Seven things drive what a chatbot costs: model usage per answer, how the vendor counts a conversation, indexed pages, re-crawls, extra languages, WhatsApp platform fees and per-seat charges. Knowing which ones apply to you is how you compare two quotes that look nothing alike.
You have two quotes. One is ₹1,000 a month, the other is ₹14,000, and both vendors describe the same thing. Neither of them is scamming you. They are billing for different underlying costs, and one of them has bundled a platform fee you have not noticed yet.
Here is what sits under the number, so you can ask about the parts rather than argue about the total.
The cost of producing one answer
Every answer runs a language model, and models are billed by the volume of text in and out.
For a chatbot grounded in your content, the text going in is not just the visitor's question. It carries the passages retrieved from your website, plus instructions, plus the earlier turns of the conversation. A three-line question can arrive at the model as two pages of context, which is why "it's only a short question" does not describe the cost.
Two levers move this and neither is under your control at purchase time: which model the vendor runs, and how much of your content they stuff into each request. A vendor running a cheaper model with tight retrieval has a genuinely lower cost per answer than one running a frontier model over your whole site, and the price difference between those two choices is large.
I am not going to publish per-token figures here; they change often enough that a number in an article is a liability. Ask the vendor which model tier they run, and treat "we use the latest AI" as a non-answer.
What counts as one billable unit
This is where quotes stop being comparable.
A message is one exchange. A conversation is a bundle of them, and every vendor draws the boundary somewhere different: some close it after thirty minutes of silence, some after twenty-four hours, some when the visitor closes the tab. A session may be counted even when nobody types. A resolution is a conversation the vendor decides ended without a human.
If your average enquiry runs six turns, a per-message plan and a per-conversation plan differ by roughly six times for identical traffic. Ask for the definition in writing before you compare rupees to rupees.
Then ask what happens at the limit: does the bill grow, or does the service change behavior? A plan that keeps answering and invoices you afterwards is a different risk from one that stops answering and keeps taking leads.
Content, crawls and re-crawls
Storing your content for retrieval costs something, and the cost is not the megabytes. Every page has to be processed into passages and embedded, and that happens again on every re-crawl.
So two things drive it: how many pages the vendor indexes, and how often they re-read them. A 40-page site re-crawled daily is more work than a 400-page site crawled once and never touched. This is why crawl allowances show up as plan limits, and why re-crawling is often capped rather than continuous.
For most small businesses the honest number of pages worth indexing is small. Pricing, services, delivery, returns, contact, FAQ and a handful of service pages. Paying for a 1,000-page allowance to cover a site whose useful content fits on eight pages is a common way to overspend. What a crawl actually finds is usually less than the page count suggests.
Languages, seats, integrations and the middlemen
Extra languages are a real translation job over your whole knowledge base, not a toggle. Whether that is included, priced per language, or unavailable is worth checking against how your customers actually write to you.
Support seats are the old live-chat pricing model, and it survives in tools built for support teams. If a plan charges per agent, adding your office manager to the dashboard costs money, and you will find yourself sharing a login, which is worse.
Integrations carry two costs: the vendor's connector fee, and the setup work. A CRM sync quoted as "included" often means the connector exists and somebody still has to spend a day mapping fields.
Setup and onboarding fees deserve a direct question: what do I get for this, and what happens if I do it myself?
Currency and tax move the number after you sign. Foreign tools priced in dollars drift with the rupee, and a plan you budgeted at ₹2,400 becomes ₹2,600 without anyone changing the price. GST applies, and how it applies to an overseas vendor differs from a domestic one, which is a question for whoever files your returns rather than for a blog post.
An agency in the middle adds its margin. That is fair; they are doing the content work and answering your calls. Ask what the underlying platform is, so you know what you are paying them for. The agency side of that arrangement is worth understanding from the buyer's seat.
The WhatsApp line nobody quotes upfront
If WhatsApp is in scope, Meta charges for conversations through the WhatsApp Business Platform, at rates that vary by conversation category and country. Those charges are yours regardless of which vendor you buy from, and they sit on top of the vendor's own fee. Most vendors' solution providers add a markup as well.
This routinely surprises businesses who compared a WhatsApp bot with a website widget on the vendor's price alone. The channel comparison goes through what else differs, because cost is not the only reason to pick one.
Estimating your own number
Do this before you take another sales call.
Count the enquiries your business actually received last month, from the inbox, the phone log and WhatsApp. Not visitors. Enquiries.
Multiply by the turns a typical enquiry takes. Six is a reasonable starting assumption for a pre-sales question, and you can check it against your own WhatsApp threads.
Add your worst month, not your average one, because that is when a usage-priced bill hurts.
List the pages on your site that genuinely answer something. That is your crawl requirement.
Decide whether you need a language beyond English, and whether you need WhatsApp at all in the first year.
Those five numbers turn a vague comparison into a specific one, and they let you ask a vendor the only question that matters: at my volumes, what is my bill in the third month? What Chatterbox charges is set out plan by plan, in rupees, if you want a worked example to check your estimate against.