The market has three tiers and they are not comparable
At the top are enterprise consultancies, priced per project with three to six month implementations. They are genuinely good at complex integrations in complex organisations. For a business with twelve staff they are almost always over-specified.
In the middle are mid-market AI agencies, usually £3,000 upwards per project, frequently without a website included and with ongoing management as a separate retainer.
At the SMB end are managed monthly plans that bundle the build, the tooling and the ongoing management. That is where most businesses under thirty people should be looking, and it is where we operate.
The questions that actually reveal capability
- "Who owns this in month nine?" If the answer is vague, the system will decay. Ask specifically who reviews transcripts, who patches knowledge gaps and who fixes a broken integration.
- "What happens to my data if I leave?" You should get a straight answer: your CRM data, your content and your domain are yours, exported on request. Anything else is a lock-in.
- "Show me a call the AI handled badly." Anyone who says there are none is either not listening to the calls or not telling the truth. Good suppliers are candid about failure modes and how they fix them.
- "What are the ongoing platform costs on top of your fee?" Model usage, telephony minutes and message volumes all cost money. If they are not mentioned, ask directly.
- "How do you handle UK GDPR?" You want specifics about lawful basis, retention periods and where data is processed, not a reassurance that they take privacy seriously.
- "What is the notice period?" Long lock-ins exist to protect the supplier from their own churn. Rolling terms mean they have to keep earning it.
- "What do you measure and how do I see it?" Calls answered, response times, enquiries captured, bookings made, revenue attributed. If they cannot report it, they cannot be held to it.
Warning signs
- No named ongoing owner, or "support" that means a ticket queue.
- Twelve-month minimum terms with early termination fees.
- Pricing that is entirely project-based with no clarity on what maintenance costs afterwards.
- Case studies with no numbers, or numbers with no context.
- Reluctance to let you speak to an existing client.
- A build that depends entirely on a platform you have never heard of and cannot export from.
- Promises of specific revenue increases. Nobody can honestly promise that.
What good pricing looks like for an SMB
| Element | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Setup fee | £500–£2,000 depending on complexity |
| Monthly management | £250–£900 including tooling |
| Website included | Should be, at the SMB end |
| Contract term | Rolling, 30 days' notice |
| Time to live | 2–4 weeks, not 3–6 months |
| Reporting | Monthly minimum, with real numbers |
Be honest about what you actually need
A lot of businesses go looking for an AI agency when what they actually need is to answer their phone and follow up their quotes. That is a good thing to discover early, because it is cheap and fast to fix.
A supplier worth hiring will tell you that. If the first conversation goes straight to a complex multi-agent architecture before anyone has asked how many calls you miss a week, you are talking to someone selling technology rather than solving a problem.
Where Swift Solution fits
We build and manage the whole system for UK small businesses — website, AI chatbot, AI voice receptionist, lead pipeline and process automation — for a monthly fee with no long contract: from £297 for the website, chatbot and follow-up, or from £497 with the AI receptionist. If you would rather not assemble it yourself, book a free consultation and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth doing for your business.