when the answer is not there.

No way to reach a human. Customers still prefer people: in a 2026 AnswerConnect survey, 85% of respondents preferred talking to a human, and in a SurveyMonkey survey 89% said a business should always offer that option. In a Five9 study, 83% of customers had to repeat their issue after being handed from a bot to an agent. A good assistant ends the conversation by preparing an enquiry with what the customer has already written and passing it on. Bit opens a pre-filled contact form after a few questions.

Promises the business never made. Users try to talk bots into “confirming a discount” or a free service. The assistant needs a written rule that it never changes prices or terms, and that only a written offer is binding.

Pop-up windows. A bot that opens by itself and covers the page irritates people. It is better for the bot to wait in the corner and say hello once at most.

The bot must introduce itself: the EU rules

Since 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act applies. People must know they are talking to AI, no later than the start of the first conversation. A clear line in the greeting or in the chat header is enough. A line in your terms and conditions is not.

This deadline was not postponed. Only the rules for high-risk systems were delayed, and a small business chatbot on a website is usually not one of them. The rules can reach businesses outside the EU when the chatbot talks to people in the EU.

In practice: if your bot introduces itself as “Anna from customer service” and never says it is AI, change it. If you use a ready-made tool, check whether the provider has handled this.

When a chatbot pays off, and when it does not

It pays off when:

• you answer the same questions over and over: opening hours, prices, directions, free slots, what to bring
• many enquiries come in the evening and at weekends, when nobody picks up
• you serve customers in several languages, for example a hotel, a holiday rental or services for tourists
• you want quote requests to arrive with all the information already filled in.

It does not pay off when:

• you get a few enquiries a month and each one is different
• every offer needs a conversation and an individual quote
• your customers call anyway, because that is what they are used to.

My simple rule: if you hear the same five questions more than a dozen times a week, an assistant will probably pay for itself quickly. If not, start with a proper FAQ section on your website. It costs less and also helps you rank in Google.

What an assistant costs with me

An AI assistant on your website costs from €1,400 / $1,500, usually ready in 1-2 weeks. On top of that there is a fee for the AI model that depends on the number of conversations, and we agree it before we start. No VAT is charged.

Every assistant introduces itself as AI, answers only from your business knowledge and has a way to reach a human.

Sources

• My own measurements while building the Bit assistant on sitebest.eu (October 2026): use of the free Cloudflare allowance, cost of the backup model, model tests on questions about the business
• Tidio pricing: Drag, getmacha, Hack’celeration
• Customer surveys: CX Today on AnswerConnect, CMSWire on Five9, usecarly.com chatbot statistics
• AI Act, Article 50: EUR-Lex, aiactblog.nl