Free AI chatbots for a website, and their limits

Most free AI chatbot plans for a website give you somewhere between a few dozen and a hundred or so AI replies a month, and a couple give you several hundred or more. Whether one works for you usually turns on something else in the small print, such as how much of your site it reads, whether the allowance renews, whether an idle bot gets deleted and what your visitors see when it runs out. We read every plan below on its vendor’s own pages on 23 September 2026.

Deacon is an AI customer support agent for founders who answer support themselves. Its free plan gives you 50 answers a month from your own docs, with every feature included, no card and no end date. When your docs don’t cover a question, it asks the visitor for their email so you can reply, and the questions it hears show you what customers are stuck on.

Free AI chatbot plans compared

Each of these customer support tools answers visitors with AI on a free plan. The catch is usually the first limit that a small site, with a few dozen help pages, runs into.

The allowances aren’t in the same unit, so a bigger number isn’t always more help. The small print below says what each one counts.

What your visitors see when a free plan runs out

A free plan ends in front of your customers, usually when you aren’t watching. Here’s what each vendor’s own pages say a visitor gets.

• Chatbase’s agent says “This AI Agent is currently unavailable. If you are the owner, please check your account.” A free account can’t buy more credits.
• Chatling keeps the chat open, and shows an error saying “Insufficient AI credits”.
• Dante AI moves to its cheapest model while any credit is left, then says “This AI agent is offline at the moment. Please contact the site owner directly for help.”
• DocsBot’s bot “stops responding and shows visitors a friendly error message”, in the words of its pricing page.
• BotPenguin’s bot can no longer talk to your customers until you upgrade, and Common Ninja’s stops responding until the next billing cycle.
• Wonderchat’s chatbot stops responding, and Tidio’s Lyro stops for good on a free account, although the live chat carries on.
• Elfsight’s whole widget goes once its 200 views are used, whatever is left of the messages.

Two of them don’t leave the visitor stranded. Chattering’s AI stops answering for the rest of the month and asks visitors to leave their email instead. Deacon gives a short reply saying it can’t look into the question right now and asks for their email, unless they’ve already left it. You can still read and reply to every conversation. Botpress, Denser.ai, Jotform and Thinkstack don’t say on their pricing pages what a visitor sees.

The catches in the small print

These are the things to check before you put a free plan in front of customers.

What the allowance counts

Deacon counts answers, one for each reply it writes on your live site, and a conversation takes about 2 of them. A reply saying it doesn’t know counts, while tests in its Playground and messages between a visitor and you never do.

Chatling, Chatbase, Thinkstack and DocsBot AI count credits, and a bigger model spends more of them on each reply. Chatling charges 0.5 to 25 credits a reply by model, Chatbase 1 to 6 and Thinkstack 1 to 15, while DocsBot starts at one. Dante AI’s free models all cost one credit, so its 100 credits buy 100 answers.

Botpress, Jotform and Tidio count conversations. Botpress counts one once a visitor has sent two messages, and Tidio counts any with at least one reply from Lyro. Elfsight and Common Ninja count the messages your visitors send, and BotPenguin counts every message its bot sends, scripted or AI. Denser.ai counts queries without saying what one is.

Free AI that never renews

Tidio says it plainly on its pricing page. “Your first 50 conversations are free (lifetime).” Chatway gives every account 10 free AI conversations beside its free live chat, and then sells AI credits. Voiceflow’s billing documents describe its free plan as “a one-time credit grant that does not renew”, and its pricing page shows no plans at all. Botpress doesn’t say whether its free allowance renews.

An idle bot that gets deleted

Chatbase’s pricing page says “AI agents get deleted after 14 days of inactivity on the free plan”. DocsBot AI’s plan table promises “No 30-day expiry”, but its terms say a free plan’s chatbot data “may be deleted 30 days after creation”. Anyone who sets up a bot and then gets busy for a few weeks can lose it.

No way for you to step in

On several free plans the AI is on its own, so a visitor who needs you has nowhere to go. These are the prices on monthly billing. Dante AI’s inbox, where a person takes over, starts on Advanced at $120 a month. Chatbase counts a handover as an AI Action, which its free plan has none of, and its helpdesk starts on Standard at $150 a month. tawk.to’s escalations to a person start on Growth at $29 a month, Thinkstack’s Human Handoff on Pro at $90 a month, and Denser.ai’s “Talk to a person escalation” on Standard at $119 a month. Chatling and Conferbot let you take over a chat on their free plans.

Free plans with no AI at all

Several well-known free chat widgets are live chat support, where a person answers. Crisp’s free plan gives you the widget and a shared inbox for 2 seats, and its card says “No AI credits included”. Its AI, Hugo, starts on Mini at $45 a month. HubSpot’s free bots follow rules you write, and its AI customer agent needs a Professional or Enterprise plan, of any HubSpot hub or of Smart CRM. Zoho SalesIQ’s free plan has no chatbot, and Freshchat’s is free for up to 10 agents with no AI sessions. Chatbot vs live chat weighs the two for a founder.

