Short answer: $29 to $99/month for SMB, $150 to $500/month for mid-market, $1,000+ for enterprise
If you only have ten seconds to skim, that range covers roughly 90% of real-world AI chatbot deployments in May 2026. The cheapest credible paid plan in the category is ChatRaj Pro at $29/month for 10,000 messages, the most common mid-market price point sits between $150 and $500/month, and enterprise contracts (with SLAs, dedicated success, and custom data-residency commitments) start around $1,000/month and scale with usage.
Within that range, four pricing models dominate the category:
- Flat monthly quota. You pay a fixed monthly fee and get a fixed number of messages or conversations. No overage on most plans. Examples: ChatRaj ($29/mo for 10,000 messages, $99/mo for 50,000), Chatbase ($40/mo for 1,500 message credits, $150/mo for 10,000, $500/mo for 40,000).
- Per-resolution. You pay only when the bot successfully resolves a customer conversation. The headline example is Intercom Fin at $0.99 per resolution, with a 50-resolution monthly minimum.
- Per-seat add-on. You pay a base helpdesk subscription plus an AI add-on per seat or per AI conversation block. Tidio Lyro's add-on starts at $39/month for 50 AI conversations on top of the Tidio base plan ($29 to $59/month for Starter or Growth).
- Usage credits. A hybrid where you pay a monthly fee for a credit pool, and any overage is billed per credit. Most enterprise contracts use this shape.
The "right" price depends almost entirely on three numbers: your monthly message volume, your tolerance for surprise bills if traffic spikes, and whether you need integrations beyond a website widget (WhatsApp, Slack, helpdesk, CRM). The rest of this page walks through each in detail, then gives you a 7-step estimator for your specific usage.
AI chatbot pricing by usage tier
The category sorts cleanly into three usage tiers that match three different buyer profiles.
SMB tier (1,000 to 10,000 messages/month)
The most common entry point for AI chatbots: a small business that wants a chatbot on its marketing site or e-commerce store, expects a few thousand visitor questions per month, and wants a predictable bill.
Realistic pricing as of May 2026:
- ChatRaj Pro: $29/month, 10,000 messages, hybrid retrieval, no overage.
- Chatbase Hobby: $40/month, 1,500 message credits, basic integrations.
- SiteGPT Hobbyist: $39/month, starting tier for small site coverage.
- Tidio Starter + Lyro add-on: roughly $68/month combined ($29 base + $39 Lyro for 50 AI conversations).
- Intercom Fin (minimum): roughly $50/month at the 50-resolution monthly minimum.
For this tier, the gap between cheapest and most expensive is significant on a per-message basis. ChatRaj Pro lands at $0.0029 per message; Chatbase Hobby works out to $0.0267 per message at the included credit count; Intercom Fin at $0.99 per resolution is several orders of magnitude higher per interaction (but only charges for successful resolutions, not every message).
Mid-market tier (10,000 to 100,000 messages/month)
Companies with a meaningful traffic footprint, often SaaS or e-commerce with documented product catalogs, FAQs, or knowledge bases. The chatbot becomes a real volume tool, not a hobby.
Realistic pricing as of May 2026:
- ChatRaj Growth: $99/month, 50,000 messages, hybrid retrieval, no overage.
- Chatbase Standard: $150/month, 10,000 credits, 2 agents, auto-retraining.
- Chatbase Pro: $500/month, 40,000 credits, 3 agents, AI Actions, priority support.
- SiteGPT Pro/Scale: roughly $79 to $399/month depending on bot count and page volume.
- Tidio Growth + Lyro: roughly $200 to $400/month combined depending on Lyro conversation volume.
- Intercom Fin (mid-volume): $500 to $5,000/month at typical mid-market resolution counts.
At this tier the per-message ratios separate further. ChatRaj Growth runs $0.00198 per message; Chatbase Pro at $500/mo for 40,000 credits is $0.0125 per credit. The 6x ratio is real and reflects different cost structures, not a temporary promotion.
