One fee up front, one a month, and usage only past a line.
You're weighing a monthly fee against the questions you answer by hand now, and the visitors who leave before you get to them. Here is the whole bill.
- Setup. No fee. The first month is invoiced first, and nothing is built until it's paid. It covers the crawl of as many as 25 of your site's pages, the files you upload, the rehearsal answers you review, and the first weeks when a copy of every reply comes to me.
- $0
- Monthly. The widget, the agent, the review on every reply, the handoff alerts, the report link, and $50 of AI and phone usage.
- $249
- Usage past the allowance. Billed at double the raw cost of the model and the carrier, itemised on the next invoice. A quiet month adds nothing.
- ×2
An example, with made-up figures: a busy month's AI and carrier cost comes to $65. The first $50 is inside the fee. The other $15, doubled, adds $30, so that month's invoice is $279. How many conversations fit inside the allowance depends on how long they run, and your report link shows the running figure all month.
- Month to month, cancel any time
- 30-day cancel for any reason
- No setup fee
- If you add text messaging, the number ports out with you
- Conversation records kept 90 days
A script hammering your widget can't run up the bill.
Every message costs a draft and a review, so the widget has built-in limits. By default one visitor can send 12 messages a minute and 150 a day, one conversation tops out at 60 messages, and the whole business at 2,000 widget messages a day. A visitor who hits one sees a short error and can try again later.
A hard monthly ceiling
Each account has a monthly cap on AI spend. When it's reached, every agent you run with me pauses until the month turns over, and you're told when it happens. The trade-off is real: a paused widget answers nobody, so the cap sits above a normal busy month, and you can ask for it higher or lower.
Adding text messages
If the same agent also answers texts, the number's carrier costs run through the same usage line. A local area code takes longer to register than toll-free.
The agent list prices every agent on its own.
What self-serve chat tools publish.
Three self-serve tools with public price lists, checked on each vendor's own site in September 2026. Each counts usage a different way, so compare the unit as well as the headline. Click through before you decide; these change.
| Product | Published price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Support & FAQ Chat | $249/mo including $50 of usage, no setup fee; month to month | Set up and run for you, with a check on every reply. |
| Intercom (Fin AI Agent) | Essential plan $29 per seat a month, billed annually; Fin from $0.99 per outcome; Fin on its own carries a minimum monthly commitment | A help desk and live chat, with the AI agent charged per resolved conversation. |
| Tidio (Lyro AI Agent) | Starter $24.17 a month billed annually (100 billable conversations, 50 one-off AI conversations); Lyro from $32.50 a month billed annually, for 50 AI conversations | Live chat your team staffs, with the AI agent sold by the conversation. |
| Chatbase | Free for 50 message credits a month; Hobby $40/mo (700 credits), Standard $150 (4,000), Pro $500 (15,000); $99/mo to remove its branding | A builder: you upload your documents and set up the bot yourself. |
Read it honestly. Every one of these costs less to start, and Chatbase's free tier costs nothing. What they leave to you is the work: loading the right pages, deciding what the bot may say, reading its answers, and fixing the bad ones. For scale, $249 buys about 251 of Intercom's $0.99 outcomes, which Intercom counts when a customer confirms the answer resolved it, doesn't ask for more help, or Fin completes a workflow, handoffs included. If you have an afternoon a month and like tuning software, a builder is the sensible buy.
Price it against one booked job. Then count them.
There's no setup fee to spread, so the bar is the monthly fee: $249 a month before any usage past the allowance. Divide by what one job is worth to you. The job values below are examples, not claims about your trade.
| Example job value | Chat-won jobs a month to clear the bar |
|---|---|
| $150 | 2 |
| $400 | 1 |
| $2,000 | 1 |
A $2,000 project clears it with one conversation that turns into a booking. A $150 service needs 2 of them every month, and those are bookings the widget made happen, not ones you'd have had anyway. If your site doesn't get that kind of traffic, the fee won't pay back.
Run your own figures through the ROI calculator, or read what AI automation costs for the wider picture on pricing this kind of work.
