An AI chatbot for your small business website now costs pennies. That was never the hard part.

An AI chatbot for a small business website now costs almost nothing to run. On 7 October 2026 Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens, and by my math a 10-question chat on it costs well under a cent. That was never the hard part. The hard parts are a wrong answer, keeping it up to date, and what happens when a visitor needs a person. All dollar figures here are US dollars.

What did Anthropic release on 7 October, and what does it cost?

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, its small, fast model, on 7 October 2026. Anthropic prices it at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens (for prompts up to 100,000 tokens). A token is a small chunk of text, roughly three quarters of a word. Anthropic says it costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5, on average.

Anthropic also says it “works especially well for speed-sensitive tasks like live customer support and browser use.” That is the company describing its own product, and the quality benchmarks on that page are reported by Anthropic too. I don't treat them as proof that it will answer your customers well. I haven't tested it on a client site.

What does one chat actually cost?

Here is the cost of the model, worked out from Anthropic's published prices. The chat itself is my assumption, not a quote from Anthropic and not what any product charges.

• A 10-question chat. Your business FAQ and instructions run about 3,000 tokens and are sent again with every question.
• Each exchange adds about 350 tokens (about 150 for the question, about 200 for the answer).
• Input over 10 turns: 10 x 3,000 = 30,000, plus 350 x (1 + 2 + ... + 10) = 19,250, minus 2,000 (each turn sends the new question but not its answer yet) = 47,250 tokens. Output: 10 x 200 = 2,000 tokens.

Prices from Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 page, read on 9 October 2026. The chat cost is my own sum, rounded. Haiku 5.5: 47,250 x $0.10 / 1M = $0.0047, plus 2,000 x $0.50 / 1M = $0.0010. Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5.5 use the same token counts.

What the sum leaves out: cheaper cached prompts, which would lower it, and the new tokenizer (how the model counts text), which Anthropic says uses slightly more tokens per task, which would raise it. It also leaves out the fee to build and host the chat, and the time to look after it. Those are the real bills.

If the model is nearly free, what am I paying for?

You're paying for the parts around the model. I think a wrong answer costs far more than the chat saves, because a visitor believes it. A bot that says you're open Sundays when you aren't, or quotes a price you changed in September, is worse than no chat at all.

• Accuracy. Someone has to decide which answers it may give, and read what it actually says.
• Upkeep. Hours, prices and services change. The chat only knows what it was last given.
• The hand-off. When it can't help, the visitor needs an obvious way to reach a person.
• What visitors type. People put names, numbers and health or money details into a chat box. Ask where those chats go.

AI also tends to write fluent text that sounds sure of itself. I covered that in my test of AI writing a homepage. It's why I like AI with a person who checks the work, which I explain on why I build the way I do.

Should my small business add an AI chatbot to its website?

To me it comes down to the questions your customers already ask.

• Good fit: the same ten questions arrive again and again, enquiries come in after hours, and your answers are written down and rarely change. Next move: write the answers first, then have a professional set up the chat and check it against them.
• Weak fit, customers phone first: a chat adds little. Make the phone number easier to find instead.
• Weak fit, thin site: if your pages don't answer the basics, a chat has nothing good to draw on. Fix the pages first.
• Weak fit, answers change weekly: prices, stock and availability go stale fast. Link to the live page instead.
• Weak fit, the question is a quote: that needs a person. A short contact form does it better.

On my own site, the answers a chat would draw on already sit in plain pages and a written FAQ, and there is a contact form for everything else. I would keep that form and a visible email on the page whatever else I added. A visitor holding a wrong answer needs somewhere to go.

What should I ask a professional to set up and check?

• Which answers is it allowed to give, and what does it say when it doesn't know?
• Who reads its replies, and how often?
• How does a visitor reach a real person from inside the chat?
• Who updates it when your hours or services change?
• Where do the chats go, and who can read them?

A chat or booking assistant wired into your real systems is custom web solutions work. I haven't tested Haiku 5.5 on a client site, so I won't tell you how it behaves on yours. I'd test it on your real questions first. I also think telling visitors it's an AI is the right call, so nobody feels tricked. That's my recommendation, not a rule.

What to do this week

• List the ten questions customers ask you most.
• Check that your website answers each one in plain words.
• Read last month's after-hours enquiries and see what people wanted.
• Make sure your phone, email and contact form show on every page.

Common questions about an AI chatbot for a small business website