For most small business websites, pick Tidio or Crisp for an affordable widget with a built-in AI agent, Help Scout or Intercom Fin if you'd rather pay per resolved conversation, Chatbase to build one from your own content, and Shopify Inbox or Wix Smart Chat if your site runs on those platforms. Match the pricing model to your chat volume.
The price model matters more than the feature list. Some tools charge a flat monthly fee with a bundle of AI conversations, some charge per resolution on top of seats, and help-desk suites fold AI into per-agent plans. The same 400 chats a month can cost under $100 on one model and over $250 on another, for broadly similar answers. So count last month's chats and enquiries before you read the list, then price your shortlist at that number and at double it.
How the four pricing models compare
| Model | Who uses it | You pay for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flat plan with an AI allowance | Crisp, Chatbase, tawk.to | A monthly fee covering a set amount of AI use | Allowances are often "around" a number, because longer conversations use more |
| Seats plus AI conversations | Tidio | A base plan plus an AI add-on sized in conversations | Two meters to watch: human-handled and AI-handled chats |
| Seats plus per-resolution fee | Intercom Fin, Help Scout, HubSpot | A fee each time the AI resolves a conversation | "Resolved" can include customers who simply stopped replying |
| Help desk with AI included | Zendesk, Freshdesk | Per-agent plans, with AI usage billed on top past an allowance | Built for teams with a support inbox; heavy for a one-person site |
The definitions behind "resolution" differ, and they change what you pay. Intercom counts an assumed resolution when a customer goes quiet for 24 hours after Fin's last answer. Zendesk closes a messaging conversation after two hours of inactivity by default (72 hours on email and web forms) and, since 18 May 2026, bills only resolutions its AI check verifies; hand-offs to a person and unverified closes are free. Help Scout counts one when the customer gets an AI answer and doesn't escalate, search the help docs, ask more or say they need more help. Silence isn't satisfaction, so read the definition before you sign.
Ten website chatbots worth a shortlist, as of September 2026
Prices below are list prices from each vendor's pricing page and change often. Where a page shows annual billing by default, that's stated; monthly billing costs more.
1. Tidio with the Lyro AI Agent
What it is: a chat widget and shared inbox with Lyro, an AI agent that answers from your FAQs and site content, plus rule-based Flows for things like welcome messages.
Price: the Free plan includes 50 billable conversations (ones a person replies to) and a one-off 50 Lyro conversations. Starter is from $24.17 a month billed annually, with 100 billable conversations. Lyro is an add-on from $32.50 a month, billed annually, for 50 AI conversations, with larger tiers on the pricing slider. A conversation counts once however many times Lyro replies in it. There's a 7-day trial.
Fits: an illustrative nail salon with about 120 chats a month, mostly "how much for gel removal?" and "any slots Saturday?". The free Lyro conversations are enough to see whether it answers those correctly before paying.
Start: install the widget, add your top 20 questions as FAQs, then test in the Lyro Playground, which has Live chat and Email tabs so you can see both kinds of reply.
Watch out for: the two separate meters, and the gap between displayed annual prices and monthly billing. The Tidio pricing page doesn't say what Lyro does when its monthly allowance runs out, so ask before a busy month finds out for you.
2. Crisp with the Hugo AI agent
What it is: a chat widget and shared inbox priced per workspace rather than per seat, with a no-code chatbot builder and an AI agent on paid plans.
Price: Free has no AI features and two seats. Mini is $45 a month (around 90 automated conversations, with $5 of AI credits included), Essentials $95 (around 450 conversations, $25 of credits) and Plus $295 (around 1,350 conversations, $75 of credits).
Fits: a yoga studio where four part-time teachers take turns on chat. Per-workspace pricing means adding a fifth teacher to the inbox doesn't change the bill, and the Essentials allowance covers a busy January of timetable and intro-offer questions.
Start: connect your class timetable page and FAQ as sources, set the AI to answer only from them, and route anything about memberships or refunds to the inbox.
A test exchange worth running: a visitor asks, "Is the Tuesday 6pm class OK for a total beginner, and do I need a mat?" An illustrative first answer: "Yes! All our classes welcome beginners, and mats are provided free." Both halves were wrong. Tuesday 6pm is a Level 2 flow, and mats cost $2 to hire; the AI had blended a general FAQ line ("we welcome beginners") with a guess. Adding each class's level to the timetable and a line on mat hire to the FAQ produced this on the retest: "Tuesday 6pm is a Level 2 class, so Thursday 6pm Beginners would suit you better. Mats are $2 to hire, or bring your own."
