Free AI chatbot for your website: 9 real free tiers, their limits, and how to test one in an afternoon

This is for small business owners who want a chatbot on their website without a monthly bill. We checked nine free tiers in October 2026, separated real AI from plain live chat, and show where each one stops, so you know what "free" buys before you paste any code.

By Ritchie, ReplyKit · Published 15 October 2026 · 8 min read

Is there a truly free AI chatbot for a website?

There are free website chat widgets, and a few free AI allowances, but no AI chatbot is free at real volume. Every AI reply costs the vendor money to generate, so free plans cap it hard or leave AI out.

It helps to separate two things that get called "chatbot":

• Live chat is a widget where a person replies. Free versions are common and genuinely useful if someone is available.
• An AI chatbot reads your content and replies on its own. Free versions exist, but with small caps, one-off allowances or a short trial.

A third kind, the scripted bot with buttons, is often free too. It follows menus you draw and cannot answer a question you did not predict. Our chatbot vs AI agent explainer covers the difference.

Which website chatbots have a free plan?

Nine tools small businesses ask us about, checked on each vendor's own pricing page in October 2026. Only three include any AI on the free tier.

What does each free chatbot plan actually give you?

In short: Tidio and Botpress give you a taste of real AI, tawk.to gives you free human chat, and the rest are free live chat with AI on paid plans.

Tidio Free

Live chat, ticketing and 50 billable conversations, plus a lifetime allowance of 50 Lyro AI conversations. Once those 50 are used, Lyro is a paid subscription: $39 a month for 50 AI conversations when billed monthly, rising to $700 for 1,000. Good for trying AI on a quiet store. See ReplyKit vs Tidio and our list of Tidio alternatives.

Botpress Free

A builder for AI bots: 100 conversations a month, three bots and three seats, with "no top-ups or overages" on the free plan. Each conversation includes $0.10 of AI usage covered by Botpress. Powerful, but you build the bot yourself, which takes longer than an afternoon for most owners.

tawk.to

The most generous free live chat: unlimited use if you keep the "Powered by tawk.to" branding (removal is $29 a month). AI Assist starts at $29 a month, and the page mentions a forever-free AI Assist plan for sites with limited chat volume without saying what the limit is. Best if a person can answer most chats. See ReplyKit vs tawk.to.

Crisp, Freshchat, Zoho SalesIQ and HubSpot

Solid free live chat, no AI on the free tier. Crisp Free gives two seats and a shared inbox; its Mini plan at $45 a month adds $5 of AI credits, which Crisp puts at about 90 automated conversations. Freshchat is free for up to 10 agents, with the Freddy AI Agent on paid plans (first 500 sessions included once, then $49 per 100). Zoho SalesIQ Free covers 3 operators and 100 chats a month. HubSpot's free chatbot builder links to its free CRM; its AI Customer Agent needs a Professional or Enterprise edition.

Chatwoot: the open-source route

Chatwoot's cloud Hacker plan is free for two agents and 500 conversations a month, without its Captain AI. The Community Edition is free to self-host, which costs you a server and someone to maintain it. Paid cloud plans start at $19 per agent a month with 300 AI credits.

What breaks when you rely on a free chatbot?

Free plans fail quietly. The widget still shows, but the AI stops, the history disappears, or the chat waits for a person who is not there.

• The cap arrives mid-month. A busy week uses 50 conversations in days. After that, visitors get an offline form or a person who may not reply.
• The AI allowance is one-off. Tidio's 50 Lyro conversations are lifetime, not monthly. Freshchat's 500 Freddy sessions are once per account.
• No AI at all. Free live chat only works if someone watches it. Our live chat vs AI widget comparison shows what happens after hours.
• Branding stays on. Removing it costs extra on most tools, from $29 a month on tawk.to to $1,188 a year on Chatbase.
• History is short. Chatwoot's free plan keeps 30 days of data.
• No booking or lead capture. Free tiers answer questions; few offer real appointment slots or score leads.
• Website only. None of the free plans above answers your WhatsApp. If customers message you there, a free website bot misses them.

Free is right when volume is low and you mostly want a place for visitors to reach you. Once inquiries are part of how you make money, the cost of a missed lead is larger than any plan. Harvard Business Review's audit of 2,241 US companies found 23% never responded to a web lead at all, and firms that responded within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that waited even an hour longer (HBR, 2011).

How do I test a website chatbot in one afternoon?

Use your own questions and your own content, compare two tools side by side, and score them. This takes about three hours and tells you more than any review.

1. Collect 20 real questions. Copy them from last month's emails, website form, DMs and WhatsApp. Include the awkward ones.
2. Gather your content. Your website address, price list, opening hours, policies and a short FAQ. If it is not written down, the chatbot cannot know it.
3. Set up two tools. Use free plans or trials. Load the same content into both. Note how long setup takes.
4. Ask the 20 questions, then three traps. One question your content does not answer, two questions in one message, and one in a second language your customers use.
5. Test the handoff on your phone. Ask for a person. Check you are notified and can reply while the visitor waits.
6. Read the limits page. Find out exactly what happens at the cap: does the AI stop, does the widget go offline, what does the next tier cost?
7. Score and decide. Count correct answers out of 20, and reject any tool that guessed on the trap question. Then price your real monthly volume.

Our AI chatbot buyer's guide has a printable ten-point scorecard, and how to test your AI agent before going live goes deeper.

Free trial or free plan, and where ReplyKit fits

A free plan lets you run small forever; a free trial lets you run properly for a short time. If you want to know whether AI will win you customers, a full-featured trial on real traffic answers that faster than a capped free plan.

ReplyKit does not have a free plan. It has a 7-day free trial with no credit card needed and 300 AI replies, and nothing is charged unless you choose a plan. The $29 Starter plan includes one website assistant and one WhatsApp number, with 1,000 AI replies a month shared between them. The website assistant goes on with one line of code and has its own instructions and knowledge.

• Answers from your content: crawl your site, upload PDFs and price lists, add Q&A pairs. If the answer is not there it says so and escalates.
• Books appointments: offers real open slots and sends a reminder about 24 hours before.
• Also answers WhatsApp: through Quick Connect, an unofficial QR pairing that is not the WhatsApp Business API and can get a number restricted, so use a dedicated number.

Where it is not the right pick: if you only need a place for visitors to reach a person, tawk.to's free live chat is enough. If you get fewer than 50 website chats a month and no WhatsApp inquiries, Tidio Free may cover you. If you want both website and WhatsApp answered with AI, start the free trial and run the afternoon test above. Plans are on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

ReplyKit is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Meta or WhatsApp, or by any other vendor named here; their names are trademarks of their owners. Third-party prices and free tiers were checked on each vendor's public pricing page in October 2026 and may change. This article is general guidance, not financial advice.