4 min read · updated 2026-10-18
What are you actually buying with a website AI chatbot?
Short answer
A website AI chatbot, as sold here, is a widget that answers up to twenty questions you wrote, collects a name and an enquiry, and emails you. That is $150, delivered in 3–5 working days, with 7 days of fixes. It does not offer calendar slots and it does not answer the phone. Those are the $300 and $500 packages. A widget pointed at a general model, with no approved answers, will invent facts about your business.
The $150 version, item by item
The chat package is deliberately small. It includes the widget on your site, training on up to twenty of your own answers, a prompt for the visitor’s name, contact, and enquiry, an email on every enquiry, and written handover notes.
It does not include live availability, qualification beyond that enquiry, transcripts as a log you browse, or a phone number. If a proposal says “chatbot” and also says “books appointments”, it is at least the $300 package.
Why the twenty answers are the product
The model is not the product. The list is. Hours, service area, what you do not do, how booking works, and what a visitor should do next. Twenty specific answers beat two hundred vague ones, because the assistant has to refuse everything else.
You write them, or you approve them. A developer who drafts them from your site still needs you to say which prices and policies are allowed. That approval is what takes the days, more often than the install.
Buy, build, or leave the widget off
Buy a hosted chat product if you want a generic widget this week and you are happy with its monthly fee and its limits. Build this package if the answers must be yours and the enquiry must land in your inbox with a note of what was asked.
Leave chat off if the site’s problem is that nobody reaches it. A shorter page and one clear next step is the web package, from $180, and it will do more than a chatbot on a page people bounce from. If the same questions are asked on the phone, chat is the wrong first channel.
What it must not do
It must not quote a price that is not in the twenty answers. It must not pretend a person has been booked. It must not keep talking once the visitor asks for a human, a refund, or a complaint. Those go to the email notification and stop. An assistant that “handles the whole conversation” is the expensive kind of cheap.
This is what I do: AI Agents & Voice Assistants — three packages from $150.
