AI Cost in the UK (2026): What AI Agents, Consultants, Developers, Chatbots and AI Receptionists Cost, in Pounds

On 9 October 2026 we read 175 answers that AI assistants gave to 19 cost questions UK buyers ask. For "How much does it cost to build a custom AI agent?" we read eight answers, and the eight small-firm pages they cited most were all cost guides. We opened seven of them the same day. The eighth sat behind a bot check, so we did not read it. All seven priced in US dollars. Across those seven pages we counted zero pound signs and zero mentions of VAT. This page is the pound version, with the source beside every number.

It covers the seven things UK buyers price: building a custom AI agent, running it each month, an AI consultant, an AI engineer or developer (employee, contractor or agency), an AI chatbot, an AI receptionist set beside the cost of a human one, and a custom LLM. LLM stands for large language model, the kind of AI behind ChatGPT and Claude.

We are FactoryJet, an AI services company that designs, builds and supports AI agents, automation and websites. We work remotely with UK clients. We are one of the firms you might compare, so we have kept our own prices off this page on purpose. FactoryJet was founded in 2014 by Bhavesh Barot and has served more than 500 businesses.

AI cost in the UK at a glance (2026)

One table, twelve rows. Each row shows the UK range, where it comes from, and whether the source includes VAT.

How much does it cost to build a custom AI agent in the UK?

An AI agent is software you give a goal to. It decides its own steps and uses tools to act on your systems: it books the appointment, updates the CRM, drafts the quote or checks the order. A chatbot answers a question. An agent finishes a task. That is why agents cost more to build.

Three UK guides publish ranges in pounds, and at the low end they disagree by a factor of ten or more. Here they are side by side.

The gap has a plain cause. Augustova collected the prices of UK agencies that publish a rate card. It says an agent that reads messages and takes one action is a few days of work on a platform such as n8n, Make or Zapier, and that integration is what you pay for after that. Fulminous and LeverX are software development firms pricing custom code with discovery, testing, security and deployment inside the number. Augustova gives a rule you can use on any quote: a one-system agent sits under £5,000 and a several-system agent at £4,000 to £15,000, so a £12,000 quote for an agent that reads a form and creates a CRM record needs a question about what else is in it.

One UK consultancy publishes fixed packages instead of ranges. SpotDev says most businesses planning a build should budget £8,000 to £45,000, with a first rollout typically live in two to three weeks. Its page does not state a VAT basis.

Fulminous also prices by the job the agent does, before VAT: a customer service agent at £20,000 to £70,000, a sales agent that qualifies leads and books meetings at £25,000 to £80,000, a back-office agent for data entry and invoices at £30,000 to £90,000, and a research agent at £20,000 to £65,000.

7 things that move the price of an AI agent

1. How many systems it connects to. Each connection, such as your booking tool, CRM, Shopify store or Xero, adds build and testing time. Fulminous puts tool and API integration at 25 to 35 per cent of a build and calls it usually the largest line.
2. Whether it only reads or also writes. An agent that looks up an order is simpler and safer than one that can issue a refund. Write access needs permissions, approvals and logs.
3. How clean your data is. Scattered spreadsheets, old PDFs and duplicate customer records mean groundwork before the agent can start.
4. How many exceptions the job has. The main path is quick to build. The edge cases, such as a customer in the Highlands or an order over a set value, are where the hours go.
5. Testing. Fulminous puts testing and evaluation at 15 to 20 per cent of a build and calls it the line people cut and regret, because an agent that takes a wrong action can email the wrong person or change the wrong record.
6. Data protection. Anything touching health, financial or other personal information needs extra design and testing under UK GDPR. OpenKit adds 10 to 20 per cent for regulated environments.
7. Voice or text. Phone agents add telephony, speech and call transfers, and every minute is billed. Text chat has none of those costs.

How much do AI agents cost to run each month?

Once an agent is live you pay for four things: model usage (the AI provider bills per token, a token being roughly three quarters of a word), hosting, monitoring and maintenance. If the agent sends texts or takes phone calls, those are billed too. Most buyers overestimate the first line and forget the last.

Model usage: a worked example on published prices

Anthropic publishes its Claude prices in US dollars per million tokens. We took a support agent handling 2,000 conversations a month, assumed each one reads about 3,000 tokens (the question, your policies and the order details) and writes about 500, and worked out the bill. That is 6 million input tokens and 1 million output tokens a month.

Arithmetic on the list prices at claude.com/pricing, read 9 October 2026, and our stated assumptions. It is not a quote. The bill arrives in US dollars, so the pound cost depends on the exchange rate on the day your card is charged.

UK guides give wider figures because they assume different volumes. AI Agency Plus says £5 to £100 a month is the realistic range for a typical small business running a few automations. Fulminous says £150 to £5,000 or more a month, because agents that reason over many steps use more tokens than a simple chatbot. Both can be true. Ask any supplier to model your own monthly volume before the build starts.

