How much does a chatbot cost and what are you paying for
AI chatbot pricing answers two different questions, and it helps to separate them before you compare offers. The first is how you pay. That can be a flat monthly amount or a usage fee counted per conversation or per message. The second is who does the work. Someone has to connect the catalog, write down your delivery and returns rules, and then correct the bot when it mixes up variants or quotes an old free-shipping threshold.
The two questions move independently. A subscription can be self-service, where you do all the setup yourself, or a managed service, where the vendor does it for you. Managed does not mean you pay per result, and it does not always cost more than a tool you configure yourself. So when you compare two offers, look first at how much work stays on your side and only then at the price.
Per-conversation fees and the month your ad campaign works
Paying by usage feels fair while traffic is small. The trouble starts when traffic grows faster than you planned, for example when a pre-holiday campaign finally takes off and far more people open the chat than usual.
First read what the vendor calls a conversation. A chat resumed after an hour may be counted twice, and a handover to a human may also move the meter. Tidio's public pricing, for example, distinguishes conversations with your staff from conversations with its Lyro AI assistant, so the name of a plan alone does not tell you what the bundle includes.
Then ask for two quotes, one for an ordinary month and one for a month with the campaign you are planning. Also ask what happens when the bundle runs out. Do you pay extra, or does the bot go silent? Be careful with the second answer, because the bundle tends to run out exactly when you have the most customers.
How much does it cost to build a chatbot from scratch
Building your own bot is the third route. You pay a developer to connect a language model to your shop, and then you pay every month for the model itself. Model providers usually charge by the amount of text processed, counted in tokens, so here too the bill grows with traffic.
Then comes maintenance. The catalog changes, the delivery rules change, and someone has to make sure the bot knows. With a custom build that someone is you or a developer billed by the hour. If you want to compare this route with a ready-made service, calculate both over the same period, for example a year, because a one-off build cost spread over twelve months looks very different from how it looks on the first invoice.
Your time costs money too
One item has no invoice and is easy to forget. With a tool you configure yourself, you prepare the knowledge for the bot, test it on your own products, and come back to it after every larger change in your offer. A managed service cuts that work, though it never drops to zero. Someone still has to pass the new rules to the vendor and check that the bot describes your range correctly, because only you know whether a jacket has a membrane.
Say a tool costs PLN 100 a month and you spend two hours a month on it. If you value your hour at PLN 80 for the sake of the comparison, the total is PLN 260 a month. The amounts are illustrative. They show why a cheaper subscription does not have to mean a cheaper bot.
Record a one-off clean-up of your product descriptions separately, since it does not recur every month. Keep one basis consistent too: if one offer quotes net prices and another gross, convert them to the same footing before you compare anything.
When does a chatbot pay for itself
A report titled something like "revenue from chat" tempts you to put it next to the invoice and divide one by the other. That is not enough. The report shows orders linked to a conversation and does not say how many of them exist only because of the bot. Some of those customers would have bought anyway.
Calculate on margin. Suppose the service costs PLN 200 a month, and one extra order leaves you PLN 40 after the cost of goods and variable costs. To cover the service alone you need five orders that would not have happened without the chat. Five purchases linked to chat in a report do not prove that yet.
Count the time you saved separately. Check how many answers you really stopped writing yourself and subtract the time you spend correcting the bot. And if you changed your ads or ran a promotion in the same month, comparing sales before and after the launch will mix both effects.
How much does CartBot cost
CartBot is a managed service on a flat subscription from PLN 50 a month + VAT. Setup and management are included, you pay PLN 0 for tokens and messages, and billing is monthly, with no multi-year contract. The exact amount depends on your catalog and traffic, because a shop with two hundred products and a shop with twenty thousand are different jobs. Scope matters as well, meaning what the bot is meant to do for you. We do not bill on sales results.
Little is left on your side. You send us the current rules of your shop when they change and you confirm facts about your offer. For a quote we need only your shop address and a few sentences about what you want the chat to do. When you accept the setup, ask the bot about a product you know by heart, then place a test order and find it in the report.
In your comparison spreadsheet, enter the amount from the quote you receive. A "from" price in a page heading, ours included, only tells you where the price list begins.