Help Scout gives a new account 3 months of AI Answers, which then needs a paid plan. Smartsupp’s free plan is live chat for 25 conversations a month, with its AI agent, Mira, sold separately after 10 free conversations, or 35 once you finish its onboarding tasks. ArtiBot calls itself a free chatbot and AI-powered, but it follows “a conversational flow that you design”.

Not free, or not on your site

Zapier Chatbots is free for 2 chatbots on a public Zapier link. Putting one on your own site starts on Pro, at $20 a month or $13.33 a month billed yearly. A custom GPT can’t go on your site at all. OpenAI’s help centre says GPTs “are not a way to embed ChatGPT in an external website or application”, and that new ones can’t be made on personal accounts, the Free plan included.

Some tools that come up in the same searches have no free plan. SiteGPT and CustomGPT.ai offer 7-day trials that take a card, Intercom has a 14-day trial, and Chatwith’s pricing page lists no free plan.

Deacon’s free plan

Deacon’s free plan gives you 50 answers a month, 1 seat, room for about 67 pages of docs and 10 pages fetched from your site each month. It needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing if you go quiet for a while. Every feature is on it, and the paid plans change only how many answers, pages and seats you get.

It answers your customers in seconds, from your own content and in the language they write in. When your docs don’t cover a question, Deacon says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email. If they leave it or ask for a person, you get an email. Reply from the dashboard, and if they still have the chat open, your reply appears there under your name.

Then it gets better. Every question your docs didn’t cover waits in your dashboard with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Topics groups what people ask and labels most of it as a how-to, a bug report, a feature ask and so on, so you see what customers are stuck on and what they want next.

Fifty answers is about 25 conversations, so a site with steady traffic will outgrow it. Nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, no plan upgrades itself, and there’s no badge to pay to remove on any of them. The website chat widget page shows what your visitors see, and AI chatbot for your website shows everything Deacon does behind it.

Which free plan fits your site

Start from what your site needs most. Chatbot examples shows how the good ones reply.

If you’ll answer visitors yourself and want a little AI on the side, tawk.to’s live chat is free for good, with 100 AI credits a month on top. There’s more in tawk.to alternatives.

If you want the most AI replies without paying, BotPenguin’s 1,000 messages and Conferbot’s 600 chats are the biggest allowances here, though BotPenguin counts its scripted replies in the same 1,000.

If your help pages run past a handful, check the knowledge limit before the reply count. Crawl N Chat reads 10 pages, Common Ninja holds 5 blocks and DocsBot AI 50 pages, while Chatling takes 500,000 characters.

If the bot might sit idle while you decide, skip Chatbase. If you want to step in when the bot can’t help, Chatling and Conferbot let you on their free plans.

If you’d pay for the right tool, the best AI chatbots for customer service compares the paid plans too, with when a person can take over. If you run a shop, a clinic or a trade, AI chatbot for small business shows which of your customers’ questions a chatbot can take.

If you answer support yourself and want to know what your customers are asking, Deacon is built for you. It answers from your docs in seconds, lists the questions your docs didn’t cover so you can answer each one once, and the free plan includes every feature.

Questions about free AI chatbots for a website

Is there a completely free AI chatbot for a website?

Not one with unlimited AI replies. Every reply costs the vendor money to generate, so each free plan caps them. The closest to free for good is live chat that you answer yourself, such as tawk.to’s, with a small AI allowance on top.

Can I put ChatGPT on my website for free?

No. ChatGPT runs on OpenAI’s own site and apps, and OpenAI says GPTs aren’t a way to embed it in another website. To build your own chat on OpenAI’s models, you use its API, which is paid for by use.

Do free chatbot plans show the vendor’s branding?

Most do. Tidio’s branding can’t come off on its free plan, and taking “Powered By Chatbase” off costs $99 a month, an add-on free accounts can’t buy. Dante AI’s free widget carries its branding, and removing tawk.to’s badge costs $29 a month. Deacon has no “powered by” line on any plan, the free one included, so there’s nothing to pay to remove. Its replies do carry a small Deacon mark.

What happens when Deacon’s free answers run out?

Visitors get a short reply saying Deacon can’t look into that one right now, and are asked for their email unless they’ve already left it. You can still read and reply to every conversation, and messages between a visitor and you never count against your answers. Nothing is billed, and your plan never upgrades itself.

Can I add a free AI chatbot to WordPress?

Yes. Most chatbots here go on with a plugin or a script tag in your footer, and our WordPress guide covers both, with what the free WordPress plugins include. For any other platform, how to add a chatbot to your website says where the tag goes.