The price of an AI agent is more than its subscription. Before comparing quotes, define one job, how often it runs and what a person must check. Ask for setup and ongoing costs separately, using the same workload in every proposal.
Do you need an agent, a chatbot or a simple automation?
For moving known fields between two apps, a fixed integration may be enough. For answering approved website questions, consider a chatbot. An agent becomes relevant when a task needs to interpret information and choose its next steps. More autonomy also creates more work to test and supervise. Start with the simplest option that completes the job.
What should the quote include?
Separate discovery and setup; connections and data preparation; model usage; platform and hosting charges; monitoring and maintenance; and staff review. Ask which items are fixed, which vary with usage, and which are excluded. A vendor subscription is not a complete implementation price.
Calculate the monthly cost for your own workload
Use: fixed monthly charges + usage charges + human review + maintenance. Include failed attempts and retries when estimating usage. Compare this with your current cost per correctly completed task, including corrections. Time freed up is not automatically money saved.
An illustrative monthly budget
Suppose you process 1,000 requests a month. Assume $100 in fixed charges and $0.05 in usage per request. If 200 requests need three minutes of review at an assumed $30 per hour, review costs $300. That is $450 a month before setup and maintenance. If every request needs the same review, the total becomes $1,650. These are invented inputs to demonstrate the calculation, not market prices or QA Digital pricing.
Decide what needs approval before it runs
Write a short action list: what the system may read, what it may draft, and what it may change. A useful starting point is to let it prepare a draft while a person approves sending it or changing a customer record. Set a limit on repeated attempts and a clear route for failed tasks. Test what happens when the reviewer is absent; silence should not count as approval.
What should you ask before paying?
Ask the supplier to demonstrate one real workflow with representative data and exceptions. Request the setup scope, expected monthly workload, usage assumptions, review responsibilities, support terms and a way to export your records. Agree how to stop the workflow and who will investigate a failure. Choose based on correctly completed work, not the number of automated actions.
Sources and further reading
