Short answer: a website chatbot for a small business usually runs as a one-time build in the low hundreds, not a monthly subscription that bleeds you for years. The longer answer is below, because the price depends on a few things you should understand before you pay anyone.
You added a "Contact us" page and you still get the same three questions over and over. Your hours. Whether you do X. How much something costs. Do you serve their area. Meanwhile a chunk of people leave your site because nobody answered fast enough.
A chatbot fixes that narrow problem: it answers the common questions right on the page, day or night, and passes the rest to you. The pricing question is where most owners get stuck, because the market is split into two very different models.
Monthly subscription tools. Plenty of chatbot platforms charge a recurring fee. Entry plans are often modest, but the price climbs as you add conversations, team seats, or "premium" features. You don't own anything. Stop paying and the bot stops working.
A one-time build you own. The other model is paying once to have a chatbot built for your site, trained on your own information, and handed to you to keep. No monthly fee to the builder. That's the route Keelflo takes, with the Website Chatbot starting at $40 as a launch price.
Neither model is automatically right. A huge company with a support team may prefer a subscription platform. A small business that wants a steady tool without another recurring bill usually does better owning the build.
When a build is priced per job, the number moves based on how much work the bot has to do. The main factors:
The honest part: hosting or an AI service can carry a small ongoing cost that goes to the provider, not to us. We point you to the lowest-cost option up front, with no markup. So "one-time build" means no fee to the builder, while any third-party running cost stays small and is yours to see.
Whatever you pay, a website chatbot for a small business should do these things well:
If a quote is vague about any of those, ask. A clear builder can tell you exactly what the bot will and won't do before you pay.
Over a year or two, usually yes, because you stop paying a recurring fee. Run the math on a subscription's yearly total versus a single build. The longer you keep the bot, the more an owned build saves.
Not with Keelflo. The price is flat and scoped before you pay. The only ongoing cost that can exist is a third-party hosting or AI fee, which we name up front with no markup.
Yes. It's built on your own information — your hours, services, prices, and policies — so the answers are yours, not boilerplate.
It hands off to you. The goal is to handle the easy, repetitive questions and route anything tricky to a real person.
Tell us your site and the questions you're tired of answering. We'll scope a chatbot and give you one flat price before you pay anything. If a chatbot isn't the right fix for you, we'll say so.