HeyPapaya
HeyPapaya
The honest answer is "it depends", but here are the real ranges, the split between setup and usage, what maintenance costs, and how to estimate the ROI before you sign. No magic number, no fine print.
The first mistake is to think of "the price of a chatbot" as a single number. An AI chatbot has two kinds of cost: the setup (a one-off investment to build it and wire it in) and the recurring usage costs (what it consumes each month to run). Conflating the two always leads to nasty surprises. Let's look at them separately.
This is the design work. It covers scoping the use cases, connecting to your content (website, knowledge base, documents), integrating with your tools (CRM, calendar, helpdesk), the guardrails, the automated evaluations and a pilot on real traffic before rollout. At HeyPapaya, a simple first agent starts from CHF 2,500 for a single workflow and up to two integrations. A broader deployment, several agents, multiple integrations, a written outcome guarantee, sits higher, around CHF 11,900. The exact price depends on scope, and we fix it in writing after a free audit, before any work begins.
What pushes the setup up: deep integrations (ERP, custom telephony), a regulated sector, several languages to validate finely, or a large volume of source content to structure. What brings it down: a well-bounded use case, standard tools and content that's already clean.
Once it's live, the chatbot consumes third-party resources, billed at actual cost: language-model tokens (every message sent and received), possibly voice minutes if the agent speaks, plus infrastructure and hosting. For a typical SME, this comes to between CHF 100 and CHF 800 per month per agent. A text chatbot with moderate volume sits at the bottom of this range; a heavily-used or voice agent climbs. We keep these costs predictable with caching (not paying again for answers already computed), model routing (a light model for simple questions, a powerful one only when needed) and capped budgets.
A chatbot isn't a piece of furniture: without upkeep, it degrades. Your offering changes, your content evolves, new questions appear. Maintenance covers prompt and knowledge updates, quality monitoring, adding use cases and performance reviews. Depending on the plan, it starts from CHF 100 per month and includes a monthly review. That's what separates an agent that stays sharp from a bot bought once and abandoned.
A cost means nothing without the gain on the other side. Put two figures down before you decide:
A concrete example: a support team that handles 400 repetitive enquiries a month, at 10 minutes each, spends roughly 66 hours a month on automatable tasks. Even partially deflected, those hours comfortably cover a usage cost of a few hundred francs. That's why we turn down cases where we don't see at least 5× ROI: a chatbot that doesn't move a number has no place.
Volume is the primary factor: more conversations means more tokens, but also more value captured. Multilingualism (FR · DE · IT · EN) barely raises usage costs but takes a little more validation up front. Voice costs more than text per interaction. Finally, wiring the chatbot into your existing stack (Bexio, HubSpot, your calendar) costs a little more in setup but multiplies the value, because the agent can then act and not just answer.
Want to quantify your specific case? That's exactly what the free audit does: we look at your real volumes and you leave with a cost and ROI estimate, not a generic range. For the big picture on the subject, also read our guide to AI for Swiss SMEs.
Book a 30-minute call. We look at your real volumes and you leave with a cost and ROI estimate, not a generic range.