What does a chatbot cost? Pricing models and costs in 2026
The common pricing models, public prices from well-known vendors with sources (as of October 1, 2026), the cost of building your own, and a calculator to estimate your own chatbot costs.
What a chatbot costs depends mainly on the pricing model and on how many conversations it handles. For an AI chatbot on your website, prices at well-known vendors (as of October 1, 2026) run from free entry plans through two- to four-figure monthly amounts to enterprise contracts quoted only on request. Five models are common:
- Per seat: help desk and live chat software charges for every agent license; at Zendesk, $19 to $115 per agent per month, paid yearly. AI usually comes on top.
- Per resolved conversation: you pay for each case the AI handles: from $0.99 at Intercom Fin, $1.50 to $2.00 at Zendesk.
- Credits or usage tiers: a monthly bundle of messages or conversations; at Chatbase, from $40 for 700 to $500 for 15,000 message credits a month.
- Flat plans: a fixed monthly price with no conversation cap; at moinAI, from €750 to from €2,930 a month, depending on plan and billing cycle.
- Enterprise on request: custom contracts without public prices.
If you build it yourself, you pay for the language model by usage: roughly $0.50 to $10 per 1,000 messages depending on the model, plus development, hosting and maintenance.
What drives the bill
List prices say little until you know your volume. A per-seat price stays the same no matter how many questions the chatbot answers; a per-conversation price grows with every resolved request. Flat plans are predictable but can tie you to a minimum term. With credits, the model you choose also decides how fast the allowance runs out.
So don’t compare entry prices; compare your expected monthly cost. How many conversations do visitors start, how many of them does the chatbot answer completely, and what comes on top? Typical extras are setup, AI add-ons, minimum volumes, VAT or sales tax, and your team’s time for content and review. The cost calculator below puts three models side by side with your numbers.
Why we link every number
Some well-known guides to chatbot costs quote prices that no longer match the vendors’ current pricing pages. We checked the pricing pages on October 1, 2026 and link every figure in the table. The vendor’s page is what counts, because prices change.
Chatbot prices at a glance: examples by pricing model
As of October 1, 2026. Prices as shown on the linked vendor pages, without guarantee; the vendor’s own page is authoritative. Lime Connect and Crisp state their prices exclude VAT; the other pricing pages don’t say.
Prices are shown in the currency the vendor page uses, without conversion. “From” appears where the vendor page itself says “from” or “ab.”
| Pricing model | How it is billed | Vendor and public price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per seat | A monthly price for each agent license in a help desk or live chat tool. AI is often billed on top. | Zendesk: Support Team $19, Suite Team $55, Suite Professional $115 per agent/month, paid yearly; billed monthly: $25, $69, $149 | zendesk.com/pricing |
| Freshchat (Freshworks): Growth $19, Pro $49, Enterprise $79 per agent/month, billed annually; Free $0 for up to 10 agents. The AI agent is billed separately. | freshworks.com/live-chat-software/pricing | ||
| Per resolution or conversation | A price for each conversation the AI resolves or handles. Each vendor defines what counts as resolved. | Intercom Fin: From $0.99 per outcome, at most one per conversation; nothing is charged if Fin can’t answer or the customer asks for a human. With the Intercom help desk, seat licenses come on top; with another help desk, a monthly minimum applies. | intercom.com/pricing |
| Zendesk AI agents: $1.50 per automated resolution with a commitment, $2.00 pay-as-you-go; 5 (Support Team, Suite Team) or 10 (Suite Professional) resolutions per agent/month included | zendesk.com/pricing | ||
| Freshchat Freddy AI Agent: $49 per 100 sessions; first 500 sessions included once per account. A session covers all interactions within 24 hours. | freshworks.com/live-chat-software/pricing | ||
| Credits or usage tiers | A monthly bundle of message credits or conversations. Need more, and you move up a tier or buy extra. | Chatbase: Hobby $40, Standard $150, Pro $500 per month (monthly billing) for 700, 4,000 or 15,000 message credits; top-ups $40 per 1,000 credits | chatbase.co/pricing |
| Botpress: Plus $150/mo, Team $750/mo, billed annually; 250 or 1,500 conversations and $25 or $150 of AI usage included; extra conversations in packs of 100 for $65 or $50 | botpress.com/pricing | ||
| Lime Connect (formerly Userlike): Connect AI Agent from €99/month including 100 conversations, as an add-on to a plan such as Pro from €105/month billed monthly (3-seat minimum per the vendor’s page); prices exclude VAT | connect.lime-technologies.com/en/pricing | ||
| Flat plans by feature set | A fixed monthly price per feature package, with no per-conversation billing. Some come with a minimum term or capped AI usage. | moinAI: Business from €750 (annual billing) or from €880 (monthly billing) per month, Growth from €1,350 or €1,580, Professional from €2,500 or €2,930; unlimited conversations; minimum term 3, 6 or 12 months | moin.ai/preise |
| Crisp: Mini $45, Essentials $95, Plus $295 per month per workspace, no conversation cap; $5, $25 or $75 of AI credits included, around 90, 450 or 1,350 automated conversations according to Crisp | crisp.chat/en/pricing | ||
| Enterprise on request | A custom quote after a call with sales. There are no public prices. | Zendesk Suite Enterprise: “Talk to Sales” | zendesk.com/pricing |
| Lime Connect Enterprise: “On request,” minimum 5 seats | connect.lime-technologies.com/en/pricing | ||
| Chatbase Enterprise: “Let’s Talk,” price on request | chatbase.co/pricing |
Calculate your chatbot costs
Enter your volume and the prices from your quotes. The calculator shows the monthly cost under three pricing models side by side and breaks it down per answered conversation.
