Show me the money!
You have a use case which a Bot can easily fulfil. You now ask your team how much it would cost. You are unable to get a straight answer.
What is the Bot Cost Structure
There are three cost factors: The hosting plan, the channel(s) and any auxiliary services.
App Service plan
All bots are hosted on an App Service Plan. See pricing details.
Based on the expected interaction rate with the bot, you will need to choose the right tier.
Channels
As mentioned in the documentation for this, you will be charged based on your channel tier, either premium or not.
Today only the DirectLine and WebChat are considered premium.
The cost would be based on the number of messages funneled through these channels. If you are going to expose the Bot using teams for example, there will be no cost or restriction on the number of messages.
Auxiliary
Any additional services your Bot is using, have it LUIS, Azure SQL or any other resource would be part of this cost factor.
Cost Examples
You plan to create an internal Bot that will be published via Teams. It will provide query services to its users. Allowing query by id only.
Something like this:
Your load expectation for production indicate that the standard plan would suffice.
You need development, testing / staging and production enviorments.
The Azure SQL is already payed for by another department.
| Item | Development | Testing / Staging | Production | Total |
| App Service plan | Basic [€13.165] | Basic [€13.165] | Standard [€69.479] | [€95.809] |
| Channel | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Aux | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Total | [€13.165] | [€13.165] | [€69.479] | [€95.809] |
After few months, you decide the Bot could also be exposed to your customers, however you plan on embedding it to your portal, which would be using the WebChat channel. From your research it seems that your customer would use this bot 2-3 times per month, you have 100K customers - > you plan for 300K messages per month. Your portal is hosted on Azure using Premium tier, and you request to increase your current instance count by one. Your new pricing would look like this:
| Item | Development | Testing / Staging | Production | Total |
| App Service plan | Basic [€13.165] | Basic [€13.165] | Standard [€84.106] | [€110.436] |
| Channel - Webchat Teams |
5000 messages - [€2.505] Free |
10K messages - [€5.01] Free |
300K messages - [€150.3] Free |
[€157.815] Free |
| Aux | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Total | [€13.165] | [€13.165] | [€84.106] | [€268.251] |
* Prices are valid for September 2022