How much does it cost to implement AI in a business in 2026: real breakdown by project type

The question we get every week at SprintMarkt is the same: 'how much does it really cost to add AI to my business?'. Most posts online answer with an 'it depends' wrapped in buzzwords. Here we will be concrete, using our real pricing and an honest explanation of what moves each figure up or down.

Pricing TL;DR (SprintMarkt 2026 rates)

Now we break down what is inside each line, what drives the price and what ROI to realistically expect.

Upfront vs. recurring cost

An AI project has two natures: an upfront spend (development, integrations, training) and a monthly cost that never goes away (LLM tokens, hosting, maintenance, monitoring). Many people only budget the first part and get a surprise three months in.

As a rule of thumb, count on recurring cost between 10% and 25% of the upfront cost per year, split monthly. A 5,000€ chatbot usually runs 40-100€/month in hard costs (API, hosting), plus a maintenance plan from 250€/month if you want someone watching it and improving it.

AI audit / discovery: 490€

The honest first step. Two or three sessions with you, analyzing your processes, looking at your data, and delivering a report with:

- Which processes are good AI candidates and which are not.

- The technical approach we recommend (simple automation, RAG, fine-tuning, agents).

- Estimated investment range and expected ROI order of magnitude.

- Regulatory risks (GDPR, EU AI Act) and prerequisites.

Sometimes the outcome is 'do not do AI yet, tidy up your data first'. That is a service too.

AI training for teams (3h): 750€

Many companies ask for 'a chatbot' when what they really need is for their team to learn to use ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot properly. A three-hour hands-on session on your own business cases usually creates more short-term savings than a technical project.

What it covers: effective prompting, use cases by department, security and privacy best practices, and an internal playbook tailored to your company. We deliver it on-site in Valencia or remotely.

WooCommerce RAG chatbot: from 4,500€

A serious chatbot for eCommerce is not a 'hi, how can I help?' widget. It includes:

- Indexing your catalog, pages and FAQs in a vector store.

- WooCommerce integration to query stock, orders and shipping in real time.

- LLM with guardrails so it does not invent products or promise what you cannot deliver.

- Human handoff when the bot is not confident.

- Analytics dashboard to see what it is asked and what it misses.

From 4,500€ for a standard implementation. Climbs to 7,000-9,000€ with ERP integration, genuine multilingual support or WhatsApp Business API.

Custom AI automation: from 6,000€

This is everything that is not chat: processing incoming invoices with OCR + LLM, classifying support tickets, extracting data from contracts, drafting proposals, summarizing calls, tagging products. Price depends on how many systems need integrating and whether there is a decent API or you need civilized scraping.

Typical cases we run: automating delivery-note entry into an ERP from heterogeneous PDFs (from 8,000€), classifying and prioritizing support emails (from 6,000€), generating SEO product descriptions from technical specs (from 6,500€).

Corporate LLM with RAG: from 12,000€

When a company wants its 'internal ChatGPT' on top of its own documentation, we start at 12,000€ and it climbs quickly. It includes:

- Document ingestion pipeline (Drive, Notion, SharePoint, loose PDFs) with permission control.

- RAG system with scheduled re-indexing.

- Chat interface with history, source citations and user feedback.

- Team-level access control, audit logs and selective deletion.

- Quality and per-query cost monitoring.

From 20,000-30,000€ if there are strong data sovereignty requirements (model deployed in your cloud, not the LLM vendor's).

Monthly maintenance: from 250€/month

An AI agent is not a static brochure. Models evolve, prices drop, your business changes and new use cases appear. Monthly maintenance includes:

- Error and token-cost monitoring.

- Periodic prompt and response-quality review.

- Minor updates and small new use cases.

- Corpus re-indexing when your documentation changes.

- Monthly report with metrics.

From 250€/month for a small agent; a serious corporate LLM starts around 600-900€/month.

What drives price up

Realistic ROI (no fantasy marketing)

We will not promise a 300% conversion lift. What we see consistently in real projects:

- Customer support: 25-40% reduction in first-tier tickets in 3-6 months.

- Sales teams: several hours saved per rep per week on proposal prep and follow-ups.

- Back office: 50-70% reduction in document processing time for structured inputs.

- Marketing / content: significant drafting speed-up, with human review always in the loop.

ROI comes more from time savings and consistency than from magic.

Common mistakes that waste money

Sensible alternatives on a tight budget

Next step

If you want to know exactly what AI would cost in your company, the sensible move is to start with the 490€ audit. You get concrete numbers, an investment range and which project we would start next month if we were you. No obligation to hire afterwards: often the audit is all a small business needs.