The defaults are example values from the market table, as of October 1, 2026: €1.50 per answered conversation from the Zendesk AI agents row ($1.50 per automated resolution with a commitment; €1.50 on Zendesk’s German site); €55 per seat from the Zendesk row (Suite Team, per agent/month, paid yearly; €55 on Zendesk’s German site); €750 flat from the moinAI row (Business from €750 a month with annual billing). Conversations, messages, share and number of seats are placeholders. Replace every value with the figures from your quote. If a vendor bills every AI conversation, not just answered ones, set the share to 100%; on per-seat plans, AI is often extra.
Your monthly costs
Conversations answered by the chatbot per month: 250; Per month: Per conversation €375.00, Per seat €165.00, Flat €750.00
| Pricing model | Per month | Per answered conversation |
|---|---|---|
| Per conversation | €375.00 | €1.50 |
| Per seat | €165.00 | €0.66 |
| Flat | €750.00 | €3.00 |
Kyros: estimate your monthly credits
Messages per month: 2,000
- Credits at 1 credit per message: 2,000
- Credits at 2 credits per message: 4,000
- Credits at 3 credits per message: 6,000
Example values; each model shows its credits per message in the Studio. We don’t show a euro amount here: Starter costs €0, and Pro and Business are available on request.
An example calculation with your numbers, not a price quote or an offer.
Costs that are easy to overlook
Beyond the list price, these items decide what a chatbot really costs. The examples are as of October 1, 2026.
Setup and onboarding
Some vendors charge a one-time fee. According to its product catalog, HubSpot requires onboarding for $1,500 on Service Hub Professional and $3,500 on Enterprise. moinAI, by contrast, explicitly charges no setup fee, and neither does Intercom for Fin used with another help desk.
Minimum terms and volumes
moinAI has a minimum term of 3, 6 or 12 months depending on the plan. Lime Connect requires at least 3 seats on Pro and 5 on Enterprise. Intercom states a monthly minimum for Fin with another help desk, and at Zendesk an automated resolution costs $1.50 with a commitment instead of $2.00.
AI on top of the license
On per-seat plans, AI is often a separate line item. Zendesk charges $50 per agent per month, paid yearly, for Copilot, plus automated resolutions. Intercom charges $29 per agent per month billed annually or $35 billed monthly for Copilot; Freshchat charges $29 per agent per month billed annually for Freddy AI Copilot.
Overage and extras
Go over your allowance and you pay more. Chatbase auto-recharges at $40 per 1,000 credits, and when the bot runs an action, a request uses twice the credits. Botpress automatically buys 100 more conversations at 95% of the quota. Removing “Powered By Chatbase” costs $99 a month.
VAT and billing cycle
Lime Connect states “Preise zzgl. MwSt.” (prices excluding VAT), and Crisp says “VAT is not included in our plan prices”; for other vendors, check the pricing page or your quote. The lowest prices often require annual billing: Zendesk advertises 20% off, moinAI up to 15%, and Lime Connect Pro costs €87 instead of from €105 a month. Compare like with like.
Content preparation and review
A chatbot needs current content and someone who reviews conversations and closes gaps. None of the vendors we checked lists hours for this on its pricing page. One vendor blog (Qualimero) estimates 2 to 5 hours a week for upkeep; that is a vendor’s estimate, not an independent figure.
Building a chatbot yourself: what AI usage costs
If you build a chatbot yourself, you pay for the language model by tokens, small chunks of text, billed separately for input and output. What an answer costs depends mostly on how much text the model has to read per message. Our example calculation for one answer from an FAQ chatbot that searches your content assumes:
- instructions to the model: about 1,000 tokens
- matching passages from your content: about 2,000 tokens, say 4 passages of 500
- conversation history so far: about 450 tokens, plus about 50 for the question itself
- about 3,500 input tokens and 300 output tokens in total, a short answer of roughly 150 to 200 words
- no reasoning, no caching, list prices
Per 1,000 messages, that works out to 3.5 × input price + 0.3 × output price, each per 1 million tokens. According to the official price lists of major model providers as of October 2026, that comes to roughly $0.50 to $10 per 1,000 messages, depending on the language model. With a lot of context, such as 8,000 input and 600 output tokens, it is roughly $1.10 to $22. The most expensive top-tier models cost more, and with reasoning turned on, extra tokens are added and billed as output. German text often needs more tokens per word than English; that is not officially quantified. Several major providers charge about 10% extra for processing pinned to a specific region, according to their price lists.
Indexing your content once barely registers: by our calculation, 2 million tokens of website text cost about $0.04 with a small embedding model.