Enterprise tier (100,000+ messages/month)
Larger SaaS, retail, telco, or financial-services operators with custom SLAs, signed DPAs, regional data-residency requirements, and a procurement team that runs vendor reviews.
Realistic pricing as of May 2026:
- ChatRaj Enterprise: custom contract, usually starting around $999/month base plus message-volume add-ons.
- Chatbase Enterprise: custom contract; public reports describe ranges from $2,000 to $5,000/month base.
- Intercom Fin (enterprise volume): $5,000 to $50,000+/month depending on monthly resolution counts.
- Tidio Plus: from $749/month (with Premium contact-only contracts reported around $2,999/month).
- SiteGPT Enterprise: custom contract, scaling with up to 100,000 pages and 1,000 bots.
At enterprise scale the per-message ratio matters less than the SLA, the DPA, and the integration surface. A 99.9% uptime SLA, a 4-hour support response time, EU data residency, and SSO/SAML add-ons typically gate the move from mid-market plans to enterprise contracts.
AI chatbot pricing by model shape
Beyond the tiers, the four pricing models behave very differently when traffic varies.
Flat monthly quota (most predictable)
You pay $X/month and get N messages or conversations. If you use fewer, you still pay $X. If you use more, plans either reject the extra messages or upsell you to the next tier. There is no surprise bill at month-end.
Best for: operators who want a predictable line-item in the budget and don't want to worry about spiky traffic blowing up the chatbot bill. The flat quota is also the simplest model for non-technical buyers to reason about.
Examples: ChatRaj ($29 Pro, $99 Growth), Chatbase (Hobby, Standard, Pro tiers).
Per-resolution (Intercom's model)
You pay $0.99 per successfully resolved conversation, with a 50-resolution monthly minimum (roughly $50/mo floor). A resolution is counted when the customer either confirms the answer was satisfactory or exits without further questions, capped at most once per conversation.
Best for: support teams already running Intercom for live chat. The per-resolution model aligns spend with outcomes (the bot only earns its fee when it actually resolves something). The downside is variable bills: a high-traffic month with strong resolution rates can produce a much larger invoice than a quiet month.
Hidden cost note: Intercom's Helpdesk subscription (starting at $29/seat/month) and Copilot ($29 to $35 per agent per month) often sit on top of the per-resolution Fin fee for teams that want the full stack.
Per-seat add-on (Tidio Lyro's model)
You subscribe to a base helpdesk plan (Tidio Starter at $29/mo or Growth at $59/mo) and add Lyro AI as a per-conversation add-on (starting at $39/month for 50 AI conversations, scaling with higher volume bundles).
Best for: teams already running Tidio for live chat that want to layer AI on top without re-platforming. The downside is that the base plan + AI add-on math can produce noticeably higher effective costs than a flat-quota competitor: a Tidio Growth + Lyro mid-volume bundle often lands at $150 to $250/month for what ChatRaj covers at $99/month.
Usage credits (most flexible, hardest to compare)
You pay a monthly fee that includes a pool of credits, and any overage bills per credit. Some vendors' credits also vary by underlying LLM (a Claude Sonnet reply costs more credits than a Claude Haiku reply, for example), which makes plan-to-plan comparison harder.
Best for: large operators with predictable monthly volume who want one negotiated annual contract. The downside is that the unit (credit) doesn't map cleanly to a question or a message in the operator's head, which makes monthly cost auditing slower.
Hidden costs to budget for
The advertised plan price is rarely the all-in cost. The five most common surprises:
- "Remove branding" upcharges. Most plans put a small "Powered by [vendor]" link in the widget footer. Removing it is often a $39 to $199/month add-on (Chatbase, Tidio, several others charge for this).
- Custom domain for the widget. Hosting the widget at chat.yoursite.com instead of widget.vendor.com is sometimes a $59 to $99/month add-on.
- Extra credits / message overage. Once you exceed your plan's message or credit pool, top-ups typically run $12 to $14 per 1,000 credits with Chatbase and similar.
