Pricing guide
Several serious small-business chatbot tools ship genuine $0 plans. Use them to prove the bot answers your customers' questions before paying; just know the limits are sized for testing, and plan the upgrade decision in advance.
Yes, a small business can start with a genuinely free AI chatbot. FastBots and Chatbase both offer $0 plans for trained website answers, and Manychat has a free tier for Instagram and Messenger automation. The honest framing: these are test drives. The allowances are small on purpose, and the moment the bot starts earning — capturing leads, deflecting repeat questions — the entry paid tiers are close by. If you already know you will pay, skip to the affordable chatbots guide; for the full decision map, use the small-business picks page.
A trained website chatbot at $0 with a low message and crawl-page allowance.
Good for: Proving whether a bot trained on your pages answers real customer questions well.
Limits: The allowance is sized for testing, not production traffic on most sites.
A source-controlled AI agent at $0 with low message, member, and source limits.
Good for: Testing careful answers from a handful of pages or documents before paying.
Limits: Inactive agents may be removed, and limits arrive quickly on a live site.
Social DM automation at $0, metered by monthly Active Contacts.
Good for: Testing comment-to-DM and Messenger automation where leads already message you.
Limits: Contact caps and feature gates push active social channels to paid tiers.
Tidio's pricing meters billable conversations; the first 50 Lyro AI conversations are lifetime free.
Good for: A small taste of AI-handled support inside a live-chat workspace.
Limits: Not an ongoing free plan for AI answers; ongoing use lands on Starter and up.
Answer quality on your real pages, setup friction, widget fit, and whether customers actually use the bot.
Run it for two weeks on real questions before judging.
Scale behavior: credit burn under traffic, handoff under load, team access, and removal policies for idle bots.
Read the plan table for the tier you would upgrade into, not the one you are on.
Very low traffic, a single owner-operator, and questions that map to a small set of pages.
Stay free until the bot misses questions you care about.
The bot starts capturing leads or deflecting support you would otherwise pay for in time.
Entry paid tiers cluster around $14-$39/month annually; compare against one recovered lead.
Before any trial, set the bot up to fail honestly: train it only on approved pages, give it a fallback answer, and route anything about price, bookings, or promises to a person. The free prompt builder generates those rules, and the implementation best-practices guide covers the rest of the first project.
FAQ
A free plan is usually good enough to prove the concept and rarely good enough to run on. Free tiers from tools like FastBots , Chatbase , and Manychat are real working chatbots, but the allowances are sized for testing: low message or contact limits, fewer training sources, limited team access, and in some cases inactive bots being removed. Use the free plan to test answer quality on your real pages and your real customer questions. If the bot earns its keep — fewer missed enquiries, fewer repeat questions — the entry paid tiers start around $14-$39/month annually, which is cheap against even one recovered lead for most service businesses.
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The cheapest sensible start is usually a free tier or low entry plan on a tool that already matches the job, not the lowest sticker price you can find. For website answers, Chatbase has a Free tier (limited models, 50 message credits/month, one workspace member) and a Hobby plan at $32/month billed annually; FastBots and Tidio also offer entry tiers. The trap is choosing a $0–$32 plan that meters the wrong unit, then paying more in overages than the next plan up would have cost. Pick the plan that actually fits the meter your traffic will push first, even if it is not the absolute cheapest line item.
Reviewed · Sourced from Chatbase pricing page
Across the main small-business tools, entry paid plans cluster between roughly $14 and $39 per month on annual billing: Manychat Essential from $14/month, ChatBot.com Essential from $19 per user/month, Tidio Starter from $24.17/month, Chatbase Hobby from $32/month, and FastBots Essential from $33/month annually. The sticker is the smaller question; the meter is the bigger one. Two plans at the same price can behave very differently once you compare message credits, billable conversations, contacts, or per-user seats against your actual traffic. Budget for the plan whose meter your busiest month would fit inside, and recheck vendor pricing pages before buying because these numbers drift.
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Pick by the job before you pick by the vendor. Write down the first lost conversation in plain English — missed enquiries from service pages, repeat product questions, DMs that go unanswered, support replies that pile up overnight, or quote requests that need a person. Then match the surface: a website chatbot for site pages, a social-DM tool for comments and DMs, a WhatsApp tool for WhatsApp follow-up, a support-workspace tool when tickets and team inbox matter. Only after the job and surface are clear should you compare plans, pricing units, and handoff. The [small-business chatbot plan picker](/guides/chatbot-plan-picker-small-business) walks through the same sequence.
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