How much does an AI agent cost in the UK?
It depends on which of three routes you take. An agent you switch on inside software you already use is charged by use: Salesforce charges £1.60 per conversation for Agentforce, Microsoft charges £153.80 a month for a pack of 25,000 Copilot Studio credits, and Intercom charges from $0.99 per outcome for its Fin agent. A custom agent built on your own systems costs between £3,450 and £25,000 for a first agent at the UK firms that publish their prices, plus a monthly fee for hosting, support and AI usage. A larger build across several systems runs from just under £9,000 to £150,000 and more on published prices.
We’re Logica HQ, a UK AI engineering firm, and we build custom AI agents, so our prices are among those below. Every other figure comes from the provider’s own page, checked on 10 October 2026 and listed in the sources at the end. Where a firm doesn’t publish a price, we say so rather than guess.
What are the three ways to pay for an AI agent?
| Route | What you get | How it’s charged | Published price | Where it runs out |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent inside a platform you use | An AI agent switched on inside Salesforce, Microsoft 365 or Intercom, working on that platform’s data | Per conversation, per outcome or per credit | £1.60 a conversation (Agentforce); £153.80 a month for 25,000 credits (Copilot Studio); from $0.99 an outcome (Intercom Fin) | Stops at the edge of that vendor’s software; cost rises with every conversation |
| Custom agent, one task | An agent built on your own inbox, documents or software to do one job | A build fee, then a monthly fee | £3,450 to £25,000 to build where published; £249 to £1,500 a month | Costs more up front, and you rely on whoever built it to keep it working |
| Multi-system build | Several agents or workflows across several systems, often with audit trails | A larger build fee, then a monthly fee | £8,950 to £150,000+ where published | Months rather than weeks, and worth it only for a process big enough to repay it |
Ranges come from the providers’ own pages, checked 10 October 2026, and are set out in the sections below. Check VAT and contract terms with each provider.
If you’re not sure which route you need, our pricing page lists a fixed price for every build we do, and the sections below explain what each route is good for.
What does an off-the-shelf AI agent cost?
If your business already runs on Salesforce, Microsoft 365 or Intercom, the cheapest way to try an AI agent is usually the one your vendor sells. There is no build fee. You pay for use, and each vendor counts use differently.
Salesforce Agentforce
Salesforce’s UK pricing page lists Agentforce at £1.60 per conversation, or Flex Credits at £400 per 100,000 credits, charged per action. Salesforce says the page is for information, subject to change, and that its sales team gives detailed pricing. It runs on Salesforce, so it suits firms whose customer records already live there.
Microsoft Copilot Studio
Microsoft’s UK page sells Copilot Studio as a tenant-wide licence with packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits at £153.80 a pack per month, or on a pay-as-you-go meter with no up-front commitment. Each action or response an agent completes uses a varying number of credits, depending on the usage, so test it on your own tasks before you commit to packs.
Intercom Fin
Intercom prices its Fin AI agent from $0.99 per Fin outcome, on top of seat plans that start at $29 per seat a month on its Essential plan. Prices are in US dollars. Fin works on customer conversations (Intercom lists service, sales and ecommerce), not back-office processes.
The sums are simple, and they scale with you. 500 conversations a month on Agentforce is 500 × £1.60 = £800 a month. 500 outcomes on Fin is 500 × $0.99 = $495 a month, plus seats. That is good value at low volume and less so at high volume, which is the point where a custom build starts to make sense.
The limit of this route: the agent works on what’s inside that vendor’s platform. It won’t read your shared mailbox, price from your own rate card or update the job software you run beside it unless that software is connected. Codebased’s cost guide puts the wider off-the-shelf market, from website chatbots to meeting schedulers, at £40 to £400 a month and makes the same point: these tools stop at the edge of your systems.
What do UK firms charge to build a custom AI agent?
Most of the UK firms we looked at don’t publish a price. These four do, on their own pages. They’re listed alphabetically, not ranked.
