AI Chatbot Development Agency

Grounded support, sales, or internal copilots — one channel, human handoff, cost caps. Not a hallucinating widget.

An AI chatbot agency should ship a grounded product: a corpus, citations or at least sources, a human handoff, and a bill you can predict. We do not ship personality widgets that invent refund policy.

If the answers live in documents, it is a RAG product. If they live in a short FAQ, it is retrieval-lite. See /ai/ai-chatbot-mvp.

Timeline: 21–35 daysPrice: From $3,460Fixed price — no hourly billing

Why ai chatbot development is easy to get wrong

Hallucinated pricing and legal answers

No handoff — users rage-quit into email anyway

OpenAI key in the frontend

One bot trying to do support + sales + internal ops

What we build

One channel

Site widget or Slack — not both in v1.

Grounding

Help center, policies, or RAG over uploads.

Handoff

Escalate to a human with transcript.

Caps

Rate limits and usage logs.

Typical features in v1

Tenant-safe

User A cannot retrieve User B’s docs.

Eval set

20 questions you actually care about.

Development process

1

Scoping call

30 minutes. We lock the v1 loop, platforms, and a fixed price.

2

Design sprint

Days 1–5. Core screens and data model. You approve before heavy build.

3

Build sprint

Days 6–18. Daily Slack updates. Scope cuts happen in the open.

4

Launch & handoff

QA, deploy or store submission, repo access, two weeks of fixes.

Recommended stack

  • Next.jsChat UI
  • OpenAI / AnthropicModel
  • Postgres + vectorsCorpus when RAG

What you get

  • Chat UI
  • Corpus / FAQ pipeline
  • Handoff
  • Usage logs
  • Source code

Planning resources

FAQ

Custom GPT vs your chatbot?

Custom GPTs are fine for internal demos. A product needs your auth, your host, and your meter.

Intercom / Zendesk instead?

Use them if you already live there. We build when you need owned UX or RAG over private docs.

How much?

Same floor as other AI MVPs when the corpus is small. RAG over messy docs is a custom quote. See /ai/ai-mvp-cost.

Related services

Start your MVP

Free 30-min scoping call. Fixed price quote after we write the v1 list.

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