Costs that are easy to forget when you build it yourself
- Development: search over your content, the chat interface, and connections to your website and systems.
- Hosting and operations: servers, a vector database, monitoring, and updates when models or APIs change.
- Quality and security: testing answers, moderation, and data protection and security work.
- Review time: someone has to read conversations and correct wrong answers, whether you build or buy.
We found no neutral figures for these items; they depend on your team or contractor. For comparison: at four messages per conversation, raw model costs work out to roughly 0.2 to 4 US cents per conversation. Intercom Fin charges from $0.99 per outcome, and Zendesk charges $2.00 per automated resolution pay-as-you-go. The difference pays for search, hosting, the widget, analytics, support and the vendor’s margin.
Price ranges by company size: estimates from vendors
We found no independent source, such as an analyst firm, an industry association or a neutral trade publication, that gives price ranges for small, mid-sized and large companies. The ranges that circulate come from blogs of chatbot vendors with a commercial interest. We show them as third-party estimates, not as market data.
| Source (vendor blog) | Vendor’s estimate | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Qualimero | DIY builder tools €0–100 a month with no setup; professional SaaS AI €500–2,500 a month plus €2,000–15,000 setup; enterprise “ab 5.000 € monatlich” (from €5,000 a month) plus €30,000–200,000 setup | updated July 20, 2026 (“Stand Q3 2026”) |
| Chatarmin | Do-it-yourself €0–200 a month; professional SaaS €500–2,500 a month plus €2,000–15,000 setup plus agent licenses (€40–80 per seat); custom development €20,000–100,000 | September 1, 2026 |
| moinAI | Rule-based bots from about €10 a month; AI chatbot “ab 725 € (moinAI)” (from €725), total project in the five figures; live chat software from about €100 a month. moinAI’s own pricing page shows from €750 (annual billing) or from €880 (monthly billing) on October 1, 2026. | updated May 27, 2026 |
What Kyros costs
Starter at €0, Pro and Business on request
The Starter plan costs €0, with no time limit and no credit card. It includes one assistant with a chat widget and monthly credits. Every message uses credits; each model shows how many before you choose it. With Compare models, you test two models side by side, including their credits per message. Pro and Business are available on request, and there is no online checkout. Details on the pricing page.
When another pricing model fits better
If your team should take over conversations live, you need software with live chat, usually priced per seat; Kyros has no live chat and no handoff to staff. If you need a fixed monthly price with no message cap, a flat plan is the better fit, because every Kyros message uses credits.
Example (Beta): so visitors still have a route to your team, the assistant can show an Interactive Card that takes a callback request, for example with name, phone number and topic. Submissions are stored per Card and can be exported as CSV.
Chatbot cost FAQ
How much does a chatbot cost per month?
It depends on the pricing model and your volume. As of October 1, 2026, well-known vendors range from free entry plans through credit bundles such as Chatbase ($40 to $500 a month) to flat plans such as moinAI (from €750 a month, billed annually). With per-resolution pricing, such as from $0.99 at Intercom Fin, costs rise with the number of conversations. Run the numbers with your own volume and the vendors’ current pricing pages.
Are there free chatbots?
Yes, many vendors offer a free entry plan with tight limits. As of October 1, 2026, Chatbase Free includes 50 message credits a month, Lime Connect Free includes one seat and 200 conversations, and Crisp Free includes no AI credits. With Kyros, the Starter plan is €0 with no time limit and no credit card, with one assistant, a chat widget and monthly credits. Check whether a free plan covers your volume and what it leaves out.
Which is cheaper: per seat or per conversation?
Your volume decides. A per-seat price stays the same no matter how many questions the chatbot answers; a per-resolution price rises with every case. With few conversations, paying per conversation is often cheaper; with many, a license can come out ahead, as long as the AI is included rather than billed on top. Divide the monthly cost by the number of answered conversations; the calculator on this page does that for three models side by side.
What does it cost to build a chatbot yourself?
The AI usage itself is relatively cheap: at about 3,500 input and 300 output tokens per message, the official price lists of major model providers (as of October 2026) put it at roughly $0.50 to $10 per 1,000 messages, depending on the language model. On top come development, hosting, search over your content, testing, data protection work and maintenance. We found no neutral figures for those; plan them with your own team or contractor.
What one-time costs should I expect?
Depending on the vendor, a setup or onboarding fee: according to its product catalog, HubSpot charges $1,500 once for Service Hub Professional and $3,500 for Enterprise. Others, such as moinAI, explicitly charge no setup fee. Internal work almost always comes on top: checking and updating content, testing the chatbot, installing it on your site and reviewing answers. Custom connections to a store, CRM or ERP often mean project costs; we found no neutral figures for them.
Is a chatbot worth it?
Only your own numbers can tell you; there is no blanket saving. Count how many recurring questions arrive by email, phone and chat and how much time your team spends on them. Then test with real questions how many of them the chatbot answers correctly. Set the chatbot’s monthly cost, including upkeep and review, against the handling time it frees up, and factor in that wrong answers create follow-up work.
Try Kyros with your own pages.
Starter at €0 for good, no credit card. Pro and Business on request.