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, model usage 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.
Model usage. Variable, metered, and the one that scares people because nobody knows how to estimate it. It can be estimated well; how 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 with metered usage charges a flat fee plus whatever the AI spends. The flat fee covers the whole team and usage is paid for as it happens. 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 Ofivia the Basic plan is 80 dollars a month and the Pro plan 150, in both cases for the whole company, with a monthly credit allotment included. We do not charge for readers.
Model usage: how to estimate it without guessing
This is where budgets break, because the vendor says “it depends on usage” and you are left exactly where you started.
It can be estimated from two numbers. The first is what one agent work turn costs. The second is how many turns your team makes in a month.
A turn is a question and its complete answer, with the agent reading the documents it needs in order to answer, in the sense described in AI agents for companies. On the installation we write this from, measured over 119 real work turns, the average came out at 0.19 dollars per turn. That is not a brochure estimate: it is the average of what they cost.
Now the part people calculate badly: how many turns a team makes. Intuition says “forty people times ten questions a day is four hundred a day”. The reality of the rollouts we have seen is very different. In a forty-person company, between four and eight people use the agent daily and make between ten and twenty-five turns each. The rest use it two or three times a week. That gives between 1,500 and 3,500 turns a month.
At 0.19 dollars a turn, between 285 and 665 dollars of monthly usage. Which is considerably more than the license, and that is why two things are worth checking before signing.
Which operations consume nothing. 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. In Ofivia indexing, searching, recalling past conversations and people talking to each other consume no credit. Credit is only consumed when the agent works.
How you see the spend. Ask to see the usage screen before signing. It has to answer three questions: how much have I spent this month, which process spent it, and on what day. If the vendor only shows you a monthly 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 Ofivia usage is recorded and shown as it happens, and you see exactly what was spent, by day, by process and by person. What we do not do today is cut off automatically at the ceiling: if a month runs over, you see it in the dashboard and we tell you, and an owner can request more credit from that same screen. 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 license | 960 | 1,800 |
| Model usage (12 months) | 3,420 | 7,980 |
| Rollout (one off) | 1,500 | 6,000 |
| Internal time (80 to 160 hours) | 1,200 | 3,200 |
| First-year total | 7,080 | 18,980 |
Year two loses the rollout and internal time drops, so it settles between 4,900 and 10,500 dollars.
Put on the scale of a forty-person company: the low end is roughly the total cost of a junior employee for four months. The high end, about eleven months.
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.
- Which operations consume and which do not? If indexing consumes, ask for the price per thousand documents.
- What is the average measured usage per agent turn on real installations, not estimated?
- What exactly happens when the month’s credit runs out? Ask for the literal answer, not the commercial one.
- 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 numbers in this article come from the same model we bill on, and it is published with the full breakdown on the pricing page. One credit equals one thousandth of a dollar of real model spend, plans come with their monthly allotment, and the owner can request a mid-month top up. If you would rather see first how that translates into concrete work, the credits explainer has three examples with measured ranges.