AI Chatbots for Small Business

• Entry tier - NZ$20-80 / AU$20-80 per month. Plug-and-play chatbots using tools like Tidio, Intercom starter, Crisp.
• Mid tier - NZ$150-600 / AU$150-600 per month. Properly configured, trained on your documentation, with live-handoff.
• Custom tier - NZ$15,000-80,000+ upfront. Bespoke conversational systems tied to your business data.

Count how many support or sales enquiries come in that could be answered from your existing FAQs. Multiply by time per answer. Multiply by fully-loaded hourly cost (NZ$45-65 / AU$45-65 per hour).

If the weekly cost exceeds the monthly price of a mid-tier chatbot, the subscription pays for itself inside the first month.

• High-traffic service websites.
• Service businesses with predictable FAQs.
• E-commerce stores.
• Businesses with after-hours enquiries.
• Multi-location operators.

• Consultative, relationship-first sales.
• Low-traffic websites.
• Compliance-heavy advice (legal, medical, financial).

• Trained on your actual documentation.
• Knows when it doesn't know, and routes cleanly to a human.
• Captures leads even when it can't answer.
• Responses sound like your brand.
• Someone reviews conversations weekly and updates training.

Most chatbots fail on the fifth point. Setup is a day. Ongoing maintenance is what makes it good six months later.

These five points aren't theory - they're what we learned building Hello Norg, our own AI chatbot platform for businesses on Facebook Messenger. Most chatbot failures aren't technical. They're configuration failures dressed up as technology problems.

• What happens to our conversation data?
• How do we update the training when our pricing or services change?
• What's the handover to a human actually like?
• Can we see a realistic demo using our own documentation?
• What does the bill look like if our traffic doubles?

Subscription wins when your needs are standard. Custom wins when the chatbot needs to talk to your proprietary data. Break-even: if your monthly subscription is pushing past NZ$600-800 / AU$600-800 and still not doing exactly what you need, a custom build usually pays back inside 18 months.