AI chatbot
By Saurav | Founder of saavos | Building in public toward $10k MRR
[!TLDR] Adding an AI chatbot to a small SaaS costs $0–$49/month for 95% of teams in 2026. The price range is wide because the products are genuinely different: $0 tests the question, $19/month handles up to ~1,000 conversations/month, $49/month handles ~3,500, and anything above $99/month is designed for teams with dedicated support staff. The hidden cost nobody quotes is per-resolution billing — Intercom Fin and Tidio Lyro on some plans charge $0.99 and $0.07 per resolved conversation, which turns a flat budget into a variable invoice fast.
I'm the founder of saavos. I've tested every product in this range on my own site, checked competitor pricing pages this week, and paid real invoices. This is what I found.
Here's the current market for small SaaS teams, all prices confirmed from vendor pages on 2026-05-18:
| Platform | Entry paid price | Messages or conversations | Per-resolution fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| saavos | $19/month | 1,000/month | None |
| Chatbase | $32/month (annual) | 500 credits/month | None |
| Tidio | $24.17/month + Lyro add-on from $32.50/month | 100 + 50 Lyro conversations | $0.07–$0.14/resolution on some plans |
| Intercom Fin | $29/seat/month + $0.99/Fin outcome | Per-resolution | $0.99/resolved conversation |
| SiteGPT | $39/month | 4,000/month | None |
Three things stand out.
One: the gap between "looks cheap" and "actually cheap" is per-resolution billing. Tidio and Intercom look competitive on the headline number. At 200 chatbot resolutions a month, Intercom Fin adds $198 in resolution fees on top of seat pricing. That's not a gotcha — it's how the product is designed. But it's not a flat $29.
Two: message volume varies wildly. Chatbase's 500-credit Hobby tier is tight. A single visitor session with 5 back-and-forth exchanges uses 5 credits. At 100 engaged visitors per month, you're near the limit before the month ends.
Three: there's no free permanent tier on most platforms. saavos has one (50 messages/month, no expiry). Chatbase's free tier deletes bots after 14 days of inactivity. SiteGPT has a 7-day trial then it's $39 or nothing.
The free tier question is real. Most small SaaS founders want to test the thing on their actual site before paying anything.
saavos, Chatbase, FastBots, and Tidio all have free tiers. But they're not equivalent.
saavos free: 50 messages/month, one bot, Claude Haiku, no expiry. You can embed it on your production site and watch real visitors use it indefinitely. The only limit is volume.
Chatbase free: 50 message credits, one chatbot — but bots delete after 14 days of inactivity. If you set it up and forget about it for two weeks, the bot is gone and you rebuild from scratch. Good for an active evaluation sprint; unreliable as a permanent tool.
Tidio free: 50 live-chat conversations plus 50 Lyro AI conversations as a one-time allotment. After those run out, you're either paying or without AI capabilities.
FastBots free: 50 messages/month, no time expiry. Honest free tier.
For a small SaaS team that wants to test with real traffic before committing: saavos and FastBots have the most useful free tiers. Chatbase is fine if you'll test actively in the first two weeks.
This is where most small SaaS teams land.
$19/month (saavos Starter): 1,000 messages/month, 2 bots, API access, Claude Sonnet 4.6. For a site with 200–800 monthly visitors at 15% chatbot engagement, you're looking at roughly 90–360 conversations per month — comfortably under the ceiling. If you're a developer, API access at $19 is meaningful: SiteGPT doesn't include API until $79/month.
$32/month (Chatbase Hobby, annual): 500 message credits/month, model selection (GPT-4o, Claude, GPT-5 variants), Notion and YouTube training sources, WhatsApp integration. The 500-credit cap is tight. The model selection and multi-channel support are real differentiators if you need them.
$39/month (SiteGPT Starter): 4,000 messages/month, 1 bot, 1,000 pages of ingestion. The message ceiling is the strongest in this price range — 4x what saavos offers at $19. For moderate-traffic sites (1,000–3,000 monthly visitors), SiteGPT's message headroom changes the math.
$49/month (saavos Pro): 3,500 messages/month, 5 bots, API access, Claude Sonnet 4.6. Right tier for a small SaaS team running multiple products or a marketing site plus a docs bot.
Tidio Growth at $49.17/month + Lyro add-on from $32.50/month: Live chat plus AI in one platform, up to 2,000 live-chat conversations, Lyro AI conversations purchased separately. Total monthly cost for live chat plus meaningful AI: roughly $80–100/month. The right call only if you need live chat alongside AI — otherwise you're paying for a surface you won't use.
Intercom Fin is $0.99 per resolved conversation. Let me run the numbers.
Say a small SaaS has 300 inbound support interactions per month. A well-tuned AI chatbot resolves 60% of those — 180 resolutions. At $0.99, that's $178.20 in resolution fees. Add the $29/seat/month minimum, and you're at roughly $207/month before you add seats for your support people.
That's $2,484/year on support tooling for a team at sub-$5k MRR.
Intercom Fin is a genuine product. The per-resolution model makes economic sense when you're comparing the bot cost against a human agent's salary. At $35/hour for a support agent handling 200 tickets, one avoided hour of agent time covers 35 bot resolutions at $0.99. The math closes for companies with active support teams.
It doesn't close when the comparison is "chatbot vs founder answering Gmail at 11pm." That's the small SaaS scenario. The per-resolution architecture wasn't designed for it.