Watch out for: the word "around". Conversation counts depend on how many AI credits each one uses, so long back-and-forths eat the allowance faster. Check credit use weekly in the first month.
3. tawk.to with AI Assist
What it is: free live chat, with a paid AI Assist that answers from your knowledge base and saved FAQ shortcuts.
Price: the live chat itself is free, with a small "Powered by tawk.to" label; removing it costs $29 a month. AI Assist starts at $29 a month, with a free tier for sites with limited chat volume. tawk.to also sells hired chat agents, real people, at $1 an hour.
Fits: a barber shop where the owner answers chats on his phone between cuts. AI Assist can take "are you open Sunday?" and "do you take walk-ins?" while he's mid-fade, and he answers the rest himself for nothing.
Start: write ten knowledge base articles covering hours, prices, walk-ins, booking, parking and gift vouchers before switching AI Assist on; it can only be as good as those pages.
Watch out for: the pricing page doesn't spell out the free AI tier's limits, so confirm them before relying on it. Treat hired agents as a separate decision: they're outsourced people speaking for your business.
4. Chatbase
What it is: a builder for a custom AI agent trained on your website, documents and files, which you embed on any site.
Price: Free gives 50 message credits a month and one agent; Hobby is $40 a month (700 credits, two agents); Standard $150 (4,000 credits, three agents); Pro $500 (15,000 credits, five agents). Yearly plans are 20% off. Removing Chatbase branding is a separate $99-a-month add-on.
Fits: a wedding planner whose package details live in long PDFs and venue guides. An agent trained on those can answer "what's included in partial planning?" or "do you work at [venue]?" at 11pm, when couples actually browse.
Start: upload your current package guide, FAQ page and terms, test 30 questions, and remove any document that makes it answer badly rather than adding more.
A test exchange worth running: "Do you do on-the-day coordination at a venue you haven't worked at before?" An illustrative first answer: "Yes, we coordinate weddings at any venue, and our on-the-day package starts at $1,800." The $1,800 came from last year's price guide, still sitting among the uploaded files, and the planner only takes unfamiliar venues after a site visit. Deleting the old guide and adding one sentence about site visits fixed both problems. Old files are the most common cause of wrong answers in trained agents, because the AI can't tell which document is current unless you remove the stale one.
Watch out for: agents on the free plan are deleted after 14 days of inactivity, and the branding fee can exceed the plan itself. Being a builder, it puts the setup work on you, so check early how a chat reaches a person when the agent can't help.
5. Help Scout with AI Answers
What it is: a shared inbox and help desk with a website widget called Beacon, help docs, and AI Answers as a paid-per-resolution add-on.
Price: free for up to five users, with one inbox, one docs site and 100 contacts a month. Paid plans are $25, $45 and $75 per user a month (Standard, Plus, Pro), with a discount for annual billing. AI Answers costs $0.75 per resolution, with a three-month free trial of unlimited resolutions.
Fits: a personal trainer whose enquiries mostly arrive by email and contact form. One inbox, a small docs site of FAQs, and AI answering the repeat questions keeps everything in one place.
Start: write the docs first; AI Answers draws on them. Use the three-month trial to measure how many conversations it genuinely resolves before any charge applies.
Watch out for: the pricing page doesn't say whether AI Answers runs inside the Beacon widget, so confirm that during the trial if website chat is your main channel. The free plan's 100 contacts a month runs out quickly once a chat box is live.
6. Intercom with Fin
What it is: a customer service platform whose AI agent, Fin, is built to resolve conversations on its own, and can also run on top of another help desk.
Price: Essential is $29 per seat a month billed annually (Advanced $85, Expert $132). Fin costs from $0.99 per outcome, which Intercom's pricing page defines as the customer confirming it's resolved, not asking for more help after Fin responds, or Fin completing a workflow. Used with another help desk, Fin has no seat cost but a minimum monthly commitment, such as 50 outcomes. There's a 14-day trial.
Fits: a tattoo studio with 300 chats a month about availability, deposits and aftercare. If Fin resolves 180, that's about $178 in outcomes plus a seat, a price that makes sense only if those chats would otherwise tie up an artist.
Start: use the Preview panel to check answers while you train it, then run a batch test of real past questions before any customer sees a reply.
Watch out for: the bill grows with success, and silence counts as an outcome after 24 hours. Set a monthly budget in your head before launch and check outcomes weekly.
7. Zendesk
What it is: a full help desk suite in which AI agents are included in every Suite and Support plan.