- Helpdesk subscriptions sitting under AI add-ons. Per-resolution and per-seat models often assume you're paying for the base helpdesk separately. Tidio Lyro, Intercom Fin, and Zendesk AI all stack on top of a $29 to $99/seat base.
- Annual lock-in discounts. Most vendors offer 17 to 20% off for annual billing. The cash discount is real, but the lock-in trades flexibility for savings; if you're unsure about volume, monthly billing is safer for the first 3 to 6 months.
For a credible total cost of ownership estimate, add roughly 15 to 30% to the headline plan price to cover the add-ons that most operators end up enabling.
Is an AI chatbot worth the cost?
The honest framing is unit economics: a chatbot is worth its monthly fee if it deflects enough support tickets, captures enough qualified leads, or shortens enough sales cycles to cover that fee.
A useful back-of-envelope test:
- If your support team currently handles 1,000 tickets/month at an average cost-per-ticket of $5 (typical for an SMB), your monthly support cost is $5,000.
- A chatbot that deflects 20% of those tickets (a conservative target for well-trained bots) saves $1,000/month.
- At $29/month for ChatRaj Pro, the ROI is roughly 34x.
- At $150/month for Chatbase Standard, it's 6.7x.
- At $0.99 per resolution for Intercom Fin and 200 resolved tickets (20% of 1,000), it's $198/month for $1,000 deflected, a 5x ROI.
If your support volume is small (under 100 tickets/month) the math is tighter and the chatbot has to lean on lead capture or sales-cycle compression to justify itself. If your volume is large (10,000+ tickets/month) the math becomes extremely favorable even at premium price points.
Free tiers exist on every major vendor (ChatRaj 100 messages/mo, Chatbase 50 credits/mo, SiteGPT free trial, Intercom Fin 14-day trial, Tidio free plan). The cheapest credible evaluation is to run a free tier for 2 weeks against real visitor traffic, measure the deflection rate, then size the paid plan to that actual demand.
How costs scale as your business grows
The other useful framing is "what happens to my bill if traffic doubles." Pricing models scale differently and the answer matters when you are projecting next year's budget.
Per-message and per-credit plans scale linearly within a tier and then step up when you cross to the next plan. A site going from 8,000 to 16,000 messages on Chatbase Standard ($150/mo, 10,000 credits) would jump to Pro ($500/mo, 40,000 credits), so doubling traffic triples the bill. ChatRaj going from Pro ($29/mo, 10,000 messages) to Growth ($99/mo, 50,000) is a 3.4x cost increase for 5x more messages, which is cheaper per unit at scale.
Per-resolution plans (Intercom Fin) scale truly linearly: 2x traffic with the same resolution rate equals 2x cost. There are no step functions, which makes per-resolution easier to forecast but harder to cap.
Per-seat plans (HubSpot Service Hub, Drift before sunset) decouple cost from traffic entirely. Add agents to add cost; visitor volume on a fixed seat count is free. That is good news for high-volume sites with small support teams and bad news for sites with seasonal traffic spikes that you cannot staff for.
The takeaway: pick the pricing model whose scaling curve matches your traffic shape. Flat-tier sites do well on per-message. Steady-state support teams do well on per-resolution. Sales-team-heavy organizations do well on per-seat.
Free trial versus free tier: which evaluation path makes sense
The two evaluation paths look similar but commit you differently.
A free tier (ChatRaj, Chatbase, Tidio) is permanent, has a small monthly cap, and lets you evaluate for weeks while running real visitor traffic. Upgrade when you are confident the bot works for your site. Cancel anytime before upgrading.
A free trial (CustomGPT, Intercom Fin) is time-limited (usually 7 to 14 days), requires a credit card upfront, and converts automatically. You either confirm and pay or actively cancel before the trial ends. If you forget to cancel, you are billed for the first month at full price.
For risk-averse SMB evaluators, the free tier path is structurally less costly. Picking a vendor whose free tier is permanent lowers your trial-conversion risk to zero. Picking a vendor with only a paid trial requires more diligence on your calendar.