Solo founder, under 500 monthly visitors: Start on the free tier. saavos, Chatbase, or FastBots — pick whichever has the training source you need. Don't pay anything until you see real conversations in the logs and can verify the bot is actually deflecting questions.
Small team (2–5 people), 500–3,000 monthly visitors: $19–$39/month is the realistic range. If you're under ~1,000 conversations/month, saavos at $19 covers it. If you need the message ceiling or already have a large knowledge base to train on, SiteGPT's $39 Starter handles more volume for a modest premium.
Small team that needs live chat plus AI in one platform: Tidio, but budget for Growth ($49.17) plus the Lyro add-on ($32.50 minimum). That's $80+/month combined. Only worth it if your support model requires live agents alongside the AI — most early-stage SaaS teams don't.
Developer or API-first integration: saavos at $19 includes API access. SiteGPT API requires $79. Chatbase API access is available on paid plans. If building on top of the platform is a requirement, the API tier matters more than the conversation ceiling.
Multi-language audience: None of the sub-$40 options fully cover this in 2026. SiteGPT supports 95+ languages and is the clearest answer in the $39 tier. saavos is English-only until Q3 2026.
Every platform says "set up in 5 minutes." The realistic numbers from my own tests, time-to-live-chatbot-answering-real-questions:
| Platform | Actual setup time |
|---|---|
| saavos | ~8 minutes |
| Chatbase | ~40 minutes |
| SiteGPT | ~20 minutes |
| FastBots | ~25 minutes |
| Tidio (live chat + Lyro) | ~60 minutes |
| Intercom Fin | Demo call required; 3–5 hours minimum |
Setup time is a real cost for a small team. Eight hours evaluating five platforms is a full workday. I'd suggest picking one, giving it a real two-week test with free-tier volume, and only comparing a second option if something is clearly broken.
The Semrush 2026 AI search study found that clarity and direct answers correlate with +32.8% AI citation rates. The same principle applies to chatbot setup: simple, focused training sources outperform an everything-crawl. Three to five tightly-scoped factual pages — pricing, FAQ, key feature pages — outperform a full site crawl on answer quality every time.
Two things shifted the math in early 2026.
FastBots raised its entry tier from $16–19/month to $39/month. That move left saavos as the only product in the sub-$25 entry-paid bracket for website FAQ chatbots. Before the price change, there were two options under $20. Now there's one.
Chatbase Hobby stayed at $32/month annual and added model selection including GPT-5 variants and WhatsApp/Instagram integrations. The feature set expanded without a price increase — notable for a product that was already the feature-richest option in this range.
Both changes make the current market simpler to navigate: if price is the primary constraint, saavos at $19. If feature breadth (multi-channel, model selection, Notion training) is the primary constraint, Chatbase at $32.
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Most small SaaS teams in 2026 pay $0–$49/month for an AI chatbot. Entry-paid tiers start at $19/month (saavos) and reach $49/month for mid-tier platforms. Intercom Fin is outside this range — the per-resolution model at $0.99/outcome puts realistic monthly costs at $150–300/month for small-volume teams once platform fees and seats are included. Per-resolution billing is designed for companies comparing bot cost against human agent cost, not for early-stage founders. Pricing confirmed from vendor pages, 2026-05-18.
The cheapest entry paid tier is saavos at $19/month, which includes 1,000 conversations per month, 2 bots, API access, and Claude Sonnet 4.6. The free tier (50 conversations/month, no expiry, no credit card) covers evaluation needs. Chatbase Hobby is $32/month on annual billing with 500 credits/month. SiteGPT Starter is $39/month with 4,000 messages — the highest message volume in this price range. All prices from vendor pricing pages, confirmed May 2026.
Yes. Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per resolved conversation ("Fin outcome"), on top of per-seat platform pricing starting at $29/seat/month. At 200 chatbot resolutions per month, that adds $198 in resolution fees before seat costs. The pricing model is designed for companies comparing AI deflection cost against human agent cost. For small SaaS teams at sub-$5k MRR, flat-rate alternatives at $19–$49/month are significantly cheaper at equivalent volume. Confirmed from intercom.com/pricing, May 2026.
At $32/month (annual billing), Chatbase Hobby includes 500 message credits/month, model selection (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, GPT-5 variants), Notion and YouTube training sources, and WhatsApp/Instagram integrations. The 500-credit cap is tight — a visitor session with 5 exchanges uses 5 credits. Worth it if you need multi-channel or Notion training. If you only need website FAQ deflection under ~1,000 conversations/month, $19/month alternatives have more message headroom at lower cost. Confirmed from chatbase.co/pricing, May 2026.
Tidio has two components. The live chat platform starts at $24.17/month (Starter, 100 billable conversations). The Lyro AI agent is a separate add-on from $32.50/month. Combined for live chat plus AI: roughly $57–90/month depending on volume. The right choice if you need both channels in one interface. If you only need AI-based FAQ deflection with no live chat component, the combined cost is unnecessary overhead. Confirmed from tidio.com/pricing, May 2026.
Realistic setup times, tested personally: saavos (~8 minutes from sign-up to embedded live chatbot), SiteGPT (~20 minutes), FastBots (~25 minutes), Chatbase (~40 minutes), Tidio with live chat plus Lyro (~60 minutes), Intercom Fin (demo call required; 3–5 hours minimum). The 5-minute claims on marketing pages cover the URL ingestion step only, not full setup. The embed step — copying a script tag into your site HTML — is about 90 seconds. The time goes into picking training sources and testing conversation quality.
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