Price: Suite Team is $55 per agent a month paid yearly and Suite Professional $115. Automated resolutions are billed per resolution, but the pricing page doesn't publish the per-resolution price, so get it in your quote. The trial gives 14 days of Suite Professional.
Fits: a business that already runs its email support in Zendesk and wants the website chat in the same place, such as a multi-site barber group with a central support person.
Start: turn on the AI agent for web chat only, pointed at your existing help centre articles, and keep email on human handling until you've read a month of chat transcripts.
Watch out for: it's more than a one-person site needs, and the two-hour inactivity rule means a customer who wanders off counts as resolved. Ask how that affects your bill.
8. Freshdesk with the Freddy AI Agent
What it is: a help desk whose plans include an AI agent measured in sessions.
Price: Growth is $19 per agent a month billed annually, Pro $55 and Enterprise $89. All three include the first 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions, then $49 per 100 sessions. A Copilot add-on for agents is $29 per agent a month on Pro and Enterprise. There's a 14-day trial and no free plan.
Fits: an illustrative three-site nail salon group with one person handling email and chat for all three, who wants tickets, chat and AI in one cheap per-agent plan.
Start: check what counts as a session and whether the 500 included sessions refresh monthly, then size the plan on your real chat numbers.
Watch out for: $49 per 100 sessions is $0.49 a session once past the allowance, which adds up fast if every visitor who opens the widget starts one.
9. HubSpot Customer Agent
What it is: HubSpot's AI agent for customer service, answering from your knowledge base inside HubSpot's chat.
Price: it needs any Professional or Enterprise hub (usually Service Hub); Starter isn't eligible. Professional starts at $90 per seat a month billed annually ($100 monthly), plus a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee, and includes 3,000 HubSpot Credits a month. Customer Agent uses 50 credits per resolved conversation, about $0.50, with extra credits at $10 per 1,000. Unused credits don't roll over. HubSpot often advertises steep first-year promotions, so compare list prices.
Fits: a personal training studio already tracking leads and memberships in HubSpot, where the chat history landing on each contact record is worth the price.
Start: build the knowledge base in HubSpot first, then switch the agent on for a single chat channel.
Watch out for: the onboarding fee, which is roughly $125 a month spread over a first year, and promotional prices that jump at renewal.
10. The one built into your website platform
Shopify Inbox now includes a free AI agent that answers customers on its own, on the Basic plan or above with new customer accounts. It can use web search as a secondary source, so test it on your own returns, delivery and product-care questions before trusting it. A barber shop selling beard oils on Shopify should start here; the best AI chatbots for small Shopify stores compares the alternatives.
Wix Smart Chat is free to install and combines free manual live chat with an AI chat that answers from your site content. There's a free quota of AI conversations and higher quotas on upgraded plans. It replaced Wix AI Site Chat, which can't be installed on new sites since March 2026. A nail salon with a Wix site can switch it on in an afternoon.
Watch out for: platform-native tools answer from the platform's view of your business. If prices or policies live somewhere else, such as a PDF or a booking app, add them to the site properly or the AI won't know them.
A test worth running on Shopify Inbox: ask "Can I return a beard oil I've opened?" If your returns page doesn't mention opened products, an agent allowed to search the web may fill the gap with a general answer that isn't your rule. The fix isn't a cleverer bot; it's one sentence on your returns page, such as "Opened grooming products can't be returned unless faulty", followed by the same question again to confirm the answer now quotes it.
One tool not on the list: Meta Business Agent answers in WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger messages rather than on your website. Since 1 August 2026 it has been charged per token, at $2 per million tokens, which Meta puts at roughly 4-5 cents a message.
A yoga studio's 400 monthly chats, priced on four of them
Suppose an illustrative yoga studio gets 400 website chats a month and, from a trial, expects the AI to resolve about 60% of them (240), with the rest going to a person. Here's the monthly cost at list prices for one seat or user:
| Tool | Sum | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Crisp Essentials | Flat fee; the "around 450" allowance covers 400 chats | $95 |
| HubSpot Service Hub Pro | $90 seat (annual) + 240 x 50 = 12,000 credits, minus 3,000 included, so 9,000 extra at $10 per 1,000 = $90 | $180, plus $1,500 onboarding once |
| Help Scout Standard | $25 user + 240 x $0.75 | $205 |
| Intercom Essential with Fin | $29 seat (annual) + 240 x $0.99 | $266.60 |
Tidio and Chatbase are harder to price here without the vendor's slider or credit-use figures: Lyro's tiers above 50 conversations and Chatbase's credits per reply depend on choices you make at sign-up. And the per-resolution rows are floors, not ceilings. If 40 more chats end with the customer going quiet, Intercom may count them as outcomes too, adding about $40.
