Every second week someone asks us a version of the same question: should we put one of those AI chat things on the website, and what does it cost? The honest answer has three parts — what a chatbot does for a business like yours, what the market charges, and what you are really buying. Here is all three, with our own numbers in the open.
(We are also documenting how the page this post links to ranks, publicly and as it happens: the SEO case study has the Search Console baseline and every change we made.)
What a site chatbot actually does for a Canberra business
Strip away the demos and a website chatbot does one useful thing: it answers the question the visitor came with, at the moment they have it, instead of asking them to fill in a form and wait.
That sounds small. It is not, because of when it happens. People browse trade and clinic websites in the evenings, on weekends, and in the gaps in a workday — the hours when nobody at your end is going to reply. A visitor at 9:40pm has two options: fill in a contact form and hope, or go back to the search results and open the next three tabs. Most choose the tabs.
For the three kinds of business we get asked about most, that plays out like this:
- A trade — “do you do my suburb”, “how long does a job like mine take”, “are you licensed”, “how far out are you booked”. None of those need you. All of them decide whether the person calls you or the next company.
- A clinic — what you treat, whether you bulk bill, what a first appointment involves, parking, whether anyone speaks the patient’s language. A bot answering those at 10pm is worth a receptionist’s afternoon.
- Professional services — here the visitor is working out whether you are the right kind of firm at all. Filtering out the people who were never a fit is as valuable as capturing the ones who are.
The second useful thing is qualification. A contact form gives you a name and a sentence; a conversation gives you what they run, what they want done and roughly when, before you have spent a minute on it. None of which matters unless it reaches you — which is the part most vendors underplay.
The part that actually changes your week: the emailed summary
On our chatbots, when a visitor leaves their name and email in the chat window, you get an email. Not a notification that “a conversation occurred” — their contact details plus a short AI-written summary of what they appeared to be after, the questions they asked, and their industry if they mentioned it. You open your phone in the morning already knowing which of last night’s enquiries to ring first, and what to say.
It is also why we are strict about what the bot may say about money. Ours is under hard instructions never to invent a price, promise a timeline, or commit you to anything. Where you publish a price on your own website, it may quote that figure exactly as you wrote it and tell the visitor which page it came from — that is your number, not the bot’s. Everything else, it does not guess: it says quotes are prepared personally, asks for their details, and hands the enquiry to you. A pricing question is the most qualified moment in the whole conversation; spending it on a made-up number is the worst trade in this business, and refusing to answer a question you have already answered in public is the second worst.
Who gets reported: the one choice you make
By default — and this is included — you hear about a visitor when they leave their name and email. Somebody who came for an answer, got it, and left is not emailed about. That is deliberate. Most people who open a chat window are not leads, and a bot that treats every one of them as a form to be filled is the thing people close the tab on.
Some businesses want the other setting, and we build it as an option at extra cost: a summary of every conversation, whether or not they left their details. You see the questions people are actually asking, the objections that come up before anyone gets as far as contacting you, and the enquiries that walked away. If your view is that every conversation on your website is worth knowing about, that is a legitimate view and the software does it. It is scoped and priced with you rather than bundled, because it is a different amount of email landing in your inbox every week, and that should be a choice you make on purpose.
What chatbots cost in this market
Published rates as at 2026 fall into two bands, and they are buying you genuinely different things.
DIY platforms — typically around US$19 to US$150 a month. You sign up, paste a script tag, and it trains itself on whatever it can crawl. What you are buying is software: the briefing, the guardrails, the testing and the “why did it tell someone we do that” are all yours, forever, and that is the real price. Watch the message and “AI credit” caps — the plan with the features you want is rarely the plan in the headline.
Managed Australian providers — typically around A$150 to A$350 a month, plus A$500 to A$1,500 setup. Someone else does the configuration, the testing and the updates. The setup fee is the honest part of that bill: getting a chatbot to be right about a specific business is real work, and it is mostly conversation, not code.
(Both are typical published rates, not quotes — prices move, and what a vendor includes at a given number varies a lot.) Be careful with “no setup fee” attached to a 12 or 24-month term: that is a setup fee with extra steps, and one you cannot stop paying.
What ours costs
Try it free for a month. If you keep it: A$1,000 one-off setup — billed only when you decide to continue — and A$100 a month, month to month, with the build, the briefing, hosting, the AI usage behind every reply and updates all included. Fair use is up to 500 conversations a month, well past what a site this size sees; if you ever get near it we will talk rather than send you a surprise invoice.
