Why there is no single price
AI is not one product. A chat assistant on your website, a tool that reads supplier invoices and an assistant that searches your internal manuals are three different projects. They use different data, connect to different systems and carry different risks. A price that ignores those differences is either padded or will grow later.
What you can do is understand the cost drivers. Once you know them, you can compare offers, reduce scope where it makes sense and spend money where it brings the most return.
What drives the cost
- Number of systems to connect. Reading a PDF and showing the result on screen is simple. Writing the result into Bexio, Abacus, SAP or a CRM, with checks and error handling, takes more work.
- Quality and variety of your data. Fifty suppliers with fifty invoice layouts, scanned delivery notes or handwritten forms need more testing than clean digital documents.
- Languages. Swiss companies often work in German, French, Italian and English. Each language has to be tested with real examples, not only assumed to work.
- Approval and control steps. If people approve what the AI prepares, you need a clear review screen, logs and permissions. This is worth it, but it is part of the build.
- Hosting and data protection requirements. Hosting in Switzerland, separate environments per client or strict access rules add effort and sometimes running costs.
- Volume. Ten documents a day and two thousand a day are different systems, both for model usage and for monitoring.
Typical ranges
The table below shows our own fixed packages. Prices are starting prices in Swiss francs, excluding VAT. They give you a realistic picture of what a step by step approach costs for a small or medium company.
| Stage | What you get | Price from |
|---|---|---|
| AI Discovery | One-day workshop: we review your processes, pick the use cases worth doing and estimate the benefit | CHF 1,200 |
| Pilot | About four weeks: one use case built and tested on your real data | CHF 4,900 |
| Production | The solution connected to your systems, with approval steps, monitoring and training | CHF 12,000 |
| Care | Operation, updates, monitoring and small adjustments | CHF 290 per month |
Larger projects with several systems, many document types or demanding integrations cost more. In that case we split the work into stages, so you only commit to the next step once the previous one has shown results.
Running costs after go-live
Many offers focus on the build and say little about what happens afterwards. Plan for these monthly costs from the start:
- Model usage. Language models are usually billed by the amount of text processed. For a typical SME volume this is often in the range of tens to a few hundred francs per month, depending on volume, document length and the model chosen.
- Hosting. Servers, storage and backups, in Switzerland or the EU if you require it. Swiss hosting can cost somewhat more than a large international cloud region.
- Operation and support. Someone has to watch the system, apply updates and react when a supplier changes its invoice layout. Our Care package covers this from CHF 290 per month.
- Licences of other tools. API access to your accounting or CRM system may require a specific subscription plan.
Estimating payback: a worked example
You do not need a complex business case. A simple calculation on one process is enough to decide whether a pilot makes sense. The following numbers are a made-up example to show the method. Replace them with your own.
- Measure today's effort. An office team enters 600 supplier invoices per month into accounting. Each takes about 4 minutes, so 40 hours per month.
- Estimate the effort with AI. The AI reads the invoice and prepares the booking. A person checks and approves it in about 1 minute. That is 10 hours per month.
- Value the time saved. 30 hours saved at an internal cost of CHF 60 per hour gives CHF 1,800 per month.
- Subtract running costs. Care at CHF 290 plus about CHF 100 model usage and hosting leaves roughly CHF 1,410 per month.
- Compare with the one-off cost. Pilot and Production together are CHF 16,900. Divided by CHF 1,410 per month, the project pays for itself in about 12 months.
If the calculation shows a payback of three years or more, start smaller, choose a different process or wait. If it shows a few months, the process is a good candidate. Also count benefits that are harder to price: faster replies to customers, fewer typing errors, and staff who spend their time on work that needs their judgement.
Hidden costs to watch
- Your team's time. Someone has to provide examples, test results and give feedback during the pilot. Plan a few hours per week.
- Data clean-up. If supplier master data or product lists are incomplete, the AI will expose it. Fixing it is useful, but it takes time.
- Per-user licences. Some off-the-shelf tools look cheap per seat but grow with every new employee.
- Changes in connected systems. When your accounting software or web shop changes its interface, the integration may need an update.
- Lock-in. Ask who owns the configuration, the prompts and the data, and what it costs to leave.
- VAT. All prices here exclude Swiss VAT.
How to keep costs under control
- Start with one process that is repetitive, frequent and easy to measure.
- Test on real data in a pilot before you commit to a full rollout.
- Keep people in the loop. Approval steps reduce risk and make it easier to start early.
- Agree on fixed prices per stage, with clear deliverables.
- Review the numbers after three months and decide on the next step based on facts.
If you want a realistic estimate for your own case, book a free 30-minute consultation by video call. There is no commitment, and we will tell you honestly if a project is not worth it.