Hosting, monitoring and maintenance

• Hosting. We found no UK guide that prices hosting for a custom agent on its own, so we give no range for it. Two published data points for agents built on a workflow platform: n8n lists hosted plans at €20 a month for 2,500 workflow runs and €50 a month for 10,000, billed annually, and AI Agency Plus says the free self-hosted edition runs on a small server for £5 to £15 a month.
• Monitoring. No UK source we read prices monitoring by itself. It is sold inside a support retainer. The Augustova survey of twelve UK agencies puts retainers at £350 to £2,000 a month before VAT. AI Agency Plus says £400 to £1,200 a month for a business running several workflows in production.
• Maintenance. Fulminous budgets 15 to 25 per cent of the build cost each year for prompt changes, test updates and keeping pace with new models.
• Texts and calls. AI Agency Plus puts a UK text message at roughly 4p to 5p and a minute of AI voice at 15p to 20p. The raw parts cost less: OpenAI lists its gpt-live-1 voice sessions at US$0.05 a minute with backend model and tool usage charged separately, and Twilio lists US$0.01 a minute to receive a call on a UK local number plus US$3.50 a month for the number.

Augustova worked two examples at stated volumes and found the model was the smallest line in both. Its inbound enquiry agent, at 400 written enquiries and 300 calls a month, came to about £187 to £232 a month, of which the model was £5.91. Without the phone channel it was about £40. One design decision, whether the agent talks on the phone, moved the bill more than the choice of model did.

How much does it cost to hire an AI consultant in the UK?

An AI consultant helps you decide where AI will pay off, what to build or buy, and how to do it safely. Some only advise. Others advise and then build. You can buy that help three ways: a contractor by the day, a consultancy by the project, or an employee.

London sits above all of this. Helium42, a London consultancy, says boutique consultants there charge £200 to £500 an hour and that executive strategy workshops cost £5,000 to £15,000 a day. That is one firm describing the top of its own market, so treat it as a ceiling.

Software Development UK is open about the limit of its figures: it says no UK trade body publishes what agencies charge, so its consultancy column is a typical market range and not a survey. The ITJobsWatch rows are counted from adverts, which is why we show how many rates sit behind each one.

A good discovery engagement ends with a written list of use cases ranked by value and effort, the systems each one touches, the data protection risks, and a fixed-price quote for the first build. If you pay for discovery and leave with slides and no scope, you paid for a conversation. To compare firms, see our list of AI consultancies in the UK.

How much does it cost to hire an AI engineer or developer in the UK?

ITJobsWatch counts the pay figures in UK IT job adverts over a rolling six months. The table below is its picture for the six months to 9 October 2026. Each cell shows the 10th to 90th percentile with the median in brackets. Where the site does not publish a percentile because the sample is thin, we say so.

These are advertised figures, not agreed ones, and ITJobsWatch does not state a VAT basis for day rates. Outside London the AI engineer medians were lower: £513 a day and £80,000 a year.

What an employed AI engineer costs on top of salary

Salary is the start. GOV.UK sets employer National Insurance for 2026 to 2027 at 15 per cent on earnings above £5,000 a year. On the median AI engineer salary that is (£87,500 minus £5,000) x 15 per cent = £12,375, which makes £99,875 before anything else. The legal minimum employer pension contribution is 3 per cent. Equipment, recruitment fees and the months before a new hire ships anything come after that. Eligible employers can take up to £10,500 off their National Insurance bill with the Employment Allowance for 2026 to 2027.

A contractor at the median £600 a day costs £12,000 for a 20-day month, and £8,440 to £17,620 across the 10th to 90th percentile. You pay only for the days you book, and you carry the job of checking the work.

How much does it cost to hire an app developer in the UK?

By the day, the two rows at the bottom of the table apply: contract iOS developers advertised a median of £401 and Android developers £450. Both rest on 44 rates, so read them as a rough guide. By the project, Foresight Mobile, a UK app agency, says in a guide updated on 6 October 2026 that most business apps cost £15,000 to £80,000: £15,000 to £40,000 for a simple app, £40,000 to £80,000 for one with accounts, payments and integrations, and £80,000 or more for complex builds. Those are the prices it quotes, for one codebase that ships to both iPhone and Android.

What is the average hourly rate for software developers in the UK?

Few UK contracts are advertised by the hour, so the samples are thin. On ITJobsWatch, adverts for a software developer showed a median of £50 an hour from 37 hourly quotes, with the 25th to 90th percentile at £43.75 to £70.60. Adverts for a software engineer showed a median of £65 an hour from 320 quotes, with the 10th to 90th percentile at £51.75 to £75. Software Development UK gives a similar picture for freelancers: £40 to £55 an hour for mid-weight work and £60 to £95 for senior.