Built Logic
Works only with construction and the built environment. A custom-built system for one process costs £4,000 to £16,000 + VAT, with the exact fee agreed in writing before work starts. It’s built on your own accounts, you own it, and the first month of support is included. After that, a Support Plan has a monthly fee agreed with the build.
Codebased
A software house in Stafford. Its pricing is a build fee that reflects a fortnight of engineering (the figure isn’t published), then a monthly fee by how many processes it runs: £1,500 a month for one, £2,750 for up to three and £4,500 for up to six. The monthly fee covers hosting, model usage, upgrades and continued improvement.
SpotDev
A Bath firm that works with HubSpot users. Its fixed prices are £5,000 for an AI and data readiness assessment, £8,000 for AI Foundations (your first working agent in production), £20,000 for Custom Agents (one or more agents built around a specific process, with deeper integration) and £45,000 for AI Transformation across several processes or teams. It says a first rollout is typically live in two to three weeks. VAT isn’t stated on the page.
Tinderhouse
A Canterbury and London agency. Its agentic AI page lists a typical investment of £7K to £25K for a Starter agent with one or two integrations (10 to 14 weeks), £25K to £75K for Production with five or more integrations (16 to 20 weeks) and £75K to £150K+ for an Enterprise multi-agent system (20 to 24 weeks).
The cost guides that rank for this question give similar ranges as estimates rather than prices. LeverX puts a single-workflow agent at £10K to £30K and says those are indicative market benchmarks, not its own pricing. AI Workforce gives roughly £6,000 to £24,000 for a narrowly scoped agent and £40,000 to £120,000 for a multi-step production workflow. Creative Agent says £6,000 to £25,000 to build and £400 to £3,500 a month to run. Fernside Studio puts a simple agent at £3,000 to £8,000 and UK AI developer rates at £80 to £150 an hour.
Read those side by side and the pattern is clear. One well-defined task on one system costs low thousands to the mid-teens. Every extra system the agent has to read from or write to adds to the build, and so does anything that needs an audit trail.
What do we charge for an AI agent?
Our prices are fixed and agreed before work starts. Monthly plans have no minimum term, and AI usage is passed through at cost with no markup. These are the three tiers on our custom agents page:
| Tier | Scope | Price | First year before AI usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple agent | One task, up to one connected system. Live in 1–3 weeks. | from £3,450 + £249/mo | £3,450 + 12 × £249 = £6,438 |
| Multi-step agent | Several connected workflows across 2–4 systems, with a person signing off. 4–10 weeks. | from £8,950 + £449/mo | £8,950 + 12 × £449 = £14,338 |
| Complex system | Cross-department, legacy systems, audit trails. Scoped in a discovery sprint first. | from £18,500 + £995/mo | £18,500 + 12 × £995 = £30,440 |
From our pricing page (logicahq.com/pricing). The discovery sprint is £1,250 and is credited in full against the build.
Some agents are common enough that we price them as fixed products. A website chat agent that answers questions, captures leads and hands over to a person is £1,250 + £89 a month. An AI receptionist that answers inbound calls 24/7 is £1,450 + £249 a month, with call minutes at cost.
Our limit: we’re a small engineering firm, not an enterprise consultancy, and we can’t yet show you a long record of agent builds. Judge us on what you can check: published prices, no minimum term and a fixed price agreed before work starts. And if a platform agent from your existing vendor does the job, buy that instead. It will cost less.
What does an AI agent cost to run each month?
The monthly bill has four parts: the AI model’s usage, hosting, someone keeping it working, and any per-use fees from the software it connects to. Firms bundle these differently. Codebased’s monthly fee includes hosting and model usage. Ours is a fixed monthly fee with AI usage passed through at cost on top. Platform agents charge per conversation or credit and include the rest.
Model usage is usually the smallest part. Anthropic’s published API prices for its Claude Sonnet 5.5 model are $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens; Claude Haiku 5.5 is $0.10 and $0.50 for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, and batch processing saves 50%. A token is a fragment of a word.
