What free chatbot plans typically include
Free plans across the major chatbot platforms share a common pattern: they give you enough to see the product works, but cap the most valuable features.
| Platform | Free Limit | AI on Free? | Branding removed? |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatBot Sense | 50 AI interactions | Yes | No (paid plans from $9) |
| Tidio | 50 live chat convos/mo | No (Lyro add-on) | No |
| Crisp | 2 agents, unlimited chats | No | No |
| Tawk.to | Unlimited live chat | No | No |
| Freshchat | 100 agents, 500 MAU | No | No |
The real cost of “free”
Free chatbot plans have three hidden costs that rarely show up in the marketing:
1. Your brand is advertising theirs
Every major chatbot free plan includes a “Powered by [Platform]” badge on your chat widget. Your visitors see it. It signals that you are on the free tier of a third-party service — not a great look for a business trying to appear professional.
2. The limits hit at the worst time
Conversation limits on free plans reset monthly. If you run a promotion or get featured somewhere and traffic spikes in week three, your chatbot stops responding to new conversations for the rest of the month. That is the opposite of what you paid nothing for.
3. AI is almost never on the free tier
The features that make a chatbot genuinely useful — understanding natural language, answering novel questions, routing complex queries — are AI features. On most platforms, AI is an add-on that starts at $25–$50/month on top of the base subscription. The “free” tier gives you rule-based buttons and decision trees.
When is free good enough?
Free is good enough when:
- You are testing whether a chatbot adds value before committing
- You have very low website traffic (under 200 visitors/month)
- You only need a basic FAQ button menu, not natural language understanding
- You have a human available to answer chat in real time (Tawk.to model)
Free is NOT good enough when:
- You want the chatbot to answer questions in natural language
- You want to capture leads or email addresses from chat
- You want to remove third-party branding
- You run promotions or have traffic spikes
- You want the chatbot to hand off to a human when needed
The one-time payment alternative
Monthly subscriptions for chatbots add up fast. Tidio at $29/month is $348/year. Crisp Pro is $300/year. For a small business getting 500 customer queries a month, that is a real cost.
ChatBot Sense uses a one-time credit model instead. You pay once, get a bank of AI interactions, and they never expire. A $14 one-time purchase gives you 10,000 AI interactions. At 500 queries per month, that is over 20 months of service for a single $14 payment.
It is a different model from the subscription norm — and for businesses with predictable or low-to-medium chat volume, it is almost always cheaper.
Our recommendation
Start on a free plan to prove value, then move to the cheapest paid tier that removes the “Powered by” branding and adds AI responses. For most small businesses, that sweet spot is under $20 — not the $29–$74/month that major platforms charge.