How much does an AI system cost a small business?
What a tailored AI system costs to build and run, what pushes the price up, and the questions to ask any supplier before you sign.
A tailored AI system from us costs a one-off build fee plus a monthly plan. On our public price sheet, the smallest tier (Essential) is €699 to build and €75 a month to run. Plus is €1,499 and €150 a month. Pro starts from €2,999 and from €300 a month, and is only priced after a call because no two Pro systems look alike. All prices exclude VAT. Below we explain what those two numbers cover, what moves a system into a higher tier, and what to ask any supplier, us included, before you sign.
What the build fee and the monthly plan pay for
The build fee pays for studying one workflow in your company and turning it into a small working product. At the simple end that is a single task, such as drafting replies to booking emails or writing a weekly sales report from your figures. At the larger end it is a full system, like an inbox triage agent or a quoting assistant that knows your price list.
The monthly plan keeps it running. It covers hosting, security and updates, monitoring, small changes and support within one working day. It costs about a tenth of the build fee, starts the month after delivery, and can be cancelled with 30 days' notice.
You pay 25% of the build fee when you order and 75% on delivery. We do not run discounts or promotions, so the price sheet is the price, and the final figure is confirmed in writing before any work starts.
To put it in yearly terms: an Essential system delivered in January costs €699 plus eleven months at €75, which comes to €1,524 before VAT in the first calendar year. A Plus system on the same timing is €1,499 plus €1,650, so €3,149. After the first year you pay only the monthly plan.
What pushes a system into a higher tier
We price by what the system does, never by the size of your company. A four-person café and a forty-person exporter pay the same for the same system. What changes the price is the work inside it.
The things that most often add cost are:
- More steps in the workflow. A tool that drafts a reply is simpler than one that reads the email, decides what kind it is, drafts an answer and files it.
- Connections to other platforms, such as your booking tool, accounting software or online shop.
- Extra languages, if the system has to read or write in more than one.
- Built-in specialised agents, automated email flows or an analytics dashboard.
Extras outside a tier are priced per case, because the effort depends heavily on which software you use and how it lets other tools connect to it. We would rather quote after looking than publish a number that turns out wrong for you.
The cheapest way to start is to pick the one task that eats the most hours and automate only that. Our own company grew this way, one real workflow at a time. Once the first system has earned its keep, you know far better what the second one should do.
Monthly plan or one-off handover?
If you do not want a monthly plan, you can take a one-off handover instead. It costs 1.5 times the build fee, the system is set up on accounts you own, and you get 30 days of fixes. For Essential that means €1,048.50, for Plus €2,248.50.
The handover looks cheaper over a few years, and for some companies it is. The catch is everything the monthly plan was doing. Someone on your side has to apply updates, watch that it keeps working, and fix it when a connected service changes how it works. Any running costs on those accounts are also yours to pay directly.
A simple rule: if you have a person in the business who is comfortable looking after software, the handover can make sense. If the honest answer is that nobody would notice it had stopped until a customer complained, keep the plan.
Questions to ask before you sign
These apply to any supplier, whether you buy from us or someone else:
- What exactly is in scope? Ask for the task, the inputs and the output in writing, before work starts.
- What is not included, and how will extras be priced if I need them later?
- Are third-party costs, such as AI model usage or software subscriptions, inside the monthly figure or billed separately?
- Do the prices include VAT?
- Who owns the accounts and the data, and what happens to both if I cancel?
- How quickly do you respond when something breaks, and is that written into the agreement?
- Where is my data processed, and which providers handle it?
On the last point, a supplier based in the EU works under the GDPR, and its privacy policy should list every provider it uses. Ours is at /privacy. Whether your particular use of customer data is allowed is a question for your own legal adviser, since rules on things like recording calls or storing health information vary by country and sector.
If a supplier cannot answer these clearly, that tells you something about how the project will go.
How to get a real number for your business
Start by writing down the one task you would most like to stop doing. For a week, note how often it happens and how long it takes each time. That figure, set against the yearly cost above, tells you quickly whether a system is worth it.
Then, if you want to see what it would cost with us, scope your own system. It asks five quick questions and writes a draft proposal on the spot with the public starting price. It is a draft, not a quote: we send the exact scope and price in writing within two working days. If you would like to see what a finished scope looks like first, our work page has two illustrative examples, a reply drafter for a four-person clinic and a reporting agent for a twelve-person agency.