Assume one task
An agent reads an email with some context and drafts a reply. Say that uses 3,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens. That’s our assumption for illustration; your own will vary with how much the agent reads.
Price it on Sonnet 5.5
3,000 × $2 ÷ 1,000,000 = $0.006 in. 500 × $10 ÷ 1,000,000 = $0.005 out. About $0.011 per email.
Scale it up
2,000 emails a month × $0.011 = $22 a month in model usage.
That is why the monthly fee is mostly about people and hosting, not the model. Codebased’s guide says the same: the model is the cheap part. The exceptions are agents that read long documents on every run, voice agents billed by the minute, and agents that run on a very large model when a small one would do. Ask any provider which model they use and why.
What makes one AI agent cost more than another?
How many systems it connects to
An agent that reads one inbox is a smaller build than one that reads the inbox, checks the job software and updates the accounts. Each connection has to be built, tested and kept working when the other software changes.
Whether it acts or drafts
An agent that drafts for a person to approve is cheaper and safer to build than one that sends, books or pays on its own. Most first agents should draft.
The state of your data
If the price list, job history or documents it needs are scattered or out of date, someone has to sort them first, and that time is part of the build.
Volume
Per-use pricing suits low volume. At high volume, a fixed monthly fee with model usage at cost usually works out cheaper.
Audit and compliance
Regulated work needs a record of what the agent saw, what it did and who approved it. That adds build time, and it’s why complex tiers cost more.
Voice or text
Phone agents need call handling, speech and testing on a real line, so they cost more to build and run than text agents.
Which route fits your business?
Your customers and records already live in one platform
Try that vendor’s agent first: Agentforce on Salesforce, Copilot Studio on Microsoft 365, Fin on Intercom. Watch the per-use cost against your volume.
One repetitive job across one system
A simple custom agent: sorting an inbox, answering from your own documents, drafting quotes from your own rates. Budget low thousands to build and a few hundred a month to run.
A process that crosses several systems
A multi-step build, with a person signing off what it does. Budget five figures and a few months, and start with the step that costs you most.
A company-wide programme
Pay for discovery first, so the build is priced on a scope rather than a guess. Our AI consultancy page covers roadmaps and the discovery sprint.
For a narrower question, see our guides to AI receptionist costs and to which UK business software can be connected to at all. An agent can only reach systems that let it in.
What should you ask before you pay for an AI agent?
- Is the price fixed, and does it include VAT?
- What does the monthly fee cover: hosting, support, model usage, or only some of them?
- Which AI model does it use, and what will usage cost at my volume?
- Is there a minimum term, and what do I keep if I stop paying?
- Is it built on my accounts or yours?
- What does it do when it isn’t sure? Can I see the review queue?
- Who fixes it when the software it connects to changes, and is that in the monthly fee?
- Can I test it on my own data before it goes live?
Quick answers
How much does an AI agent cost per month in the UK?
Platform agents charge by use, such as £1.60 per conversation on Agentforce. Custom agents usually carry a monthly fee of a few hundred to a few thousand pounds: ours start at £249 plus AI usage at cost, and Codebased’s start at £1,500 including usage.
What’s the cheapest way to get an AI agent?
Switch on the agent your existing software vendor sells, if it covers the job. If it doesn’t, a single-task custom agent is the next step up.
Is there a setup fee?
Not on the platform agents above. Custom builds charge one: from £3,450 at Logica, £4,000 to £16,000 + VAT at Built Logic, and £8,000 for SpotDev’s first agent.
How long does it take to build an AI agent?
On published timelines, one to three weeks for our simple tier, two to three weeks for SpotDev’s first rollout and 10 to 14 weeks for Tinderhouse’s Starter tier. Multi-system builds take months.
Are AI model costs expensive?
Usually not. On Anthropic’s published prices, a typical email-sized task on Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs about a cent. Long documents, voice and very large models cost more.