1. Estimate the cost in three parts
- Setup and operation fee: the fixed monthly cost paid to a vendor. Check the scope and any limits in the contract.
- AI provider usage fee: when you use an API such as ChatGPT or Claude in daily work, you pay the provider according to volume. It varies from month to month.
- Internal staff time: time spent reviewing drafts, changing settings and handling exceptions. It does not appear on an invoice, but it is what the hours saved should be compared against.
2. Our published prices
On our pricing page, the initial fee is 0 yen for every plan, all amounts exclude tax, and there is no minimum contract term or cancellation fee. The main plans that involve AI are as follows.
- AI office assistant: the trial is 0 yen per month for three months and up to three users. The standard plan is 4,980 yen per month for up to three users, plus 980 yen per month from the fourth user. The fully in-house plan is 29,800 yen per month, and the AI itself also stays on your premises.
- Custom development: for automation flows, the first one is quoted in writing before work starts, after a free consultation that reviews the task. From the second flow, it is 5,000 yen per month each. A daily one-page dashboard is 3,000 yen per month.
- E-commerce and social media operation: the basic e-commerce set is 9,800 yen per month, covering stock reconciliation across three sales channels plus 100 product page drafts and 100 white-background product images a month. The first month is free.
- Website production: 3,480 yen per month for a five-page Japanese-only site, or 4,980 yen per month with Japanese, English and Chinese.
Extra users on the standard plan can be calculated directly. For example, five users come to 4,980 yen plus 980 yen for each of the two additional users, which is 6,940 yen per month. Work that is not on the price list is quoted in writing before it starts.
3. Provider usage fees are separate, so set a cap first
Our pricing page states that usage fees for external AI are paid by your company directly to the AI provider and are not billed by us. A monthly limit can be set in advance in your own AI account.
The size of a metered bill depends on the model's unit price and on volume. As a reference, developer Simon Willison wrote on October 7, 2026 that Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. Once a single input passes 100,000 tokens, the price rises fivefold to $0.50 and $2.50. He also noted that the same long prompt counts as about 1.25 times as many tokens as on the previous model (original post).
At these rates, a job with 5,000 input tokens and 1,000 output tokens, run 1,000 times, costs $0.50 for input and $0.50 for output, $1 in total. For high-volume work on short documents, usage fees are small compared with fixed fees. When long documents such as contracts or product catalogs are read whole each time, whether a request crosses the 100,000-token line changes the bill considerably.
Our view What a small business should check first is not how cheap the published rate looks, but how many times a month, and with how many tokens, its own documents will be processed. We think a company should estimate a month of usage fees with about ten of its own documents before adoption, and set a monthly cap in its AI account before it starts. If the fixed fee for a task falls in the range of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of yen a month, setting the usage cap at a similar level makes the bill easy to predict. For retailers, online sellers and trading companies, starting with tasks that process short documents repeatedly, such as first replies to inquiries and quotation drafts, is the easier choice on cost. If the major AI providers abolish surcharges for long inputs by March 2027, we will revisit narrowing tasks by document length.
4. What to confirm when you request a quote
- Scope of the initial and monthly fees: which tasks the monthly fee covers, and whether a written quote is given before work starts for those it does not.
- Minimum term and cancellation fee: we have neither. Check the same points when comparing other providers.
- Who is paid for AI usage: the AI provider directly, or the vendor with a markup.
- Monthly caps: whether a usage cap can be set, and whether processing stops when it is reached.
- Data after cancellation: we hand over the source code and the full set of accumulated data within five business days of notice of cancellation.
Summary
Think of cost as the sum of a fixed monthly fee, metered AI usage fees and internal staff time, set the usage cap first, and test the estimate on about ten real documents. Our prices are on the pricing page, and work not listed there is quoted in writing before it starts. Requests for a quote are accepted through the contact page.
Questions this article answers
What determines the cost of AI adoption for a small business?
Think of it as the sum of three things: a monthly fee for setup and operation, metered usage fees paid to the AI provider, and staff time spent checking and correcting output. We charge 0 JPY setup on every plan, and the Standard plan of our AI back-office assistant is 4,980 JPY a month for up to three people, before tax. External AI usage fees are paid by you directly to the AI provider.
Sources
- Simon Willison, Claude Haiku 5.5 (2026-10-07)simonwillison.net
Related services
If you want to try this in your own business
To see how the topics in this article would apply to your own operations, and what it would cost, send us a message through the contact form.