--:-- Moscow +14° traffic6 SALE UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAREntry landing page 45 000 ₽ 22 500 ₽ −50%Services website 149 000 ₽ 74 500 ₽ −50%Website for a lawyer 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a beauty salon 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a sole trader 49 000 ₽ 24 500 ₽ −50%Website for a consultant 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Personal brand website 59 000 ₽ 29 500 ₽ −50%Website for an online course 119 000 ₽ 59 500 ₽ −50%Website for a private clinic 129 000 ₽ 64 500 ₽ −50%Website for a cafe 79 000 ₽ 39 500 ₽ −50%Website for a repair service 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Corporate website 199 000 ₽ 99 500 ₽ −50%Telegram lead bot 89 000 ₽ 44 500 ₽ −50%SALE UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAREntry landing page 45 000 ₽ 22 500 ₽ −50%Services website 149 000 ₽ 74 500 ₽ −50%Website for a lawyer 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a beauty salon 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a sole trader 49 000 ₽ 24 500 ₽ −50%Website for a consultant 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Personal brand website 59 000 ₽ 29 500 ₽ −50%Website for an online course 119 000 ₽ 59 500 ₽ −50%Website for a private clinic 129 000 ₽ 64 500 ₽ −50%Website for a cafe 79 000 ₽ 39 500 ₽ −50%Website for a repair service 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Corporate website 199 000 ₽ 99 500 ₽ −50%Telegram lead bot 89 000 ₽ 44 500 ₽ −50% RU|EN
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One hour with a specialist 1 hour
2 100 ₽ Buy
Sales

AI Chatbot for a Website: What It Does and What It Costs

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What an AI chatbot on a website actually does, how it differs from a button-driven bot, what development costs, and how to work out whether it will pay for itself on your traffic.

A chatbot answers your visitor at the moment they are interested — at midnight, on a Sunday, during lunch — and hands your sales team a warm conversation that already contains a name, a task and a contact. Replying within a minute instead of the next morning shifts the share of enquiries that reach a deal more than any change to your homepage will.

What does an AI chatbot on a website actually do?

A modern website bot does four jobs:

  • Answers questions from your own material. Prices, lead times, terms, what a service includes, guarantees — drawn from your price list, contract and service descriptions rather than invented.
  • Qualifies the visitor. Establishes the task, the scale and the deadline, then passes the conversation on with that already established.
  • Captures the contact. Name, phone or messenger, a convenient time to call — and creates a CRM record with the full transcript.
  • Hands over to a person. When a question falls outside its scope it calls a colleague rather than walking the visitor in circles.

How does an AI bot differ from a button-driven chatbot?

A scripted bot moves along a tree of buttons the visitor clicks through. It is cheap and predictable, but any question the script did not anticipate ends at «please choose one of the options».

An AI bot understands a question phrased in ordinary words and answers from your knowledge base. It copes with wording nobody foresaw, but it needs prepared material and firm limits: where it may answer and where it must fetch a human.

The combination that works in practice: AI interprets the question, the answer comes from verified company text, and sensitive topics — discounts, custom lead times, guarantees — are governed by hard rules.

How much does an AI chatbot cost to build?

Guide figures for the Moscow market, quoted in roubles, for small and mid-sized companies:

  • Scripted button bot — from ₽40,000. Contact capture and answers to ten or fifteen standard questions, about two weeks.
  • AI bot on your knowledge base — ₽120,000 to ₽300,000. Price list and service descriptions connected, qualification, CRM records created automatically, three to five weeks.
  • One bot across website and messengers — from ₽250,000. A single script and a single knowledge base serving the site, Telegram and WhatsApp.
  • Ongoing support — from ₽15,000 per month: reviewing conversations, extending the knowledge base, correcting answers.

On top of development sits the cost of the language model itself — typically ₽2,000 to ₽10,000 a month at around a hundred conversations a day. Establish that figure before work starts, alongside the development price.

When does a chatbot pay for itself, and when does it not?

The arithmetic is simple. A site receives 40 enquiries a month and 30 reach a salesperson — the rest write in the evening and do not wait for a reply. The bot answers immediately and carries 8 more through to a qualified enquiry. At an average deal of ₽60,000 and a 20% close rate that is ₽96,000 of additional revenue a month, and a ₽200,000 build returns in two to three months.

It will not pay off in two cases. Fewer than ten enquiries a month — your team answers them anyway and the bot only adds a layer. Or every question is unique and needs a quotation — in which case the bot is useful purely as a contact form, and a ₽40,000 version is enough.

What do you need to prepare before launch?

The material the bot draws its answers from:

  • a price list, or price bands with the conditions that move them;
  • service or product descriptions — what is included, what is not, what the lead times are;
  • frequently asked questions answered the way your best salesperson answers them;
  • terms of payment, delivery, warranty and returns;
  • a list of subjects the bot must not answer on.

The quality of the answers depends on this material far more than on which model you choose. A finished price list and a dozen annotated conversations are worth more than any amount of tuning.

How does the bot connect to your CRM and enquiries?

Every conversation that reaches a contact becomes a CRM record: name, channel, the substance of the request, the transcript and a source tag. Your salesperson opens the record and sees what has already been agreed — nothing needs asking twice.

Urgency is configured separately. If a visitor mentions a fixed date or names a budget above your usual range, the record is flagged and the responsible person is notified in their messenger immediately, not in the morning digest.

Where should you start?

With two numbers: how many enquiries your site receives in a month, and how many of them go unanswered for more than an hour. The gap between them is the money a bot will recover. That calculation takes a couple of days and shows whether you need an AI bot at all or simply a form with a fast notification.