The order of that matters more than the numbers. Everyone else charges the setup fee first, which asks you to pay for a thing you have never seen working on your own site. We build it, brief it, put it live, and you use it for a month — then you decide, and only then is the setup billed. If it has not earned its place, you say so and you have paid nothing.
How we build and ship one
- A discovery call. Half an hour on what your customers actually ask, what the bot must never say, and what a good enquiry looks like to you. If a chatbot is the wrong tool for your business, this is where we say so.
- We brief it on your business. Services, hours, pricing rules, tone, and what it hands to you rather than answering. The brief is the product — it is the difference between a bot that helps and one that embarrasses you.
- You test it on your own site, talking to it like a customer would. Anything that reads wrong, you tell us and we change the brief, usually the same day.
- It goes live, in days. Not weeks — there is no platform to provision.
- We tune it from real chats. Visitors ask things nobody predicts. We read the first few weeks with you and keep tightening it. Included, permanently.
We build in-house. The chatbot running on this website is our own software calling Claude directly — no third-party chatbot platform underneath, no reseller margin, no vendor whose pricing and roadmap you inherit. The person changing your bot’s brief is the person who wrote the software, in your timezone, which is why “can it stop saying that?” is a same-day answer rather than a support ticket. It also means you can judge the product before you buy it: the chat button on this page is exactly what we would put on your site.
Four questions to ask any chatbot vendor
Whoever you end up going with — and it does not have to be us — ask these.
1. Can I try it before I sign? Not a canned demo — can you talk to a bot configured for a real business and try to break it? If a vendor will not let you push on the product, that tells you what they expect you to find.
2. What happens after hours, exactly? Where does an enquiry go at 11pm — a dashboard you have to remember to check, or your inbox? Ask to see the actual email. A lead that lives in someone else’s dashboard is a lead you will find on Thursday.
3. Who owns the conversations, and where do they live? Ask where the data is stored, who can read it, whether it trains anything, and what happens to it if you leave. Ours are stored in a database we run for your site on Cloudflare, the conversation goes to Anthropic’s API to generate each reply, and it is not sold, shared with advertisers, or pooled with anyone else’s.
4. What does “AI” actually run on here? There is a real difference between a keyword-matching flowchart with “AI” in the marketing and software built on a current model with proper guardrails. Ask which model, ask what stops it inventing things, and ask what it is forbidden from doing. If the answer is vague, the guardrails are too. The same question is worth asking of any automation you are sold — we wrote about how we decide which steps actually need AI, and how often the honest answer is that a step needs plain code instead.
And if you are comparing on price, ask what is not in the monthly figure — setup, message caps, extra channels and change requests are where the number grows.
If the missed enquiries are arriving by phone
A chatbot only catches the people who are on your website. Plenty of Canberra trades and clinics lose more to the calls that ring out during a job or after closing, and that is a different product: our AI receptionist answers your business line 24/7 in English, Korean or Chinese, transfers the call to your team when someone is available, takes a structured message when nobody is, and emails you a summary of every call. There is a live voice demo on that page — you can ring it and judge it the same way you judge the chatbot here.
A short FAQ
Will it make things up about my business? It answers from the brief we write with you, and is instructed to say “I’m not certain — that’s one for the owner” rather than guess. The bigger protection is the list of things it must never do: no prices, no timelines, no commitments, nothing off-topic.
Does it replace my contact form? No, and it should not. The form stays for people who prefer it; the chatbot catches the ones who were never going to fill it in. If a visitor wants a human it hands over — asks for a name and email, says you personally read every enquiry, and stops selling.
Does it work in other languages? Ours answers in English, Korean or Chinese, following whichever language the visitor writes in. For a Canberra business with a multilingual customer base, that is usually the feature people did not know to ask for.
How much of my time does it take? The discovery call, then an hour or so reading its answers and telling us what to change. After that, the occasional “can you make it say X instead”.
Where to start
If you are curious rather than convinced, talk to the bot on this page — it is briefed on Connect Your Way exactly the way yours would be briefed on you, which makes it the fastest way to judge whether this is worth A$100 a month to your business. Then have a look at AI chatbots Canberra for what is included, or get in touch and we will book the discovery call. The first month costs nothing, so the worst case is that you learn what your visitors have been trying to ask you.