A: Hello,

Thank you for the excellent questions. These are very important to understand how the platform works and how to manage costs effectively.

Here is a breakdown of your questions:

What does "agents" mean?
You are correct in your understanding. An "agent" in Chatbot Builder is essentially a single, independent chatbot instance. Each agent has its own:

Knowledge Base: A unique set of training data (e.g., website content, PDFs, FAQs) that it learns from.

Settings: Its own custom instructions, goals, and behavior.

Deployment: It can be embedded on its own unique domain or subdomain.

This means that with a plan that includes multiple agents, you can have a completely separate and distinct chatbot for each of your websites, each trained on different content.

Anthropic Credits & Cost Calculation
You are right to be concerned about the costs, as they can be difficult to predict. The cost is not a simple flat fee; it's based on consumption, primarily the number of tokens processed.

A crucial distinction between our trial and the AppSumo deal:

Our trial at Chatbotbuilder.net uses our own Anthropic API key, so you are using our credits.

The AppSumo Lifetime Deal is a "Bring Your Own Key" (BYOK) deal. This means you will need to get your own Anthropic API key and input it into your Chatbot Builder account. Any credits used by your bot will be paid directly by you to Anthropic.

Here is how the cost is calculated:

How it works: When a user asks a question, your chatbot sends a prompt (which includes the user's message and the conversation history) to the underlying large language model (LLM), such as Anthropic's Claude. The LLM then generates a response. Both the prompt (input) and the response (output) are measured in "tokens." The total number of tokens consumed determines the cost, which you pay directly to Anthropic.

Efficiency: The cost is highly dependent on the "efficiency" of your prompts. Shorter, more direct questions and shorter bot responses will consume fewer tokens and cost less.

Cost Calculators: While we don't have a built-in calculator, you can use one like the Anthropic Claude Pricing Calculator to get a general idea. You would need to input your estimated number of input and output tokens per month.

Here are the key variables you need to consider for a rough calculation:

Input Tokens: The number of characters in the user's question and the chatbot's internal instructions.

Output Tokens: The number of characters in the bot's response.

Number of Messages: The total number of interactions you expect per month.

Since Anthropic and other LLM providers charge per token, you can use these calculators to get a good sense of your potential expenses by modeling different usage scenarios.