What an agency charges per day

Software Development UK says UK agency and consultancy rates typically run 40 to 80 per cent above the contractor rate for the same seniority, because they include testing, project management and delivery cover. Its 2026 table puts a mid-weight developer through an agency at £600 to £850 a day and a senior at £800 to £1,150. For a list of firms that build AI agents for UK businesses, see our guide to AI agent development companies in the UK.

How much does it cost to develop a chatbot?

A chatbot answers questions in a chat window on your website. It does not change anything in your systems, so it costs much less than an agent. Most businesses buy chatbot software. The well-known tools bill in US dollars, so those rows stay in dollars.

A1 Automation London calls its figures planning ranges and does not state a VAT basis. The per-outcome model is worth a sum of your own. At US$0.99 a resolution, 1,000 resolved chats a month is US$990 before helpdesk seats. That can be good value for a busy online shop and poor value for a business with a handful of chats a day.

If the chatbot needs to check orders, change bookings or issue refunds, you are pricing an AI agent. Fulminous puts a customer service agent that resolves queries end to end at £20,000 to £70,000 before VAT.

AI receptionist cost in the UK, next to the cost of a GP receptionist

An AI receptionist answers your phone, talks to the caller, takes the details, books into a calendar and passes urgent calls to a person. Two UK providers publish plan prices that we could read on 9 October 2026.

Two market guides widen the picture. Fasthosts, in a guide dated 9 July 2026, says most UK businesses pay £30 to £500 or more a month, and that custom-built voice agents can cost £2,000 to £4,000 or more to set up before monthly fees. Softomate, in a guide updated on 1 October 2026, says most UK businesses pay £150 to £500 a month for a receptionist that also books appointments, and that UK services add VAT at 20 per cent to quoted prices. Both firms sell AI receptionists.

Count your calls before you pick a plan. On the Fasthosts Lite plan, 60 calls in a month is £39 plus 30 extra calls at £0.49, which is £53.70 before VAT. The Plus plan at £69 covers 100.

What is the cost of a GP receptionist in the UK?

NHS Health Careers says a receptionist is typically paid at Agenda for Change band 2 or 3 and works about 37.5 hours a week. Agenda for Change is the NHS pay system. These are the figures on the NHS Employers pay scales for 2026/27, effective from 1 April 2026.

So a GP receptionist on band 2 or 3 costs about £28,300 to £30,850 a year in pay and employer National Insurance, before pension, holiday cover and training. Two cautions. GP surgeries are not bound by these bands: a Department of Health and Social Care answer to Parliament on 9 March 2021 said GP practices are self-employed contractors to the NHS and that pay for their staff is a matter for each practice. And no surgery can pay anyone aged 21 or over less than the National Living Wage, which has been £12.71 an hour since April 2026. At 37.5 hours a week for 52 weeks that floor is £24,784.50 a year.

The two costs buy different things. A receptionist greets patients, handles prescriptions and queries at the desk, and uses judgement a phone system does not have. An AI receptionist takes calls: the 8am rush, the lunch hour and the evening. Set beside the front desk team, it gives callers an answer while staff deal with the people in front of them. That is the kind of system we build on our AI receptionist service for UK businesses.

How this compares with a human call answering service

Human answering services in the UK are usually priced per call or per message. Mail Boxes Etc. lists live answering at £47.94 plus VAT a month for 20 calls, with extra calls at £1.50 each from the 21st, falling to £1.10 from the 101st. Connect Communications says its entry-level packages start from £14.99 a month plus VAT. For a business with a handful of calls a month, a human service can be the lower-cost answer. As calls grow, a plan with 100 or more calls included usually costs less per call.

How much does it cost to develop a custom LLM?

Almost no small business should. Training a large language model from scratch is a job for a handful of companies. Stanford's 2024 AI Index estimated that GPT-4 used US$78 million of computing to train and Gemini Ultra US$191 million. Those figures are in US dollars and cover computing alone.

When a buyer asks for a custom LLM, they usually mean an AI that knows their business. There are three ways to get that, and none of them trains a model from nothing.

OpenKit, a UK AI firm, adds 10 to 20 per cent for regulated environments and says building a frontier model from scratch costs millions and is almost never the right answer. Its page does not state a VAT basis. One more thing we read on 9 October 2026 points the same way: OpenAI's price page says it is winding down its fine-tuning platform and that the platform is no longer open to new users. Start with the first route. Move to the second or third only when you have measured that the first is not accurate enough.

What does AI cost over the first 12 months?

The monthly price rarely tells you the real cost. These worked examples use only the published figures above. They are arithmetic on public prices and ranges, not quotes.

