Free AI chatbot plans for a website, and the limit each one hits first

Most free AI chatbot plans are small on purpose. Every reply costs the vendor money to generate, so the free plan is a sample and the useful parts sit one plan up. A small site can run on some of them for a long time.

We make Deacon, which answers visitors from your own help pages. Its free plan comes with 50 answers a month, needs no card and never expires. Every figure here, ours included, is as it stood on 18 September 2026, and each rival’s comes from its own pricing and help pages.

The free plans that answer on your site

All of these customer support tools answer visitors with AI on the free plan.

What you hit first assumes a small site, with a few dozen help pages and a few hundred visitors a month. A busier site hits the message limit first on almost all of them.

What each allowance counts

Four different units

Elfsight and Common Ninja count the messages your visitors send. Most of the rest count the bot’s replies, often as credits. Botpress, Jotform and Tidio bill by the conversation instead, and Denser counts queries without saying what one is.

Where a plan counts credits, the model decides how far they go. Chatling charges anywhere from half a credit to 25 credits a reply depending on the model, and Thinkstack from one to fifteen. Dante AI keeps every free model at one credit, so its 100 credits are 100 answers.

The knowledge limit

A site can hit the knowledge limit before it runs out of messages. Crawl N Chat reads 10 pages of your site on its free plan and DocsBot 50, at about 5,000 characters a page. Dante AI holds 150,000 characters, Chatbase 1 MB of training content and Common Ninja five blocks of knowledge. On a bigger help centre, the rest goes unread.

Free plans with a catch

No AI at all

Several of the best-known free chat widgets are live chat support, where a person answers from a browser tab or a phone.

Crisp gives you a live chat widget for two people on its free plan, and its pricing card says “No AI credits included”. Its AI starts on Mini, at $45 a month per workspace. HubSpot’s free bot is rule-based, a set of questions and automatic replies you write yourself, and its AI customer agent needs a Professional subscription. Zoho SalesIQ’s free plan has no bot, and Smartsupp’s is live chat with its AI agent sold separately. ArtiBot calls itself an AI chatbot in its page title, and its bot follows a conversation you design.

For talking to visitors yourself, these are good free plans. All of them except ArtiBot sell the AI on a paid plan, and ArtiBot does not sell it at all.

Not on your own website

Zapier Chatbots has a free plan with two chatbots on it. They live on a public Zapier link, and embedding one on your own site starts on the Pro plan, at $13.33 a month billed annually.

A custom GPT cannot go on a website either. “GPTs are designed to work in ChatGPT. They are not a way to embed ChatGPT in an external website or application,” says ChatGPT’s help centre. The same page says new GPTs can no longer be made on personal accounts, the free one included, and that custom GPTs are being retired.

Gone after a while

Chatbase’s pricing page warns that a free agent is deleted once it has sat idle for fourteen days. Anyone who sets one up and then leaves it for a couple of weeks loses it. No other pricing page in the table mentions deleting anything.

“Your first 50 conversations are free (lifetime).” Tidio, on its AI agent.

After those fifty, Lyro, Tidio’s AI agent, needs a paid plan to answer again. The live chat stays free.

Voiceflow’s pricing page shows no free plan, and its billing documents describe “a one-time credit grant that does not renew”. Wonderchat lists a free plan with 20 credits, and the button under it reads “Start 7-day Free Trial”. Both work more like trials.

On a WordPress site

Most of these have a plugin in the WordPress directory, including Tidio, tawk.to, Crisp, HubSpot, Dante AI, DocsBot, Elfsight, BotPenguin and Jotform. Chatling and Wonderchat have none, and their own install guides send you to a header-and-footer plugin instead.

Either route works, and our guide to WordPress covers both.

Deacon’s free plan

A free Deacon team gets 50 answers a month and a single seat, with 1 MB of knowledge and up to 300 pages read from your site each month. There is no card and no end date. A free account that goes quiet for a month is still there when you come back.

The paid plans raise those limits and change nothing else, so the handover to you and the list of what Deacon could not answer both work on the free plan.

Fifty is a small number. Every reply counts, follow-ups too, and a site with steady traffic can spend it in the first week. After that Deacon stops answering until the month turns over, tells visitors it cannot look into their question right now, and takes an email address for your reply.

Which one to pick

You do not need AI at all for a live chat you answer yourself. tawk.to’s live chat is free for life, with 100 AI message credits a month on top.

BotPenguin’s free allowance, 1,000 bot messages, is the largest of them, though BotPenguin does not say whether it renews each month. Chatling’s 200 credits go further on a cheaper model, and you can take over a Chatling chat yourself on the free plan.

On a documentation site, check the knowledge limit before the message count.

If you might leave the bot alone for a few weeks while you decide, skip a plan that deletes an idle agent.

A site with more than a few hundred questions a month will run through most of these within a couple of weeks, and should be comparing paid plans. What an AI chatbot costs prices four kinds for a thousand questions.