What does an AI agent actually cost a UK small business?

Nobody publishes prices for this. Search for what an AI agent costs and you will find a great many pages explaining that it depends on your requirements, followed by a form.

So here is ours, with the reasoning, including the parts that make us look expensive.

The three things you are actually paying for

An agent has three separate costs, and confusing them is how people end up surprised.

One: getting it to know your business. This is the bulk of the setup fee, and it is mostly not technical. It is working out what your agent should say about your prices, what it should refuse to answer, what happens when someone asks for a discount, and how it should behave when a customer is angry. Writing that down properly takes a few hours with you and a day or so to turn into something an agent can follow.

Two: building and testing it. Connecting it to your website, making it look like it belongs there, and then genuinely trying to break it. This is faster than it used to be — considerably faster — which is why this work is affordable at small-business scale now and was not five years ago.

Three: running it. Hosting, monitoring, and the per-conversation cost of the AI model itself. This is the ongoing monthly figure.

Our prices

£1,200 to set up, then £95 a month.

That covers training on your services, prices and opening hours, the build, the testing, lead capture into your inbox, a monthly report of what it was asked, and retraining whenever your business changes. No per-conversation charge, no message limit that quietly bites in month four.

If you also need the website it lives on, that is £2,400 to build and £35 a month to host, and both together is £3,200 and £120 a month rather than the sum of the parts.

Prices exclude VAT.

What the model itself costs

This is the part people are most suspicious about, so it is worth being open.

The AI model is billed by the amount of text going in and out. For a typical small-business agent handling a few hundred conversations a month, the raw model cost lands somewhere in the low tens of pounds — sometimes less. It is genuinely not the expensive part any more, and it has fallen sharply over the last couple of years.

We build model-agnostically on purpose. The models from Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepSeek each have their moments, and which one gives the best answer per penny changes every few months. Being able to move you without rebuilding anything is worth more over five years than picking the theoretically best one today.

We include the model cost in the £95 rather than passing it through, because a bill that varies with how well your marketing worked is a bill nobody wants. If your volumes go somewhere genuinely unusual we will have a conversation about it — but we will have it before the invoice, not on it.

Where the money actually goes wrong

Three ways businesses overspend on this, none of which is the headline price.

Buying a platform when you needed a feature. There are excellent enterprise agent platforms with per-seat licensing, workflow builders and analytics suites. If you are a nine-person business answering the same four questions, you will use about 4% of it and pay for all of it. The licence is often more per year than a bespoke agent costs to build outright.

Paying per conversation. Fine at low volume, unpleasant when it works. There is something perverse about a marketing campaign that succeeds increasing your software bill. Check how any quote behaves at ten times the volume before you sign it.

Paying to be a beta tester. A lot of agent products are eighteen months old and being iterated on live. If the pricing seems remarkably low, you may be subsidised now and repriced later, or the product may simply not be there in two years.

When it is not worth it

We turn this work down reasonably often. The clearest cases:

• Your enquiries are already answered fast. If someone always picks up within minutes, an agent adds friction rather than removing it.
• Your volume is genuinely low. Under a handful of website enquiries a month, £95 is not obviously better spent here than on being findable in the first place.
• Every enquiry is unique and high-value. Bespoke work where each conversation is a real consultation — the agent can take details, but the value it adds is small relative to the cost.
• You have nothing written down and no appetite to write it. An agent trained on a business that has not decided what it charges will make things up, which is worse than silence. If that is where you are, the useful first step is a consultancy day, not an agent.

A rough way to sanity-check the number

Take the annual cost — for us, £1,200 plus twelve months of £95, so £2,340 in year one and £1,140 after that. Divide by your average job value.

If the answer is “this needs to win me four extra jobs a year to break even” and you are currently missing enquiries across 124 hours a week, the arithmetic is usually straightforward.

If the answer is “this needs to win me forty extra jobs”, it is not, and no amount of demo will change that. We would rather you worked that out from a blog post than from a sales call.