From year two the custom agent drops to its running cost. On the same Fulminous figures that is maintenance plus usage, or £3,000 to £8,050 a year before VAT. That is the number to weigh against what the agent does for you.

Buy, consult, hire or build: which fits you?

VAT, US dollars and data protection: the UK details that change the number

• VAT. The standard UK rate is 20 per cent. Every UK subscription price on this page is quoted before VAT. Fulminous and Augustova state that their build ranges exclude it. LeverX, SpotDev, Foresight Mobile, Ronins and OpenKit do not say. The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover. Ask every supplier to state the basis in writing, and ask your accountant how much you can reclaim.
• US dollar and euro billing. Anthropic, OpenAI, Tidio, Intercom, Zapier and Twilio showed us prices in US dollars, and n8n in euros. Your pound cost moves with the exchange rate, and your bank may add a foreign transaction fee. Ask your accountant how VAT applies to services bought from overseas suppliers.
• Employer costs. A salary is not the full cost of a hire. Employer National Insurance is 15 per cent above £5,000 a year for 2026 to 2027, and the minimum employer pension contribution is 3 per cent.
• Data protection.UK GDPR applies to how an AI tool handles personal data. The Information Commissioner's Office publishes guidance on AI and data protection, and says on that page that it is under review because of the Data (Use and Access) Act. Building those protections into an agent is real work, and it is part of why regulated builds cost more. We can host AI builds in UK or EU cloud regions when a client needs that.
• Call recording. AI receptionists transcribe calls, and a transcript is personal data. Tell callers, and write down how long you keep recordings.

How to get an accurate AI quote in 5 steps

1. Name one process. "Answer out-of-hours calls and book them in" can be priced. "Use AI in the business" cannot.
2. Count it. How many calls, chats, emails or orders a month? Volume drives running cost.
3. List the systems it touches and whether it needs to read or change anything in each one.
4. Ask for build and running costs separately, with the VAT basis stated and the maintenance plan written out.
5. Ask who owns what at the end: code, prompts, accounts and data. If the answer is vague, so is the quote.

How FactoryJet prices AI work

We do not publish a price list, because an AI receptionist for a dental practice and an agent that syncs a trade store with Xero are different jobs. FactoryJet quotes a fixed price in writing after a short scoping call. Before a contract, we show working software on your own data. We design, build, test and support the agent, and you own it: the code, the prompts and the accounts.

Bills for AI usage and hosting can sit in your own accounts at cost. We keep managing the servers, AI models, APIs and maintenance, so you do not have to. If an off-the-shelf tool from the tables above will do the job, we will tell you so. And a firm near you is the better choice if you need someone on site.

To see the work behind these numbers, read about our AI agent services in the UK, custom AI development, AI consulting for UK businesses and the AI receptionist we build for UK practices and trades. To compare us with other firms, see our lists of AI agent development companies in the UK and AI consultancies in the UK, or start at FactoryJet UK.

Sources

All pages opened and read on 9 October 2026. Prices change; check the source before you budget.

• Augustova, What an AI agent costs to build and run in the UK (14 September 2026) and How much does AI automation cost in the UK (12 September 2026)
• Fulminous Software, AI agent development cost UK (last updated 23 September 2026)
• LeverX, AI agent development cost in the UK (4 October 2026)
• SpotDev, How much do AI agents cost in the UK
• AI Agency Plus, How much does AI automation cost in the UK (last updated 31 July 2026)
• Ronins, AI agency, Helium42, AI consultant London, Software Development UK, UK software developer day rates in 2026
• ITJobsWatch, six months to 9 October 2026: AI engineer (contract, permanent), AI developer (contract, permanent), AI consultant (contract, permanent), software developer (contract, permanent), software engineer contract, developer (contract, permanent), iOS developer (contract, permanent), Android developer (contract, permanent)
• Foresight Mobile, How much does it cost to build an app in the UK (updated 6 October 2026)
• A1 Automation London, How much does an AI chatbot cost in the UK (updated 14 July 2026), Tidio pricing, Intercom pricing
• Fasthosts AI Receptionist, Fasthosts, How much does an AI receptionist cost (9 July 2026), The VoIP Shop, AI receptionist for GP clinics, Softomate, AI receptionist pricing UK (updated 1 October 2026)
• Mail Boxes Etc., telephone answering, Connect Communications, call answering service costs
• NHS Employers, Pay scales for 2026/27, NHS Health Careers, Receptionist, UK Parliament, written question 159040, answered 9 March 2021
• GOV.UK: National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027, Workplace pensions, VAT rates, VAT thresholds
• OpenKit, LLM development services and fine-tuning, Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2024
• Anthropic, Claude pricing, OpenAI, API pricing, Twilio, UK voice pricing, Zapier pricing, n8n pricing
• Information Commissioner's Office, Guidance on AI and data protection