What Does a Custom AI Chatbot Cost in 2026? The Short Answer
A chatbot that answers questions from your own documentation costs €8,000–€25,000 to build plus €50–€500/month in API and hosting costs. A chatbot that acts — looks up orders, books appointments, updates your CRM — costs €25,000–€60,000. An off-the-shelf widget costs €0–€100/month but can't do either well.
"What does a chatbot cost?" is one of the most common questions in our inbox. The honest answer depends on one thing: does the bot only need to answer, or does it need to act?
The three chatbot tiers
| Tier | What it does | Build cost | Running cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Off-the-shelf widget | Scripted FAQs, canned flows | €0 | €0–€100/mo |
| RAG chatbot | Answers from your docs, policies, product data | €8,000–€25,000 | €50–€500/mo |
| Integrated agent | Reads and writes: orders, bookings, CRM, tickets | €25,000–€60,000 | €200–€1,000/mo |
Most companies asking for "an AI chatbot" actually want the middle tier: a bot grounded in their own content that stops hallucinating and stops embarrassing them. That's a RAG system — retrieval-augmented generation — and it's a well-understood build in 2026.
What drives the price up
Three things, in order:
- Data quality. If your knowledge lives in clean docs, the bot is cheap. If it lives in PDFs, screenshots, and someone's head, budget for cleanup first.
- Integrations. Every system the bot touches (Zendesk, Salesforce, your order database) adds scope — and adds most of the value.
- Compliance. GDPR-compliant hosting, EU data residency, and audit logging are solved problems, but they're scope. We covered the setup in our guide to GDPR-compliant AI.
When you shouldn't build one
Skip the custom build if your support volume is under ~20 tickets a day, if your FAQ fits on one page, or if you can't name the metric the bot should move (deflection rate, response time, conversion). A €15,000 bot that saves one hour a week is a bad trade.
How long does it take?
A production RAG chatbot ships in 3–6 weeks: one week for data pipeline and retrieval quality, one to two for integration and guardrails, one for evaluation and rollout. Integrated agents take 6–10 weeks depending on how many systems they touch.
Want a fixed quote instead of a range? We scope chatbot projects in a free consultation — see our AI & LLM Integration services or read our LLM integration guide first.
Olio on LinkedIn
