How much does an AI chatbot cost to develop?

Short answer

Answered by Ijaz Khan, a senior full-stack developer building SaaS, AI products and scalable backends.

About my experience

A production chatbot grounded in your own data with RAG typically costs $3,000 to $15,000 to build, plus monthly model API costs that usually start under $100 and scale with usage. The build cost is mostly in data preparation, evaluation and guardrails, not the chat window.

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