Ease AISearch this question and you will get two kinds of answer. American agency blogs quoting $75,000 to $150,000. And Canadian agency pages saying "every business is different — book a call."
Neither is useful if you run a twelve-person clinic in Oakville and want to know whether this is a $5,000 decision or a $50,000 one.
So here are actual numbers.
What Ontario agencies publish
Of ten AI and automation agencies competing in the Ontario market, five publish price ranges. Here is what they say, in Canadian dollars:
| Agency | Project range | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT.ca | $3,500 – $25,000 | not published |
| Kaxo | $5,000 – $25,000 | not published |
| Builts AI | $8,000 – $30,000 | $500 – $2,500 |
| The Automators | "low thousands" and up | not published |
| Ease AI | $3,500 – $35,000 | $500 – $2,000 |
The consensus is tighter than you might expect: roughly $3,500 to $30,000 per project, with $5,000 to $25,000 as the dense middle, and maintenance retainers between $500 and $2,500 a month.
Three independent sources landing in the same band is reasonably good evidence that the band is real.
Why American figures are so much higher
If you have read that chatbots cost $75,000 to $150,000, that figure is not wrong — it is measuring something else.
Those benchmarks come from enterprise engagements: custom model work, deep integration into legacy systems, regulated industries with compliance overhead, and procurement processes that add cost of their own. Healthcare implementations carrying HIPAA obligations genuinely do start around $50,000 and climb.
What has changed is that the tooling underneath the common use cases has improved enormously. A chatbot that answers questions about your services, checks availability and books an appointment is now a well-understood build, not a research project. The price collapsed because the difficulty did.
If you are being quoted six figures for something that sounds like it should cost five, ask precisely what is making it expensive. There may be a real answer. There may not.
What drives the number
Four things, roughly in order of impact.
Integration. A chatbot that only answers questions is cheap. One that reads live availability from your booking system, writes the appointment back, and triggers a confirmation is doing real work against systems that were not designed to be automated. This is usually the largest single cost, and it varies enormously depending on whether your software has a sane API or whether someone has to work around it.
Scope of knowledge. Answering eight common questions accurately is a small job. Answering anything a customer might ask about a 400-product catalogue, correctly, and declining to answer when it does not know — that is a much bigger one. The second half of that sentence is where the cost is.
Escalation and exception handling. What happens when the conversation goes somewhere the system should not handle? Building sensible handoff, and testing it against the awkward cases, is unglamorous work that separates a system you can leave running from a demo.
Compliance. For an Ontario clinic under PHIPA, or a law firm with confidentiality obligations, there is genuine design work in keeping regulated information out of automated systems entirely. It is not optional and it is not free.
What you should actually expect to pay
For most small and mid-sized Ontario businesses:
- $3,500 – $8,000 — one chatbot or one automated workflow, integrated with tools you already use, live in two to three weeks
- $8,000 – $20,000 — several connected automations, or a chatbot plus the workflows behind it, with a written process diagnostic first. This is the most common engagement
- $20,000 – $35,000 — multi-department work, phased, with measurement at each stage
- $500 – $2,000 a month — optional ongoing support. Plenty of businesses do not need it
Add HST. Third-party software licences, where a project needs them, should be billed at cost and named explicitly — not buried.
The part most people miss
Ontario's DMAP grant provides up to $15,000 at a 50% match, and it explicitly funds hiring an external consultant to produce a digital modernization and adoption plan.
For an eligible business, that materially changes the arithmetic. A $10,000 engagement can cost you $5,000. It is administered by the Ontario Centre of Innovation, it is first-come first-served while funds last, and it is open to Ontario for-profit businesses with 1 to 499 employees.
We reviewed ten agencies in this market. Not one of them mentions it anywhere on their site. Some are still offering help with CDAP, a programme that closed in February 2024.
Eligibility is decided by the province, not by any consultant, and nobody can promise you will qualify. But it takes ten minutes to find out, and it is the single largest lever on what this actually costs you.
Two questions worth asking any agency
"What is the price, and what is the date?" If the answer requires two more calls, that is information about how the project will go.
"What would make you tell me not to do this?" An agency that has no answer to that question has never told anyone not to do it.
Our full pricing is published here, and the ROI calculator shows its arithmetic so you can argue with it. If you want a number for your specific situation, describe the problem and I will give you one.