The honest answer is “it depends on scope” — so here's a straight one anyway: what I charge, what you'd really spend doing it yourself, and what drives the price either way.
Most “what does an AI agent cost” answers dodge the question. Here's a direct one, in three parts.
For a personal AI agent: €1,800 one-off setup plus €300/month care. No tiers, no per-seat fees. It runs on your hardware or in your cloud with your own API key, so model usage you pay the provider directly. A larger, customer-facing system is quoted by scope after a call — the drivers are traffic, the number of integrations, and how much uptime you need guaranteed.
The software is mostly free. The cost is your time, a place to run it, and the model:
If you want to walk that path, the build-your-own-agent guide lists every tool with links. It's genuinely doable.
Not the number of integrations, but how cleanly and reliably everything works together — and that it keeps working when you're not looking. A throwaway script is cheap to make. Something that still answers your customers at 7 a.m., a year later, is the part you're actually paying for.
You can stitch a lot together from the open-source pieces. The difference I sell is a clean build with your real tools on a reliable platform, the security done right, and the upkeep handled. Tinkerers should DIY; if you want it to just work, that's the service.
An agent isn't an off-the-shelf product, and it doesn't improve by magic. It gets better because the monthly care is me watching what it gets wrong, wiring in new tools as your needs shift, and keeping it current as the models change. Over weeks, that compounds.
In short: free to build, not free to run well. Pay for the assembly, the security and the reliability — or invest the weekends and build it yourself. Both are fair choices.
Build it yourself — the full stack
€1,800 one-off setup plus €300/month care for a personal agent. Larger, customer-facing systems by scope. No tiers, no per-seat fees.
The software, mostly — most of it is open source. You'd still pay for a machine or a model API, and the real cost is your time to assemble and secure it. The build guide walks through the whole stack.
Because the free part is the easy part. DIY agents routinely ship with the API key sitting in plain text, no lock on the chat endpoint, and no backups — the kind of thing that's fine on a hobby project and a problem on your business. You're paying for the clean, secured build and for it to keep running.
Nothing. It's your hardware or your cloud, and your own API key. You can take it and run.