An AI agent is not a chatbot
A chatbot answers questions. An AI agent reads a request, decides what needs doing, then acts in your tools: it sorts an email, fills in a CRM record, prepares a quote, offers a time slot. That last part, acting in your tools, is what makes up most of the price.
Most small businesses are not there yet. According to the France Num 2026 survey, 40% of French small and medium businesses use at least one artificial intelligence tool, but only 3% have paid for custom development. The rest stick to subscriptions.
Between €1,000 and €35,000, depending on what the agent does
Agencies that publish their prices split the market into three tiers, and their price lists broadly agree.
| What the agent does | Advertised build prices |
|---|---|
| A simple agent: an FAQ, one channel or a single process | €1,000 to €3,000 |
| An agent connected to your tools: CRM, calendar, messaging | €3,000 to €15,000 |
| A full system: several agents, your documents, the ERP, voice | €8,000 to €35,000 |
Starting prices and ranges taken from the public pricing pages of 13 French agencies and freelancers, mostly excluding VAT. Pages consulted on 8 November 2026.
The lowest entry price we found was €990 for a first agent limited to one process. A survey of ten providers published on 1 November 2026 by a specialist site gives a median of €4,700 excluding VAT to set up a chatbot or AI agent, with half the prices between €1,950 and €7,900.
What makes the price vary
How many tools it connects to
Each tool the agent has to read or update needs a connection, permissions and test cases. This is the biggest difference between a €2,000 agent and a €10,000 one.
What the agent may do on its own
An agent that suggests and waits for approval is simpler to build and to monitor than one that acts alone. The more it acts alone, the more you need to plan for errors, limits and a log of what it did.
The documents it needs to know
Answering from your catalogue, your terms or your procedures means preparing those documents, then keeping them up to date. Published price lists put this work in the most expensive tier.
The channels
A form on the website, email, WhatsApp or the phone. Voice is the most expensive: one agency advertises its voice agents from €35,000.
Data requirements
Sensitive data, hosting in France, a record of every action: each requirement adds work, and it has to be decided before building, not after.
Using the models costs less than you think
Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral charge by the volume of text read and written, counted in tokens. For a typical exchange, a few pages read and half a page written, the cost depends mostly on the model tier.
| Model tier | 1,000 exchanges a month |
|---|---|
| Small, fast models | under $1 |
| Mid-range models | $2 to $5 |
| The most powerful models | $9 to $18 |
Public prices of Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral as of 8 November 2026, for an exchange of 2,000 tokens read and 500 written.
An agent that uses tools often calls the model several times per request, so multiply these figures by two to five. Even then, 1,000 requests a month usually stay under $100. It is almost never the line that decides.
The real cost is the follow-up
An agent does not stop on the day it goes live. Models change, so do your tools, and someone has to review what the agent does to correct whatever drifts. Advertised plans range from €90 to over €900 a month.
For a simple agent, count €150 to €300 a month. For an agent connected to several tools and closely monitored, more like €500 to €900. Depending on the offer, the plan covers hosting, monitoring, adjustments and sometimes model usage up to a set volume.
Before signing, ask three questions. Who reviews what the agent does, and how often? Who pays for model usage beyond the included volume? And what happens if you end the contract?
At Nuances, agents suggest and a human decides
Since 23 July 2026, AI agents have been working on the website of Nuances, a caterer in Bordeaux, each in its own role: search, content, data, Google listing, code. They run on WebWize's servers. Each week, the lead agent reviews the results and drafts a plan, then I pick the eight priorities. What visitors do not see goes out on its own. What they see waits for my approval, like blog articles, which arrive as drafts.
On Google, clicks over 28 days went from 183 before the agents arrived to 335 from 17 August to 13 September 2026. That increase measures the whole setup, including the audit and the July fixes, not the agents alone. Read the case study
What Nuances shows about price: the "agent suggests, human approves" rule keeps the setup safe, but it has a cost, the review time every week. Count it from the start.
Estimate your agent before asking for a quote
- Pick a single task. Sorting incoming requests, preparing a quote, answering questions about lead times. A first agent that does one thing well teaches you more than three agents half started.
- Count the tools it will read or update. That is the first price driver.
- Decide what it does alone and what it suggests. Starting with approved suggestions costs less and protects your customers.
- Measure the time the task takes today. Hours per week, multiplied by the hourly cost of the people doing it, give a reasonable budget, follow-up included.
- Ask for the cost over a year. The build, the monthly plan and model usage, not just the setup.
At WebWize, the price of each stage is set before we start, and the agent runs on our servers, looked after by the team that built it. See our AI automation work
Sources
Build prices and monthly plans come from the public pricing pages of 13 French agencies and freelancers, and from a survey of ten providers published on 1 November 2026 by a specialist site. We have chosen not to name them. Usage costs come from the official pricing pages of Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral. AI use by small businesses comes from the France Num 2026 survey by the French Directorate General for Enterprise, carried out with Crédoc among 9,655 businesses in March and April 2026.
All pages were consulted on 8 November 2026. Agency and model prices change often.
