How much does an AI chatbot for e-commerce cost

The short answer

For a mid-sized e-commerce, an AI assistant connected to the catalogue costs between a few tens and a few hundred euros a month. Flow-e sits in that range: €99 a month with 100 conversations and 500 AI searches included, €249 with 250 conversations and 2,500 searches, plus a free plan to try without a card.

The range is wide because underneath the fee there are three different pricing models, and the model matters more than the figure.

The three ways you get charged

Per agent. You pay for every person on the team using the tool. It is the model inherited from help-desk software: it makes sense when the value is in the agents' work, much less when the work is done by automation. The paradox is well known: the more the AI resolves on its own, the fewer seats you need, and the bill falls for reasons unrelated to usage.

Per resolved conversation. You pay only when the assistant closes a case without human intervention. On paper it is the most outcome-aligned. In practice everything hinges on the definition of «resolved», which the vendor writes: if the customer does not reopen within n days? if they do not ask for an agent? Worth reading before signing.

Monthly fee with an included bundle. A monthly price covering a number of conversations, plus a rate for extras. Predictable and checkable — provided it is clear what gets counted.

What a «conversation» is, and why it changes the bill

It is the question that moves the quote more than any discount, and almost nobody asks it.

If the unit is the message, a customer who writes five times consumes five units, and the bill depends on how talkative people are. If the unit is the conversation, that same customer consumes one.

In Flow-e the unit is the conversation: the whole dialogue with one customer, up to 20 interactions. A customer who asks, rephrases, asks for a comparison and then says thank you remains one conversation. If 3 interactions or fewer are enough, the conversation costs 50% less.

AI searches in the site bar do not open a conversation: they are counted separately, with an allowance included in the plan and a rate beyond it. Keyword search is always included: the AI search starts on its own only when the phrase describes a need (a budget, a recipient, a use), and is counted only then. Extra actions, such as image search (5 cents each), have their own price outside the bundle.

What Flow-e costs

Prices excluding VAT, no lock-in. Every product variant counts as one catalogue product. You choose once whether to pay by card or through the Shopify App Store.

How to estimate your store's spend

A worked calculation, with invented numbers and real arithmetic. For simplicity: no half-price short conversations, AI searches within the included allowance, no extra actions.

A store with 20,000 visits a month. If 1.5% open a conversation — a plausible order of magnitude for a widget visible on every page — that is 300 conversations a month.

On Pro: €249 fee, 250 conversations included, 50 extra at €0.50 = €25. Total €274 a month.

On Starter the same volume would cost €99 + 200 × €0.70 = €239: less than Pro, but with the 5,000-product catalogue limit. Which is why the plan is chosen on catalogue size before traffic.

The number to hold alongside is what those same 300 requests cost you today, handled by hand. No refined estimate is needed: average time per answer and the hourly cost of whoever answers will do.

The cost that is not on the price list

Setup. On Shopify with Flow-e it is about five minutes and no technical work. Other tools may mean initial configuration, catalogue import, writing the answers.

Maintenance. This is the heavy line, and it never appears in comparisons. A rule-based assistant must be updated by hand whenever something changes; one connected to the catalogue follows the catalogue. The right question for a vendor: when I add a hundred products, what do I have to do?

Leaving. What it costs to stop. If the widget switches off with a toggle and the data exports, the cost is zero; if it takes a theme edit to remove a snippet, it is not.

When it does not pay off

On very small catalogues, where the customer sees everything on one screen, and on low-traffic stores: any monthly fee divided by twenty conversations gives a cost per conversation that will not survive comparison with a hand-written reply.

The threshold is not a universal number, but the reasoning is always the same: how many requests you really get, and what they cost you now.