How much does an AI assistant cost?

Consumer AI subscriptions (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) run roughly S$25–35/month for individual plans. Specialised personal assistants and single-purpose business assistants typically sit between S$20 and S$200/month. Configurable team products — knowledge assistants, support triage, recruitment — commonly land between S$300 and S$1,000/month. Above that sit custom deployments and 'AI employee' offerings, which in Singapore are being pitched anywhere from tens of thousands to six figures annually.

The spread looks irrational until you see what actually drives cost — because it is mostly not the AI.

Model usage — the AI itself — is usually the smallest component, often under 20% of a well-run product's costs. The real drivers:

• Integration — connecting your email, CRM, calendar, or line-of-business systems, and keeping those connections alive.
• Grounding — loading, verifying, and maintaining your facts so the assistant answers correctly about your business.
• Permissions and audit — the engineering that makes an assistant safe to give real access.
• Human fallback — escalation paths, support, and someone accountable when it misbehaves.
• Setup labour — for custom deployments, the consulting hours to map your workflows, which is where five-figure prices come from.

Whatever the tier, the same questions separate fair pricing from theatre: What happens at the usage limit — throttle, overage, or surprise bill? What exactly is included in setup, and what becomes billable 'customisation'? Can you export your data and leave? What does the price assume about volume, and what breaks the assumption?

For anything pitched as an 'AI employee' at a salary-like price, add one more: which specific tasks does it complete end-to-end, unsupervised, and can they demonstrate that on your data rather than in their demo?

The concepts on this site publish anticipated price bands — S$9 to S$999/month depending on scope — precisely to test what people consider fair before anything is built. Those bands are hypotheses, and reactions to them are the research. We currently sell nothing and take no vendor compensation; see the methodology page for how that changes if it ever does.