The bot quoted the client the wrong price. Who's responsible?
A client writes to an auto shop: "How much to change the timing belt on a 2014 Sorento?" The bot answers: eight thousand. The client shows up two days later, the mechanic looks it over and says nineteen, because there's a water pump, rollers, and half a day of labor involved.
Best case, you do it for eight and lose eleven thousand. Worst case, the client turns around and leaves a review about how you reeled them in with a price pulled out of thin air.
The first thing people ask after something like this: whose fault is it, exactly — I never wrote that.
Who's responsible
You are. I'm no lawyer, go to your own for the exact wording, but in plain terms it's pretty clear-cut. The bot runs on your channel and answers on behalf of your business — the client doesn't care who's typing behind it. The complaint lands on you.
The topic has only just started getting discussed publicly — here's a write-up on vc.ru from Aug 7, 2026 about who pays when a bot lies. There's barely any case law on this yet, and explaining that to the client won't help anyway.
So there's not much point arguing over whose fault it is. What matters far more is understanding why the bot ended up in a position to quote a price it doesn't actually know.
Why it lies
It's not broken, it's just built that way. An AI produces a plausible-sounding answer, and there's nothing to check it against if you didn't give it a price list. Ask a bot like that about a job that's not on your list, and it won't say "I don't know." It'll guess at something like a market average and hand it to the client as if it were your price.
That's why a chatty, unrestricted GPT-based bot has no business anywhere that involves money, deadlines, and commitments.
What needs to be restricted
Prices only from the source. The price list lives in a spreadsheet or your system, and the bot pulls the number from there. Doing mental math or guessing "about the same as a similar model" is off-limits for it.
No line item in the price list, no answer. Word for word: "I don't have that job on my list, I'll check with the mechanic and get back to you within the hour." And the question lands in your Telegram.
A range instead of an exact figure wherever an inspection is needed. "Between eight and nineteen thousand, depending on whether the water pump and rollers need replacing too. The mechanic will give you the exact number once he's looked at it." People generally don't get upset about a range. They get upset when you quoted eight and charged nineteen.
No discounts, ever. You're the only one who decides on a discount.
Trigger words that hand off to a human instantly. Complaint, lawyer, refund, ruined it, lawsuit. One of those words shows up, the bot goes quiet and calls you in.
A dry run before launch. Collect the nastiest questions your clients actually ask you, and run the bot through them until it stops making things up. Takes a day, and it's tedious.
Two questions that can test any vendor
First: what does the bot do when it doesn't know the answer? And ask them to show it on screen, not just describe it. If the answer starts drifting into "deep context" and "understanding the client's emotions," what's underneath is a plain unrestricted GPT, and it's not worth what they're charging.
Second: what happens when the booking system goes down? A good answer sounds boring. The bot tells the client it's booking them manually and forwards the request to the owner. If there's no clear answer to this, the first outage will leave a client with no reply, and they'll leave.
Both questions work against anyone, me included. That's the whole point of them.
One advantage that rarely gets mentioned
The bot keeps a log. Every conversation is saved in full, and when a client says "I was promised eight," you can pull up the exchange in a minute and see exactly what was said. A phone call leaves nothing behind.
My bot only answers with what's been fed into it; everything else gets flagged "I'll check" and forwarded to you. The logs are yours and stay on your side. From $1,000, paid once, twenty days of guarantee against an agreed spec: if the bot behaves differently from what we agreed, I fix it.
Test your current vendor with the two questions above. If they fail it — website and business audit: your site or app address, business name and city, I'll send a written report with a plan.
Think you're losing money on messages — loss calculator.