AI chatbot pricing spans three orders of magnitude, which tells you the label is hiding several different products. Here’s the honest breakdown for a small business deciding what, if anything, to buy.
The tiers
- $0–$50/month — DIY widgets: generic chat plugins with light AI. They greet visitors and answer from a FAQ you type in. Better than nothing, but they crumble on real questions ("do you service tankless in Jersey Village?") and rarely connect to your calendar or phones. Visitors can tell, and stop typing.
- $100–$500/month — trained and integrated (the sweet spot): an assistant genuinely trained on your business — services, prices, service area, policies — wired into booking, missed-call text-back, and lead notifications. This is the tier where the thing stops being a widget and starts being a 24/7 employee. It’s where we build for most Houston clients.
- $1,000+/month or five-figure builds: multi-location logic, deep CRM/PMS integrations, custom compliance flows (medical, legal). Justified at scale; overkill for a single-truck operation.
The math that actually decides it
Skip the feature lists and run your numbers: What’s a customer worth? How many inquiries arrive after hours or while you’re working? What fraction currently die in voicemail? For a Houston trade with a $400 average ticket and ten after-hours inquiries a week, converting even three that voicemail would have lost is roughly $5,000/month in recovered revenue against a few hundred in cost. For roofers and HVAC companies, one saved job often covers a year.
What "trained on your business" must include
The tier-two price is only worth paying if the assistant knows your real service area and its exceptions, quotes honest price ranges, follows your triage rules (what’s an emergency, what books normally), hands off gracefully to humans, and pushes structured leads to your phone instantly. Demand a demo on your own hard questions before signing anything.
The uncomfortable comparison
An answering service runs hundreds monthly for message-taking with hold music. A front-desk hire is thousands. The trained-assistant tier undercuts both while working every hour of the year — the labor math, not the technology, is why this category is growing.
We build tier-two assistants as part of a connected capture-and-follow-up system for Houston businesses. Stress-test one right now: ask ours anything, or email hello@mediajunkie.io for pricing mapped to your call volume.