Four ways it is sold

  • Per seat. A licence for each user, often as an add-on to software you already have. Predictable, but the cost grows with headcount and the assistant knows only what that product knows.
  • Subscription with usage fees. Common for website chat tools: a monthly fee plus a charge per conversation or resolution. Cheap to start, harder to forecast.
  • Day rates. A consultancy bills time. Flexible, but the budget is only as firm as the scope, and scope tends to grow.
  • Fixed price per build. One agreed piece of work for one agreed price, with the scope and the tests written down first.

What actually moves the cost of a build

  1. How many sources. Each export or document set has to be understood, mapped and checked.
  2. How clean they are. Duplicate product codes, inconsistent units and one-off exceptions all take time to agree.
  3. How many rules your team needs written down. The rules are where the value is, and they take conversations to capture.
  4. Whether a live connection is wanted. Integration is a project in its own right. See exports or a live ERP connection.

The ongoing costs to ask about

Ask every supplier for these three, separately: hosting, the AI model provider’s charges, and support or upkeep. Some bundle them, some pass them through at cost, and some leave them out of the first quote. None of those is wrong, but you need to know which you are being offered.

How Socraty prices

To be plain about our own position: one agent is £5,000, both agents are £10,000, each as a fixed price agreed in writing. Half is paid to start and the balance on delivery. Upkeep, covering hosting, small tweaks and monitoring, is optional at £400 to £500 a month. Live system connections and multi-site work are scoped and quoted separately. The detail is on the pricing page.

Comparing quotes fairly

Put each quote on one page with the same headings: what is read, what is tested and by whom, what is excluded, what it costs to build, what it costs each month, and what you keep at handover. Most of the difference between quotes turns out to be in the exclusions.

The ten questions are a good companion to that page.