Prices of a Chatbot Agency to build a Messenger bot

First of all, in this post I am talking only about Messenger chatbots, and there is two reason for that:

1. Messenger is the biggest platforms for Chatbots and Chatbot marketing
2. We are a Messenger Chatbot Agency, so that I am quite up-to-date in this field, but not sure about pricing of development on other platforms

Chatbot marketing is quite a new technology, so the market is still about pricing it. That’s why you can hear about very different prices from different chatbot agencies. However, besides that is a new technology, there are two other reason why costs can differ in a wide-range:

1. There are agencies that defines their pricing based on the value they provide and not based on the amount of work they do
2. Not all chatbot developer agency deliver the same quality and they can also be on different levels in the aspect of the service they provide

Value-based pricing versus Solution-based pricing

There are chatbot agencies and developers that tailors their prices in accordance with the value they provide and not the amount of work they have to invest in. It’s a divisive manner, but let’s see how it works!

Solution-based pricing

So I’m sure you know how solution-based pricing works. Solution-based pricing is: prospect sends your a brief, then you’ll estimate the amount of work you’ll have to invest in, then you calculate costs by multiplying your agency hourly / daily rate with the hours or days you’ll have to work.

• Advantage: That’s easy to manage, you don’t have a invest extra effort when you create a proposal.
• Disadvantage: You’ll earn the same amount of money even if you have a very big client

Value-based pricing

However when you create a value-based proposal for the prospect, you’ll get to check how big their company is, how much they sell and spend or marketing. Because your product will actually scale with their company. And this means: the bigger their business is, the more money the chatbot will make or save for them. So you’ll have a much bigger space in your pricing, because it will be just worth for them to buy it even if it’s more expensive.

• Advantage: Of course when a chatbot agency do a pricing like this, they can earn much more, and customer also have a bigger space to bargain, when you’ll still earn more even if they succeeded to decrease your price.
• You have to propose a very strong cause in order to make them accept this. For example you have to give them more than just a common chatbot agency would give. You’ll have to provide full-service and not just development.

Differences in skills and services among Chatbot agencies and builders

Since it’s a new technology, it’s even hard for the customer to understand what they will get for their money. Chatbot agency 1 and chatbot agency 2 might seem fully the same to them, despite they provide a completely different quality and service. For instance at Chatbotize.me, in our Chatbot agency, we’ll give a full-service to all of our chatbots. This means, we don’t just build your bot and hand it over to you, but

1. We’ll analyze your whole business during continuous consultations, and give you advices not only connected to chatbots, but other things too, that could improve your business and increase profit
2. We’ll build your chatbot that will fully fit your business and your processes, and we’l highly focus on conversion-optimalization. We apply professional chatbot copywriters and developers. Our team has been working with chatbots for 2 years al full-time. We also build functions into the chatbot by default and free which you wouldn’t even think of, but will cause a better UX and conversion-rate.
3. You won’t be abandoned after you’ve got your Messenger bot by our chatbot agency. We’ll also create a personalized documentation fully tailored to our company, in which you’ll find all the information what’s necessary for onboarding.

I’m sure that there are many other companies that also provides full-service and provides a quality service to their customers. Whereas there are many chatbot developers out there that will give you a chatbot, but it won’t contain a detailed function-set, there will be a bunch of problems after handover. Because building a bot seems easy but not having experience will cause situations that they are not prepared for. However, an experienced agency would even prevent these kind of issues.

These kind of agencies aren’t even necessarily cheap. So you have to watch out really carefully what will you get for your money, and what features and service the chatbot agency or the chatbot developer promises to you.

The actual cost of a Messenger Chatbot, price of hiring of a Chatbot Agency

When you decided to hire a chatbot agency, and you’re sure that they will give you an outstanding quality service, you’ll be curious about the price of the chatbot. So prospect asks for a proposal, and the chatbot agency creates and sends it over.

What should you expect?

There are different ranges, and I tried to match different level of services to different prices too.

$1000 chatbot – What kind of chatbot should you expect for a thousand dollars?

• Good chatbot agency:
  • you should expect a 10-20 question based interactive user segmentation / quiz which will be the first step of your funnel
  • You should expect a follow up sequence of 10-15 elements offering your products in fully compliance with Facebook policies to make sure you won’t be banned
  • Full conversational design, you only have to give some instructions to the chatbot agency
  • Consultation before, during and after the project
  • Personalized instruction manual for your chatbot – to make sure you’ll be able to start using it
  • Default features integrated without asking it like: small-talk capabilities, subscription settings, persistent menu settings, automated re-engagements and so on.
  • Chatbot will be built on Chatfuel or ManyChat
• Bad chatbot agency:
  • You have to create the conversation script
  • Handing over the chatbot to you without any detailed instructions of how to start using it
  • You get a basic Chatfuel or ManyChat setup
  • Small talk, subscription handling, automated follow-ups are extra features

$5000 chatbot – What kind of chatbot should you expect for five thousand dollars?

• Good chatbot agency:
  • Everything what you would have got with the $1000 chatbot, plus:
  • Personas: developing evaluation algorithms into the chatbot and creating multiple, even 10-20 different user personas
  • Designing different conversations and different remarketing / follow-up sequences for each of the precreated 10-20 different personas
  • Personalisation is the key of the future of marketing. A good chatbot agency don’t just send different offers to different personas, but in order to maximize conversion and user experience at once, they plan and design fully different conversations and follow-up strategy for the different personas
• Bad chatbot agency:
  • Won’t create fully different conversations to 10-20 different user personas
  • Won’t pay attention enough to the key of the future of marketing: personalization.

$10,000 chatbot – What kind of chatbot should you expect for ten thousand dollars?

• Good chatbot agency:
  • Everything what you would have got with the $5000 chatbot, plus:
  • AI: Natural Language Processing system integration – ManyChat and Chatfuel itself cannot handle complex sentences, only keywords. A good chatbot agency would integrate a third-party NLP system to your chatbot that will be capable of handling complex inputs, like whole sentences – up to 20-30 topics
  • System integration: a good chatbot agency would offer data pushes to your systems, like CRM, ERP or mailing software. Thus you’ll be able to collect data from Messenger to your existing systems and able to integrate operation of them.
• Bad chatbot agency:
  • Not sure about the top-class NLP / AI technologies in the world
  • Not sure about system integrations solutions
  • They probably promise you everything, but cannot answer a technical question when you ask how it will be crafted exactly

>$20,000 chatbot – What kind of chatbot should you expect for twenty thousand dollars and above?

• Good chatbot agency:
  • Everything what you would have got with the $10,000 chatbot, plus:
  • Custom-coded chatbots built purely on top of Messenger API or other instant messaging platform
  • That means it won’t depend of the operation of Chatfuel or ManyChat, which is important for corporations where a small blackout could cost lots of money
  • Same chatbot will be run on multiple platforms at the same time (Messenger, Viber, Whatsapp etc.)
  • They will manage the hosting of the code base if needed, but can install it onto a physical environment if the client needs that
  • A good chatbot agency has an own chatbot engine on which they build their fully custom chatbot projects
• Bad chatbot agency:
  • Won’t give an account for the client for the code base
  • Can only host somewhere in the cloud
  • A bad chatbot agency does not really have a chatbot engine, they just develop onto the existing APIs. It means they might be a professional developer agency, but not a professional chatbot agency.