AI for your business — without the surprise bill

Every business owner I talk to wants the same thing from AI — and worries about the same thing.

They want it: a helpful assistant on their website that answers customers day and night, so they stop losing the people who show up at 11pm with a question and leave when nobody answers.

They worry about the bill: AI pricing is confusing, it’s “usage-based,” and everyone’s heard a story about a surprise invoice. So they wait.

I built Stelt so you don’t have to choose between the two. And the honest answer to “what does it cost?” is actually the whole selling point — so let me just walk through the money.

Most AI tools hide the meter

Here’s how a typical “AI chatbot for business” works under the hood: the company buys the AI for you, bundles it into your monthly price, and marks it up — often several times over. Or they hand you a bucket of “credits” that quietly runs out mid-month.

Either way, you can’t see what the AI actually costs. The tool decides your price and keeps the margin. A busy month either spikes your bill or gets you throttled right when your site is buzzing. Their incentives and yours don’t line up: they make more when you use more, so they either overcharge you or cap you to protect their profit.

That never sat right with me.

Stelt does the opposite: you bring your own keys

Willow — the assistant that lives on your site — runs on two AI services: Anthropic’s Claude for the thinking, and Google’s text-to-speech for the voice.

Instead of buying that for you and marking it up, Stelt lets you connect your own accounts. It’s a few minutes of one-time setup, and we walk you through every click.

Once you do, the usage is billed to you, directly, at the providers’ raw cost. Stelt never touches it and never adds a cent.

What we charge is one flat, boring thing: $24 a month per business (or $230 a year). That covers the platform — the dashboard, the one-line embed, training Willow on your business, the lead forms, all of it. Cancel anytime. There’s a 7-day free trial to try the whole thing first.

Why this is better for you — not just cheaper

• You can see it. Your AI usage shows up on your own Claude and Google bills, to the cent. No black box, no “trust us.”
• No markup. The line item that’s becoming core to every business, you pay at cost. Nobody’s taking a cut of it.
• It’s predictable. A flat platform fee you can budget. A busier month costs you a few more pennies of usage — never a shock invoice from us.
• You own it. They’re your accounts and your keys. You’re not locked in — if you ever walked away from Stelt, your AI accounts are still yours.
• You set the limits. Want a hard ceiling on spend? You can set that directly with the providers. Your rules.

The honest part: yes, there’s a little setup

I’m not going to pretend it’s frictionless. Getting your keys is a one-time task — maybe ten minutes — and yes, it’s a step most “just sign up” tools don’t ask of you. We’ve got step-by-step guides for it, and Willow herself will walk you through it.

But that ten minutes buys you something those tools won’t give you: you own the accounts, and nobody is quietly marking up the fastest-growing cost in modern business. As AI turns into plumbing that every company depends on, owning your own connection to it isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s leverage.

So what does it actually cost?

Rough numbers — and I mean rough, because it depends entirely on how chatty your visitors are:

Each conversation costs a few cents in AI — the thinking plus the voice. Call it around three to five cents a chat as a ballpark. A small business getting a few hundred conversations a month is looking at single-digit-to-low-double-digit dollars in usage, on top of the flat $24 platform fee.

Put another way: a 24/7 assistant that never takes a break, for less than the cost of one hour of a receptionist — and it’s answering the customers you’d otherwise lose overnight.

And the best part is you don’t have to take my word for the math. You’ll see the real number on your own provider bill, every month, in black and white.

Try it, then decide

Start the free trial, drop one line of code on your site, and connect your keys when you’re ready. Seven days to see whether Willow earns her keep — and full transparency on exactly what she costs from day one.

That’s the deal. No surprise bill. Just an assistant that works, and a number you can actually see.