The flat-fee option wins at this volume, by a wide margin. The per-resolution tools earn their price when chats are complex enough that a well-trained agent saves real staff time, or when you already use the platform for everything else. What a website AI chatbot costs and whether it pays off covers the payback side of the sum.
Which one fits which kind of business
| If you are... | Start with | Because |
|---|---|---|
| A one-person business answering chat yourself | tawk.to or Tidio Free | Free chat now; AI added only once you know the questions |
| A small team sharing one inbox | Crisp | Per-workspace pricing doesn't punish extra people |
| Selling packages explained in long documents | Chatbase | Trains on your PDFs and guides |
| Email-first, with occasional chat | Help Scout | Free for up to five users; pay only for AI resolutions |
| Busy, with complex questions and a support person | Intercom Fin | Built to resolve, not just answer; tools to test at scale |
| Already on Zendesk, Freshdesk or HubSpot | Their own AI agent | History stays on the customer record you already use |
| On Shopify or Wix | Shopify Inbox or Wix Smart Chat | Free to try and already connected to your store or site |
If the chatbot's main job is capturing enquiries rather than answering them, the setup changes; adding an AI chatbot that captures leads on your website covers the form fields and follow-up.
Five checks to make during any free trial
- Ask your real top 20 questions, taken from last month's emails and calls, and score each answer right, wrong or incomplete. Anything below 18 right out of 20 isn't ready.
- Ask five questions it shouldn't answer, such as a price you don't publish or a medical-sounding worry, and check it hands over instead of guessing.
- Test the handover: ask for a person and time how long until you're notified, on your phone, out of hours.
- Read the billing definition of a conversation, session, outcome or resolution, and check the usage counter after your tests.
- Export a transcript and your content. If you can't get your data out easily, factor that in now.
A fuller pre-launch test script is in how to test a customer chatbot before it goes live, and what to ask an AI chatbot vendor before you sign up covers contract terms, data handling and exit. If none of the ten fits, building versus buying a customer service chatbot weighs the custom route.
Choosing a website chatbot: follow-up questions
Is a free AI chatbot good enough for a small business website?
For testing, yes. Free tiers from Tidio, Chatbase, tawk.to and Wix Smart Chat let you see how an AI answers your real questions. For running a business, free tiers usually cap AI conversations tightly, add the vendor's branding, or, in Chatbase's case, delete agents after 14 days of inactivity. Budget for a paid tier once the trial shows the bot answers at least your ten most common questions correctly.
How many chats a month does a small business website get?
It varies too much to guess, so measure it. If you already have live chat, your dashboard shows it; if not, count last month's enquiry emails, contact-form submissions and repeated phone questions, since many of those move to chat once a widget appears. Price every shortlisted tool at your current volume and at double it, because a visible chat box tends to increase the number of questions people ask.
Should the chatbot say it is an AI?
Yes. It's the honest default, and if you serve customers in the EU, the EU AI Act's transparency duty for chatbots has applied since 2 August 2026. Most tools let you name the bot and set its first message, so say plainly that it's an AI assistant and that a person can take over. Customers who find out later that they were chatting with a bot tend to trust the answers less.
Further reads
- AI Chatbot vs Live Chat vs Help Desk: What a Small Team Needs — Decide whether you need a chatbot, live chat or a help desk.
- How to Build the FAQ Your AI Chatbot Needs Before Launch — Write the FAQ any of these tools will answer from.
- How to Stop an AI Chatbot Giving Customers Wrong Answers — Keep whichever bot you pick from giving wrong answers.
- How to Measure Whether Your AI Chatbot Is Actually Working — Check after launch whether the chatbot is actually working.
- AI Chatbot Disclosure: What to Tell Customers at the Start of a Chat — What to tell visitors at the start of a chat.
- Can You Build an AI Chatbot for Your Business Without Coding? — What you can build yourself without writing code.
- Best AI Customer Support Software for Small Teams in 2026 — Nine support tools compared on what small teams actually pay for AI: per-resolution fees, credits and bundles, each with a worked example.
- How to Protect a Customer-Facing Chatbot From Misuse — Stop visitors tricking your website chatbot: least-power setup, secret-free instructions, spending caps, attack tests and a weekly log check.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: pricing pages for Tidio, Crisp, tawk.to, Chatbase, Help Scout, Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk and HubSpot Service Hub; Wix Smart Chat app listing and Wix help articles; Shopify Inbox and Meta Business Agent details from the site's verified fact sheet; Intercom and Tidio help articles on testing. Checked September 2026.