Elbi pricing in Saudi Arabia
A one-time setup fee and a monthly maintenance fee, published in Saudi riyals for four deployment tiers, with the first-year total worked out for you. Nothing here needs a sales call to reveal.
Elbi pricing has two parts: a setup fee, which is a range because scope moves, and a monthly maintenance fee, which is a floor because usage does. Compare any AI chatbot quotation in Saudi Arabia on both together, because only one of them is paid once.
Setup and monthly cost, by tier
The tiers describe typical scopes. Your own quotation is built from your requirement, and the drivers further down explain what moves it.
| Tier | Setup (one-time) | Monthly maintenance | First year (setup + 12 months) | Typical scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single department | SAR 50,000–75,000 | from SAR 10,000 | SAR 170,000–195,000 | Website assistant, Arabic and English, no integrations |
| Multi-department | SAR 100,000–150,000 | from SAR 15,000 | SAR 280,000–330,000 | One or two integrations, live-agent handover portal |
| Enterprise | SAR 180,000–250,000 | from SAR 20,000 | SAR 420,000–490,000 | Voice, single sign-on, several integrations |
| Government or regulated | SAR 300,000–500,000 | from SAR 30,000 | SAR 660,000–860,000 | Processing and residency inside the Kingdom |
All figures exclude VAT. The first-year column is the setup range plus twelve months at the monthly floor; anything quoted per case is added on top. Maintenance is billed six-monthly or annually, not month to month, and it includes support and the service level.
Why the monthly line is the one to read
Twelve months of maintenance is the same order as the build itself: between 0.7 and 2.4 times it, depending on the tier and where in its range the build lands. At the single-department tier a year of maintenance is roughly double the setup. Only at the two largest tiers, and only when the build lands at the top of its range, does the setup fee still lead after a year.
That shape is deliberate. An assistant that answers customers needs its model running, its content maintained and its bad answers found and fixed, every month. A proposal shaped the other way round, with a large build fee and a token monthly, is describing a project that is going to be abandoned.
What moves a quotation up or down
If two quotations for the same brief differ sharply, the difference is usually concentrated in a few of these. The first four are engineering scope; the last four are packaging and can often be negotiated.
| Integrations with internal systems | Scope, rarely negotiable. CRM, ERP and ticketing connections are priced by the system on the other end: a documented modern interface and a twenty-year-old internal database are not the same job. |
|---|---|
| Voice, speech in and speech out | Scope, rarely negotiable. Voice adds speech recognition and speech synthesis, both considerably harder in Arabic than in English, and both with their own running cost. |
| Real Arabic dialect handling | Scope, rarely negotiable. Handling the Arabic customers actually type and speak, not only formal Arabic, is language work that has to be done and tested. |
| Data residency inside the Kingdom | Scope, rarely negotiable. If your compliance position requires personal data to stay in the Kingdom, establish it before you shortlist, because it reshapes the project. |
| Number of assistants or departments | Often negotiable. Each distinct agent needs its own material, persona and owner. |
| Custom interface design | Often negotiable. A bespoke interface costs more than the standard widget styled to your brand. |
| Volume of documents at launch | Often negotiable. The knowledge work of gathering, cleaning and reconciling your documents is usually the largest single block of effort, and it scales with what you bring on day one. |
| Single sign-on and role-based access | Often negotiable. Needed when the assistant must recognise a signed-in user and answer only what their role may see. |
What every Elbi deployment includes
An Elbi deployment is quoted as an implementation with a stated running cost, not as a per-seat subscription. Inside the scope:
- The assistant itself and the language model behind it.
- Retrieval that grounds every answer in your own documents, with the source it came from.
- A knowledge base built from your material.
- Arabic and English as first-class languages, neither one translated from the other.
- An escalation path to your own people when a question needs one.
- Analytics that show what customers actually asked and where the assistant struggled.
- Support and the service level, as part of the monthly maintenance fee.
What sits outside it, and should sit outside anybody's: a guarantee that automation will deflect a particular percentage of your contact. Nobody can know that before seeing your traffic.
Priced per case
Voice
Speech recognition and speech synthesis, both harder in Arabic than in English and each with its own running cost.
Each additional integration
The cost of connecting to a system depends almost entirely on that system, so each one is scoped on its own.
Each additional department
A further agent with its own material, persona and owner, added to an existing deployment.
Ask for these itemised on your quotation. A vendor who cannot break them out has not scoped them.
From first session to go-live
- Thirty minutes on your own contentWe load a slice of your real material and you try to break it, including asking things it should not answer.
- A quotation for your scopeSetup and monthly as separate figures, with anything priced per case listed as its own line.
- Discovery and requirementsUse cases, agent roles, tone of voice and integration points, mapped in a kickoff workshop.
- Knowledge base and agent setupYour documents, FAQs and product data are ingested, and each agent is configured with its persona.
- Widget, testing and go-liveThe widget is branded and added to your site with a single script tag, tested end to end, and launched with your team trained on the dashboard.
A standard deployment is live in under a week. Deep system integrations and isolated installations take longer and are scoped separately.
How to compare these numbers
These are not chatbot-platform prices and should not be compared with them. A cloud chatbot subscription costs a small fraction of this, and for organisations whose requirements it meets, it is the right purchase.
What the figures above buy is a different product: answers grounded in your own documents, Arabic handled as its own language, and conversation processing that stays inside the Kingdom with no external model provider involved. If none of those three matter to you, Elbi is the expensive option, and it is better to say so here than in month two. The full comparison sets out where Elbi fits and where it does not.
Common questions
No. Every figure on this page, setup and monthly, excludes VAT.
No. The monthly maintenance fee is billed six-monthly or annually, and it includes support and the service level.
Setup plus twelve months at the monthly floor, excluding VAT: SAR 170,000 to 195,000 for a single department, SAR 280,000 to 330,000 for multi-department, SAR 420,000 to 490,000 for enterprise, and SAR 660,000 to 860,000 for government or regulated deployments. Anything quoted per case is added on top.
Twelve months of maintenance is between 0.7 and 2.4 times the build, depending on the tier and where the build lands in its range. An assistant that answers customers needs its model running, its content maintained and its bad answers found and fixed every month, so the running cost, not the setup fee, is the larger commitment.
Voice, each additional integration and each additional department are quoted per case rather than at a flat rate, because the cost of connecting to a system depends almost entirely on that system. No guaranteed deflection percentage is included either, because nobody can know that before seeing your traffic.
Keep reading
Get a quotation for your own scope
Tell us which tier you think you are in and what needs connecting. Setup and monthly come back as separate figures.