Your first AI bot: what it needs and what it costs

Bots live under CRM → AI Bots. There is one thing to set up before creating the first one.

The OpenAI token

meruma’s bots use your organization’s OpenAI account, not ours. That means the model usage is billed by OpenAI directly to that account, with no margin from us on top, and that the day you leave, the account stays with you.

On the AI Bots screen there is an OpenAI token section with its status: Configured or Not configured. Paste your OpenAI account key there and save. It is stored encrypted in the secrets manager and never shown again; if you lose it, generate another one at OpenAI and replace it here.

Create the bot

1. In AI Bots, click the new bot button.
2. Give it a name — whatever helps you recognise it, for example “Sales assistant”.
3. Click Create.

Then you configure what it knows and what it does. It pays to start small: a bot that answers three frequent questions well beats one that tries to answer everything and gets half of it wrong.

What it costs

Two separate things, and meruma charges for neither:

• The model, billed by OpenAI to your account according to what each answer consumes.
• The messages, if the bot replies over WhatsApp outside the 24-hour window: those are templates and Meta charges for them, exactly as if a person had replied. Inside the window, they are free.

It says it is a bot, and that cannot be turned off

When a bot handles a conversation, the person sees from the first message that they are talking to an automated assistant. That notice cannot be disabled.

It is not a design decision of ours: it is required in the European Union and other jurisdictions, and saying it upfront also avoids the awkward moment when someone realises halfway through that they were not talking to a person.

You can change the wording so it sounds like your business, but not remove it.

When to hand over to a person

A bot is a statistical model: it can be wrong, and your business answers for what it says. It is worth having the bot hand over to a person as soon as the conversation touches off-list prices, complaints, or anything where an invented answer costs a customer.

Reviewed on August 26, 2026

Keep reading

• What Meta charges you for each conversation
• Answering as a team without stepping on each other
• Plans, limits and what is billed separately