What does an AI agent cost for a small business in Belgium?
In Belgium, an AI agent for a small or medium business is paid in two parts: a one-off setup fee, from €350 to €1,200 depending on the agent, then a monthly subscription between €100 and €550. An FAQ widget on a brochure site starts at €350 setup and €100 per month. A full email secretariat reaches €500 setup and €240 per month. Services backed by a media budget, such as paid campaign management, start at €1,200 setup and €550 per month, advertising spend excluded: that budget goes straight to the platforms, with no agency margin. These are the published Flows Studio rates for an agent that is deployed, hosted and supervised, with no licence to add on top.
Three pricing models coexist, and they do not compare
The first difficulty when asking for a price is that three very different offers answer to the same word. Comparing their figures without telling them apart leads to the wrong decision every time.
- Day rate. An agency bills development days, between €600 and €1,200 a day in Belgium. The budget is open ended, maintenance is not included, and the result belongs to you. Suited to a unique, complex need, expensive for a standard one.
- Self-service licence. A platform bills per seat or per conversation, often €30 to €300 a month. The advertised price excludes configuration, knowledge base writing and integration, which stay with you or with a contractor.
- Deployed and supervised package. A one-off setup, then a subscription covering hosting, model usage, supervision and fixes. That is the model described in the grid below.
A quote at €90 a month and a quote at €250 a month therefore cannot be compared until the question of configuration and supervision is settled. In the first case, it usually sits with you.
The grid, agent by agent
| Agent | Setup | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| FAQ Widget | €350 | €100 |
| Instagram Assistant | €375 | €125 |
| WhatsApp Assistant | €400 | €150 |
| Concierge Widget | From €500 | €150 |
| Email Secretariat | €500 | €240 |
| B2B Emailing | €500 | €250 |
| SEO Agent | €550 | €400 |
| Paid Social | From €1,200 | €550 |
| Custom agent | On request | On request |
Amounts in euros, excluding VAT. This table is generated from the same grid as our quotes: the public page and the commercial document cannot drift apart.
Setup is not an entry fee. It pays for real, dated work: taking stock of your existing content, writing the knowledge base, tuning the tone of voice, regression testing and going live. It is also the part that decides whether the agent answers correctly, long before the choice of language model does.
What the subscription covers, and what it does not
- Included: hosting, language model usage whatever the conversation volume, answer supervision, knowledge base corrections, technical updates and activity reporting.
- Not included: the advertising spend of a paid campaign, redesigning the site that hosts the agent, integration with a proprietary business tool that exposes no interface, and content production beyond the stated package.
The real cost is measured in hours given back
A price says nothing until it is set against the time it frees up. The method we apply in our offers rests on three numbers written down in black and white: a monthly volume, a unit time, a loaded hourly cost. The reader must be able to redo the arithmetic without us.
| Profile | Gross monthly | Loaded hourly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Administration, secretariat | €3,000 | €32/h |
| Coordination, office manager | €3,800 | €44/h |
| Owner, self-employed | Case by case | €60/h floor |
Method: annual gross multiplied by 1.5 in the private sector (employer social contributions, holiday pay, year-end bonus, statutory insurance, payroll office), spread over roughly 1,550 worked hours a year. These are discussion floors, not sector averages.
An example, on the cheapest agent in the grid. An active brochure site receives 120 repetitive questions a month. Each one costs 4 minutes to whoever handles it, that is 8 hours a month. At €32 loaded per hour, those hours are worth €256. The FAQ widget subscription costs €100. Net gain is €156 a month, and the €350 setup is paid back in 2.2 months.
Volumes are deliberately taken at the low end. A business receiving twice as many repetitive questions, which is common in hospitality and wellness, halves that payback. A business receiving thirty a month does not need an agent, and it is better said at the quote stage.
Bundles: the discount applies to setup, never to the subscription
| Bundle | Agents | Setup discount | Combined monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| A — Starter | FAQ Widget + WhatsApp | 15 % | €250 |
| B — Growth Network | FAQ Widget + WhatsApp + Instagram | 20 % | €375 |
| C — Growth Secretariat | Concierge + Email Secretariat | 20 % | €390 |
| D — Full Concierge | Concierge + WhatsApp + Instagram + Secretariat | 25 % | €665 |
The discount applies to the sum of the setup fees. Subscriptions stay at full price, because they pay for a real recurring workload that does not shrink just because several agents are deployed.
It is a deliberate choice and it holds up in a meeting: discounting the monthly fee would mean funding supervision out of the setup margin, and therefore making the quality of follow-up depend on the pace of new signings. The discount applies where the work is genuinely shared, in deployment.
The costs quotes forget to mention
- Writing the knowledge base. The most underestimated item by far. If the quote does not mention it, it will land on you, and it represents several days of internal work.
- Media budget. A paid campaign service never includes buying the ad space. Check that the line exists separately.
- Recovery after an incident. Ask what happens if the agent answers wrongly on a Friday evening: the correction turnaround and its cost should be written down.
- Reversibility. Do your content and your conversations belong to you, and in what format do they leave the day you do? A vague answer is a future cost.
- Compliance. Processing personal data requires a data processing agreement and a list of sub-processors. Their absence is not free, it is simply billed later.
Is there a minimum commitment?
Yes, and it is negotiable. Terms run from three to thirty-six months, and a longer commitment lowers the monthly fee, in exchange for visibility on the supervision workload. The exact scale sits in the quote, because it depends on the number of agents deployed and the observed volume. What does not vary: setup is due at signature, not at go-live, and the first month of subscription is free on most offers. In practice, a business signing early in the month pays its setup, uses the agent for a full month, and only starts paying the subscription in month two.
Does the price change with the number of conversations?
No. The subscription covers language model usage whatever the volume, with no tiers and no per-conversation billing. This is a budget legibility choice: a small business cannot steer a cost line whose amount depends on the success of its own marketing. The trade-off is an entry price slightly above a usage-based licence, whose advertised figure assumes low volume. Over twelve months and at real volume, the package almost always works out cheaper, and above all it is predictable from day one.
Does a five-person company have any business spending this?
It comes down to a single figure, the volume of repetitive enquiries. Below roughly thirty identical questions a month the arithmetic does not hold, and we say so at the quote stage rather than after signature. Above a hundred, the agent pays for itself in two to three months on reclaimed time alone, and the real effect exceeds the avoided cost: enquiries arriving at night and at weekends get an answer, which was impossible with five people. The right question is therefore not company size but how repetitive the inbox is.
How does that compare with a self-service chatbot?
A self-service platform often advertises €30 to €100 a month, and that figure is accurate. What it excludes is the work that separates a useful agent from a disguised form: taking stock of content, writing the knowledge base, tuning the tone, testing, then correcting wrong answers week after week. That work exists either way. The only question is who does it. Counted at a realistic internal hourly cost, that time usually exceeds the advertised price gap within the first quarter, and it comes out of a week that was already full.
Agents covered on this page
Each page details the deployment, the pricing and a live demonstration.