What it costs to put AI to work in a company: the real budget

The question always arrives in the second meeting, after the general manager has already got excited and before finance says anything. And it arrives badly framed: “what does AI cost?” AI does not cost. The software costs, your people’s time costs, the work the AI does for you costs, and each of those three behaves differently.

This article is the breakdown we would ask a vendor for if we were you. The figures come from real rollouts in Latin American companies of twenty to a hundred and fifty people during 2026, in dollars because that is what the region prices software in.

The four line items, and which one gets underestimated

An honest budget has four lines.

Software licenses. The only one everybody asks about and the smallest of the four in year one.

The work the AI does. The line that scares people, because depending on how you are billed for it, it is either a fixed line or a number you cannot write down before signing. How to tell them apart is further down.

Rollout. Connecting, uploading, reviewing permissions, configuring. Usually half of the first-year budget.

Internal time. The line nobody puts in the spreadsheet and the one that actually decides whether the project works. Somebody in-house has to give it hours. If nobody has them, the project does not fail: it simply never happens.

Licenses: between 600 and 3,000 dollars a year

For a forty-person company, the realistic range for a knowledge platform with agents is between eighty and a hundred and fifty dollars a month. That is between 960 and 1,800 dollars a year.

There are two billing models in the market and it is worth understanding the difference, because it changes the invoice six months in.

Per-seat billing charges for every person with access, between ten and thirty dollars per person per month. For forty people that is between 400 and 1,200 dollars a month. It sounds reasonable until you want to give read-only access to the twenty people on the floor, and then each reader costs the same as a heavy user.

Per-company billing charges a monthly fee that covers the whole team, however many people come in. For a company where five people use the agent every day and thirty-five only look documents up, this model costs between a third and a fifth of the other one.

In Vonzay the Basic plan is 80 dollars a month and the Pro plan 150, in both cases for the whole company and with the month’s agent work included. We do not charge for readers, or per person.

The work the AI does: the line you should not have to guess

This is where budgets break, because the vendor says “it depends on usage” and you are left exactly where you started.

There are two ways to bill for it and only one of them can be budgeted. In the first, the vendor meters your usage and invoices it on top of a low fee: the line stays variable, you do not control it, and there is no honest way to put it in the spreadsheet before signing. In the second, the agent’s work comes inside the monthly plan and going over has a written rule: the line is fixed, and the variable part is confined to an exception you can see coming.

Four things worth asking for in writing, whichever model you are looking at.

Which operations are not charged. Indexing documents, searching them and walking the link graph should cost nothing, because they do not call a paid model: they run on the platform’s own server. If your vendor charges you to index, you will end up deciding what to upload based on price, and an incomplete archive makes any search engine look bad.

Whether they charge you for re-reading. An agent re-reads what it already had in front of it at every step of its work, and that re-reading is the bulk of everything happening underneath. In Vonzay we do not charge you for it: only your agents’ new work is charged. That is the difference between an invoice that grows with what your team does and one that grows with what the machine re-reads.

What happens if you go over what you contracted. Ask for the whole mechanism: what the extra work costs, which invoice it lands on, and whether they warn you. In Vonzay work beyond the plan costs double what it costs inside the plan and it is charged on the following month’s invoice, never mid-month; if what you would owe comes to less than 25 dollars, it is not charged; and when it keeps happening we tell you, because past a certain point the plan above costs you less. A surcharge a customer discovers on a bank statement is not a charge, it is an argument.

How you see the spend. Ask to see the screen before signing. It has to answer three questions: how much of the plan this month has used, which process used it, and on what day. If the vendor only shows you a month-end total, you have no way of knowing whether the spend came from useful work or from a badly configured automation running every hour.

One warning about spend control, because on this point most of the market over-promises. In Vonzay the work is recorded and shown as it happens, and you can see at any moment how much of your plan the month has used. What we do not do today is cut the service off on our own at the ceiling: if a month runs over, your agents keep working, you see it in the dashboard, and the extra is settled on the next invoice. We would rather say it that way than sell you a guarantee the system does not yet enforce.

Rollout: between 1,500 and 6,000 dollars, once

This is where most budgets fall short, because rolling out is not installing.

For a forty-person company with around ten thousand accumulated documents, the real work is this.

Permission review: two to five days. Before indexing anything you have to decide who sees what. It sounds administrative and it is the most delicate part of the project. When an importer we worked with indexed its shared folder without reviewing it, a warehouse assistant’s first search returned the suppliers’ purchase price list, margins included. It had been there since 2021 in a subfolder nobody opened. Obscurity was not a permission but for four years it worked like one.

Upload and verification: two to four days. Uploading is quick. Verifying that what went up can be found is what takes time, and it has to be done with real questions.

Department structure: one day. Reproducing the org chart in the system, with its owners and their inherited permissions.

Training: two sessions of two hours. One for everyone, one for the five who will use the agent seriously. The second is the one that changes the results.

At local consulting rates, between twenty-five and sixty dollars an hour, that is between 1,500 and 6,000 dollars. If a vendor tells you the rollout is two hours, either your company is very small or the vendor has not done this before.

The complete first-year budget

For a forty-person company, with five heavy agent users:

Line item	Low	High
Annual plan, with the AI work inside it	960	1,800
Rollout (one off)	1,500	6,000
Internal time (80 to 160 hours)	1,200	3,200
First-year total	3,660	11,000

That table assumes a per-company plan with the agent’s work already inside it. If the vendor you are looking at bills usage separately, your table has a fourth row nobody can fill in before signing, and that is the practical difference between the two models.

Year two loses the rollout and internal time drops, so it settles between 1,560 and 3,400 dollars.

Put on the scale of a forty-person company: the low end is roughly the total cost of a junior employee for two months. The high end, a little over six.

When it is not worth it

Three cases where we would tell you to wait.

If you have fewer than fifteen people and all the documentation fits in two heads. The problem does not exist yet. Come back when the third person asks the same question.

If nobody is going to give it the hours. Without an internal owner with time allocated, the system fills with documents and empties of use in two months.

If the material is so out of date that it has to be rewritten. Then the project is not an AI project, it is a documentation project, and it costs what writing costs. AI comes afterwards, and there it genuinely accelerates.

How to ask for a quote you can actually compare

Four questions that separate a serious vendor from one improvising. Ask for them in writing.

1. Which operations are charged and which are not? If indexing is charged, ask for the price per thousand documents.
2. Do you charge me for the agent’s re-reading, or only for new work? It is the question that changes the invoice most and almost nobody asks it.
3. What exactly happens if I go over what I contracted, what does the extra work cost, and which invoice does it land on? Ask for the literal answer, not the commercial one.
4. What do I take with me if I leave? The format of the documents and of the database, and in how many days.

If all four answers are clear, the rest of the conversation is about price and you already know how to negotiate that.

The prices in this article are the ones we publish, and the full billing rules, the ones you read before putting a card in, are on the pricing page.