How much a chatbot costs.

The short answer

A simple scripted bot in one messenger — 15 to 60 thousand roubles. A bot with CRM integration and several channels — 80 to 300 thousand. An AI agent that understands free speech and runs the deal itself — from 200 thousand upwards, plus monthly support.

These are guide figures for the Russian market in 2026, not our price list. We deliberately don't quote a price before the review: until it is clear how many channels you have and what happens to an enquiry after the reply, any figure named would be guesswork.

What the price is made of

Of four parts: the one-off setup, the platform subscription, the charge for calls to the model and monthly support. Contractors often name only the first and stay quiet about the rest.

The one-off setup

The most visible part. It covers designing the scenario, collecting materials, connecting channels, integrations and testing. It takes from a few days to a month and accounts for most of the bill.

The platform

If the bot is built on a ready-made builder, there is a subscription — usually one to fifteen thousand a month depending on the number of conversations. Custom development needs no platform but costs more at the start.

Calls to the model

An AI agent pays for every reply. Per conversation that is pennies, but at thousands of enquiries a month it adds up. An important question for the contractor: is this cost inside the subscription or billed separately?

Support

Correcting answers, adding materials, reviewing conversations, reacting to changes in the channels. Without it the bot degrades: the processes change while it stays the same.

Three levels of solution and their price

Three fundamentally different things are sold under the word «chatbot». Comparing their prices is pointless — it is like comparing a bicycle with a lorry.

The upper bound on the last row is open, and that is honest: an agent for a salon with one channel and an agent for a company with telephony, stock and five sales directions differ in effort by a factor of several.

Why the range is so wide

Because 80% of the cost is not programming but work with your material. Two outwardly identical projects differ threefold in price if the materials are collected in one and missing in the other.

Five things drive the price:

• The number of channels. One Telegram and a bundle of five platforms are different jobs, and not only technically: every platform has its own limits.
• The depth of integration. A notification by email costs pennies. A two-way exchange with the CRM, where the bot reads the history and writes into the card, is a project of its own.
• The state of the materials. If the price list and terms exist in ready form, collecting them takes a couple of days. If they live in people's heads — weeks.
• The complexity of the scenario. «Book a haircut» and «select equipment by ten parameters» are different tasks.
• Who does the work. A freelancer, a studio and an agency differ not only in price but in what happens a year later.

How to work out whether it pays off

Count not from the contractor's price but from your own losses. Take the enquiries for a month, estimate what share goes unanswered for more than half an hour, multiply by your conversion to sale and the average deal value.

The order of the calculation on a worked example:

Even if half of those sixty «lost» enquiries are recovered, that is 30 enquiries, 6 sales and 240 thousand roubles of revenue a month. On that arithmetic a bot costing 150 thousand pays for itself in the first month.

The opposite case is no rarer. Twenty enquiries a month, a salesperson answering within three minutes, almost no losses — here a bot will never pay for itself, and an honest contractor will say so.

The costs people forget

The setup invoice is not the whole sum. Four items of expenditure surface after launch and spoil the economics of the project.

• Refining after launch. For the first weeks the answers are corrected against real conversations. If that isn't in the price, the bot stays as it was assembled blind.
• Preparing materials on your side. One of your people will spend several days collecting price lists, terms and answers to frequent questions. That is money too.
• Licences for adjacent services. The CRM, telephony, paid access to platform APIs — paid separately and directly.
• Changes in the channels. Messengers and platforms change their rules. Every few months something will need fixing.

Where you can save and where you can't

It is worth saving on coverage — start with one channel and one scenario. You cannot save on CRM integration and on refinement after launch: without them the project doesn't pay off at all.

You can

• Launch in the one channel with the most enquiries and add the rest later.
• Start with a scripted bot if the requests are of the same kind, and move to an AI agent when you hit the ceiling.
• Collect the materials yourself — that is a noticeable part of the bill.

You can't

• Skip writing to the CRM. Without it the correspondence stays in the messenger and there is nothing to measure the result with — so it stays unclear whether the project paid off.
• Skip support in the first months. A bot without corrections from real conversations is a bot assembled from guesses.
• Take on a contractor with no answer to «who owns the settings». The saving turns into leaving costing more than starting again.

How to tell you are being overcharged

Expensive is not when the sum is large but when it can't be broken down. Ask for the price split into the four parts and for what happens after launch.

Warning signs:

• the price is named before any talk of your channels and your process;
• they can't explain what it is made of;
• «our AI will learn everything by itself» — it won't, without materials;
• support isn't discussed at all;
• no answer on who owns the materials and settings once the work is done.

The opposite sign of a good contractor is when they calculate your payback themselves and in some cases tell you that you don't need this.