# WhatsApp Chatbot for Small Business: Costs > Scripted bot from €590, cents-per-conversation Meta fees, and the 5–10 chats/day line below which the free app beats any bot. No AI hype. - Author: Yurii Skyba, Skyba Tech (https://skyba.tech) - Published: 2026-07-28 - Category: tecnologia - Reading time: 5 min - HTML version: https://skyba.tech/en/blog/whatsapp-chatbot-small-business --- Every **WhatsApp chatbot** pitch deck in 2026 has the word "AI" on the first slide. Meanwhile, what a small business in Spain actually needs from a bot is almost embarrassingly mundane: the 3am booking request shouldn't evaporate, the same five questions shouldn't need a human, and the owner shouldn't be the bottleneck of their own business. Let's separate the useful from the hype – with the full cost picture, including the line item nearly every proposal hides: what Meta charges per conversation. ## Scripted vs AI: the distinction that decides everything A **scripted bot** is a designed flow: greeting → options → specific questions → confirmation. A well-built form wearing conversation clothes. It never improvises; anything off-script gets handed to a human. An **AI bot** generates free-form answers. It demos beautifully – and in production it brings two problems a small business doesn't need: it can be confidently wrong (inventing an opening time, promising a discount you don't offer), and it charges a monthly subscription for the privilege. Having built both: for bookings, appointments, orders and FAQs – which is 90% of real small-business cases – **the script wins**. Predictable, auditable, cheap to run. AI earns its keep when questions are genuinely unpredictable, and even then with a human safety net and hard topic limits. ## What a scripted bot does brilliantly (and what it shouldn't touch) The brilliance: **capturing intent at any hour**. A good booking flow takes a customer from "I'd like to book" to a complete request – date, time, party size, name – in 4–6 taps, no app, no account. You confirm in the morning with one tap. We built exactly this flow as an [interactive chatbot demo](/en/projects/chatbot-reservas) you can poke at right now – fictional data, clearly a demo, which is precisely why you can test it without mercy. What it shouldn't touch: consultative selling ("which treatment would you recommend?"), delicate complaints, negotiations. There the bot's only correct move is recognizing it's out of its depth and escalating. A bot that tries to solve the unsolvable burns customers quietly. ## The three real costs (here's the Meta part) A professional WhatsApp bot has three cost lines; confusing proposals blend them on purpose: - **Building the flow:** script design, integration, testing. Our fixed price: **from €590** ([pricing](/en#pricing)); market range €300–3,000 depending on complexity. - **The WhatsApp connection:** serious bots run on the official WhatsApp Business API (via Meta directly or a middleman provider). Depending on the route: €0 to a few dozen euros monthly. - **Meta's per-conversation fees** – the hidden line. As of this writing: replying within 24 hours of a customer's message falls in the service window (free or near-free), while business-initiated template messages – reminders, marketing – are billed per message, at cents per conversation with rates varying by category and country. For a small business answering inbound customers, the monthly Meta bill typically runs cents to a few euros. But verify current rates before signing anything – they change, and a mass-marketing bot is a different economic animal entirely. The control question for any proposal: *"What will I pay per month in total, Meta fees included, at X conversations?"* Anyone who can't answer it hasn't shipped many bots. ## When you should NOT bother Honestly, since we sell these: below **5–10 conversations a day**, your best bot is you with the free WhatsApp Business app – saved quick replies, an away message and a catalog cover the job for €0 and fifteen minutes of setup. A bot also fails economically if nobody on your side will process what it captures (bots collect, they don't cook), and it fails functionally if every sale is a unique consultative conversation. The bot starts paying for itself at a concrete signal: repeated questions eating hours, or bookings arriving outside opening hours and dying there. Buy at the signal, not at the trend. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does the bot replace a person? No – it removes the mechanical part. The healthy pattern: bot captures and filters (off-hours, repeated questions, booking details), human confirms and handles anything delicate. Businesses that vanish entirely behind a bot eventually read about it in their reviews. ### Do I need the paid API, or is the free WhatsApp Business app enough? The free app gives you manual quick replies and a catalog – genuinely enough under ~10 conversations a day. True automation (the bot working while you sleep) requires the official API, with the cost structure above. Starting free and upgrading when volume demands it is a perfectly respectable path – we'll tell you so ourselves. ### What about plugging ChatGPT into WhatsApp? Technically doable, and for open-ended questions it works impressively – right up until the day it promises something you don't sell. If you go that way: strict topic limits, human escalation, regular conversation reviews, and budget its monthly fee. For bookings and appointments it remains a cannon aimed at a mosquito – a cannon with a subscription. ## The short version A useful **WhatsApp chatbot** is a well-designed script, not a spectacular AI: it captures bookings 24/7, answers the repetitive, and escalates the delicate. It costs from €590 once, plus cents-per-conversation to Meta – and you don't need it at all while the free app and your own thumbs keep up. Try [the demo](/en/projects/chatbot-reservas) to feel the flow, then tell us on WhatsApp how many conversations you handle daily – the honest answer might be "not yet," and we'd rather say it now than invoice you for it.