Cost of developing a chatbot

I want to develop a chatbot with open ai, this chatbot will read a PDF document of 32 pages and 30 people will use this chatbot. I want to know the costs that I need to consider, for example the cost of developing, if I need a license, etc.

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Hi @dgranados19 and welcome to the community!

Cost-wise it’s highly dependent on your approach.

There is a low-touch method, like creating and sharing a custom GPT (see here), but most of the control is out of your hands. You can more or less make one for free, or if you want it more private, then in a Team solution is available which is 25 dollars per month.

If you want a proper engineering/dev pathway, then it’s roughly as follows:

  • Assuming you are using standard ChatCompletions API for this, you need to pay token costs, and these costs are dependent on the model type; see pricing here, normally specified in price per 1 million tokens; there is a price on input tokens (what the user sends) and output tokens (what the model generates). I would say for your use case it’s going to be a relatively small cost
  • Since it’s a 32 page document, I would say you can just get away with having that document pre-chunked/pre-indexed, embedded, and stored in-memory in your application - it can be as simple as the whole thing living in a Pandas dataframe, or some simple in-memory database. This way you won’t have to worry about some managed vector database costs
  • Then you have the actual application hosting, which means having it run in some cloud function with all the security and accessed and exposed to your users/customers. This will vary depending on the hosting provider you use, you can see Firebase pricing here as an example
  • I don’t know who will be developing this (yourself, or if you are hiring someone), but this is most likely going to be your biggest cost, both upfront development, but also maintenance of your chatbot service

Hope this helps!

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Thank you! In my case I will be the developer of the chatbot, I had made the estimation of how many tokens I will use and the cost, but will I need a license to develop the chatbot? This chatbot will be in the Microsoft Teams of the company.

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Great! If you use the API from OpenAI, you won’t need any license. You just pay for the tokens and that’s it. You however need to read their terms of use, and make sure you (or your users) will not be breaking any of those. That’s all.

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Thank you, I was with the doubt because I saw a Billing section and I had yo pay 10$, what is that secion about?