What are you actually paying for?
An AI chatbot bill has four parts, whether it sits on your website or on WhatsApp. Ask every vendor to split them out, because a cheap headline price usually hides one of them.
| Cost line | What it covers | How it is priced |
|---|---|---|
| Software or build | Either a SaaS chatbot subscription, or a custom build trained on your products, policies and systems | Monthly plan, or one-time fixed fee |
| AI model usage | The language model that reads questions and writes answers (Claude, OpenAI and others) | Per token, roughly per message |
| Channel charges | Website: usually nothing extra. WhatsApp: Meta’s per-message fees plus your provider’s plan | Per message and monthly plan |
| Running and improving | Reviewing chats, fixing wrong answers, adding new questions, updating prices | Your team’s time or a monthly support plan |
Menu bot or AI agent: which one do you need?
Most of the price difference between quotes comes from this choice. A menu bot shows buttons and follows fixed paths. An AI chatbot, sometimes called an AI agent, understands free-text questions, including Hinglish, and answers from your own data. The AI version can also take actions, such as booking a slot or checking an order, if it is connected to your systems.
| Menu (rule-based) bot | AI chatbot / AI agent | |
|---|---|---|
| How it answers | Buttons and scripted replies | Reads the question and answers from your knowledge base |
| Setup effort | Low; drag-and-drop builders | Higher; needs content, guardrails and testing |
| Handles typos and Hinglish | Only what you anticipated | Yes, naturally |
| Usage cost | Almost none beyond the tool | AI tokens per reply, usually paise to a rupee |
| Main risk | Customers stuck in menus and leaving | Confident wrong answers if not grounded and tested |
| Best for | 3 to 5 predictable journeys, like order status | Varied questions, sales enquiries, support, bookings |
A common pattern that keeps cost and risk low: buttons for the two or three most common journeys and AI for everything else, with a clean hand-over to a person.
How much do ready-made chatbot tools cost?
Indian WhatsApp platforms now sell AI add-ons on top of their monthly plans. Two examples from their pricing pages in November 2026:
- AiSensy sells a WhatsApp AI Agent Builder add-on at ₹1,350 a month for 1,000 AI messages (₹1,215 a month billed annually), and a drag-and-drop chatbot builder at ₹2,500 a month for 5 chatbots. These are on top of the main plan and Meta’s message charges.
- Gupshup lists 1,000 AI messages free every month, then ₹1.00 per AI message, on a pay-as-you-go plan with no platform fee, plus 18% GST.
- Global website chat tools such as Intercom, Tidio and Zendesk also sell AI answers, usually priced per resolution or per seat in US dollars. Check their pricing pages, because per-resolution pricing gets expensive at Indian volumes.
SaaS is the right answer when your questions are simple, your content fits on a few pages and you do not need the bot to touch your own systems. It gets harder when the bot must check stock in Tally, book into your clinic software or pull an order from Shopify with your own rules.
What does a custom AI chatbot cost to build?
A custom build means someone designs the conversations, loads your knowledge (price lists, policies, FAQs, product catalogue), connects the bot to your systems, adds guardrails so it does not invent prices, and tests it on real customer questions. The price depends on scope:
| Scope | What it includes | Silvane price band |
|---|---|---|
| FAQ and lead capture bot | Website or WhatsApp, answers from a knowledge base, captures leads to a sheet or CRM, hands over to a person | Starter: from ₹50,000 build + from ₹15,000/month |
| Sales or booking agent | Everything above plus slot booking, order lookups, payment links, CRM updates, Hindi and Hinglish | Starter to Growth: ₹50,000 to ₹1,20,000+ |
| Multi-channel support agent | Website, WhatsApp and email in one, ticketing integration, escalation rules, reporting | Growth: from ₹1,20,000 + from ₹40,000/month |
If WhatsApp is the main channel, our WhatsApp AI agent cost guide goes deeper on that channel. If the bot has to answer from long documents, read what a RAG chatbot is.
How much does the AI itself cost per message?
Less than most people expect. AI models charge per token, which is roughly three-quarters of an English word. As of November 2026, Anthropic lists Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, and Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 and $0.50 for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. OpenAI’s pricing page shows a similar spread, from cheap small models to expensive flagship ones.
Take a typical chatbot reply: about 3,000 input tokens (the question, recent chat history and the relevant part of your knowledge base) and 300 output tokens. On Sonnet 5.5 that is about $0.009 per reply, or roughly 80 paise at an assumed ₹90 to the dollar. On Haiku 5.5 it is under 5 paise. So 10,000 replies a month costs roughly ₹8,000 on the mid-size model or a few hundred rupees on the small one. A good build uses the small model for easy questions and the larger one only when needed.
What does the WhatsApp channel add?
A website chatbot has no per-message channel fee. WhatsApp does. As of October 2026, Meta charges per delivered message in India: about ₹0.86 for marketing templates and about ₹0.115 for utility, authentication and service messages, with the first 1,000 service messages per business number free each month. Your provider (AiSensy, Interakt, WATI, Gupshup) adds its plan fee and sometimes a markup. Full details are in WhatsApp Business API pricing in India.
One more cost-saver: write your knowledge base in plain language with exact prices and policies. Clear source content lets a smaller, cheaper model answer correctly and reduces the number of hand-overs to staff.
Checklist before you buy a chatbot
- Get software, build, AI usage and channel charges as separate lines.
- Ask what the bot does when it does not know. The right answer is: says so and hands over to a person.
- Test it yourself with 20 real questions from your last month of chats, including Hinglish and typos.
- Make sure the knowledge base is something your team can update without calling the vendor.
- Confirm chats and leads land in your CRM or a sheet you own, not only in the vendor’s dashboard.
- Check consent and data handling under the DPDP Act 2023, especially for health or financial questions.
- Agree on a success measure: share of chats resolved without a person, response time, leads or bookings.
What happens in the first month after launch?
The build price buys you a working bot. The first month decides whether it stays useful. Expect the bot to handle the common questions well from day one and to stumble on a long tail of questions nobody wrote down. That is normal, and it is where the run cost goes.
A sensible first month looks like this. In week one, someone reads every conversation the bot hands over and every answer customers react badly to. In week two, the knowledge base gets the missing answers and the guardrails get tightened where the bot guessed. By weeks three and four, hand-overs should be falling and you will have real numbers: how many chats the bot closes alone, average response time, and leads or bookings captured. Those numbers tell you whether to widen its scope or leave it as it is.
Budget a few hours a week of someone’s time for this, or include it in a monthly plan. Bots that nobody reviews slowly go out of date as prices, policies and stock change, and an out-of-date bot that answers confidently does more harm than no bot.
How Silvane can help
Silvane builds AI chatbots for websites and WhatsApp as part of the AI customer support team service, inside your own accounts. A discovery call and AI audit costs ₹199 for founding members (normally ₹15,000) and the fee is credited to the build. Starter builds start from ₹50,000 with a run plan from ₹15,000 a month; Growth from ₹1,20,000 plus from ₹40,000 a month; Scale is custom from ₹1,00,000 a month. Tools and usage are billed at cost, billing is 50/50, everything is built in your own accounts, you get 30 days of free fixes and 30 days’ notice to cancel. GST is extra.
Sources: Anthropic model pricing · OpenAI API pricing · AiSensy pricing · Gupshup pricing · Meta WhatsApp pricing