AI chatbot
By Saurav | Founder of saavos | Building in public toward $10k MRR
[!TLDR] No major chatbot platform offers genuinely unlimited messages. Chatbase gives you 500 message credits at $32/month. Tidio's Lyro caps at 50 conversations on their Starter plan. Intercom Fin doesn't cap you — it charges $0.99 per resolved conversation instead, which is worse. The only honest position is a visible monthly message limit with a flat price. Here is what every major platform actually gives you, and what you pay per message at real usage levels.
I'm building saavos, so I have a stake in this. But I also spent four months testing competitors on my own sites before I launched anything. What I kept seeing on every pricing page was some variation of "unlimited" — or at least no obvious number — until I dug into the fine print.
Here is the real count.
Chatbase's Hobby plan is $32/month on annual billing. The limit is "500 message credits per month."
A message credit is not a conversation. It is one exchange — one user question plus one bot reply. A visitor who asks five follow-up questions in one session uses five credits, not one.
Do the math at different usage levels:
| Monthly visitor sessions | Avg exchanges per session | Credits used | Credits left at Hobby |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 sessions | 5 exchanges | 100 | 400 |
| 100 sessions | 5 exchanges | 500 | 0 |
| 150 sessions | 5 exchanges | 750 | Over cap |
At 100 visitor sessions per month with five exchanges each, you are at your exact limit. If you have a decent month — a Product Hunt launch, a newsletter mention, a Hacker News post — you blow through it.
This is not a criticism of Chatbase. It is a real product with real features. But "500 message credits" is a specific, meaningful constraint that does not appear prominently on the pricing page. You find it in the feature table, third row down.
Tidio's Starter plan is $24.17/month. But the 50 Lyro AI conversations included are a one-time lifetime allocation, not a monthly reset. To get monthly Lyro conversations, you need the Growth plan at $49.17/month for 200/month.
Tidio positions this reasonably — the product is primarily a live-chat platform, and Lyro is an add-on. But if you land on Tidio because you want AI chatbot support and you pick Starter, you will exhaust your 50 Lyro conversations within the first two weeks of a modestly busy site.
The upgrade path to 200 Lyro conversations at Growth is $49.17/month. That is more than double the Starter price for a 4× increase in AI message volume.
Intercom Fin does not have a message cap. It charges $0.99 per resolved conversation on top of per-seat platform fees starting at $29/seat/month.
So it is technically "unlimited" — in the same way your phone data is "unlimited" until you hit the throttle.
At 100 resolved conversations, you owe $99 in resolution fees. Plus seats. At 200 resolutions — a realistic number for a growing SaaS site — that is $198 in resolution fees before you have paid a single dollar toward the base platform.
I wrote about this math in depth in the outcome-pricing post. The short version: per-resolution pricing punishes you for having a good chatbot. When the AI improves and resolves more conversations, your bill goes up. You did not change anything. The product got better and you got a higher invoice.
SiteGPT's Starter is $39/month and includes 4,000 messages per month. That is the most messages per dollar in the $20–$50 range.
At 200 visitor sessions with 10 exchanges each, you use 2,000 messages. You have room. If your site handles 800 monthly sessions at 5 exchanges each — 4,000 messages — you hit the cap at $39.
The message limit is straightforward. SiteGPT publishes it prominently, in the table, labeled clearly. For higher-volume sites in the sub-$50 bracket, SiteGPT's message volume is a real differentiator.
The tradeoff: no permanent free plan (7-day trial only), one bot at Starter vs two at comparable prices, and no API access until the $79/month tier. More in the SiteGPT vs saavos comparison.
FastBots Essential is $39/month and includes 2,000 messages/month. That doubled from around $19/month earlier in 2026. At 2,000 messages, FastBots gives you roughly half the volume per dollar that SiteGPT does at the same price.
What FastBots has that SiteGPT does not: live agent takeover. A visitor chats with the bot, you get pinged, you jump in. For founders who want human handoff at the entry tier, FastBots is the only option in this price range. More in the FastBots price-change post.
I built saavos. So I will be direct about what this is and is not.
saavos's Starter plan is $19/month and includes 1,000 messages per month. The Pro plan is $49/month and includes 3,500 messages. Business is $199/month for 15,000 messages, with a $0.02/message overage capped at $200/period (overage billing is in beta; current overages are absorbed until metered billing ships, target 2026-06).
These numbers are in the pricing table. Not in fine print. Not in a "view details" accordion three clicks deep.
At 200 visitor sessions per month with 5 exchanges each, you use 1,000 messages at Starter. That is exactly the cap. If you regularly run above 200 active sessions per month, you are either at the top of Starter or a Pro plan user.
The free tier is 50 messages/month with no expiry and no credit card. Enough to train the bot on your actual docs and run 10 full visitor sessions to test quality before committing.
Here is what each platform costs per message at real usage levels. This is the number that matters — not the tier price, but the effective cost per conversation exchange.
| Platform | Plan price | Message limit | Cost per message at 100/mo | Cost per message at 500/mo | Cost per message at 1,000/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chatbase | $32/mo | 500 credits | $0.32 | $0.064 | Over cap |
| saavos | $19/mo | 1,000 | $0.19 | $0.038 | $0.019 |
| SiteGPT | $39/mo | 4,000 | $0.39 | $0.078 | $0.039 |
| FastBots | $39/mo | 2,000 | $0.39 | $0.078 | $0.039 |
| Intercom Fin | $29/seat + $0.99/resolution | No cap | ~$1.28+ | ~$1.00+ | ~$1.00+ |
| Tidio Growth | $49.17/mo | 200 Lyro convos | $0.49 | Over cap | Over cap |
Pricing confirmed from vendor pricing pages, 2026-05-18. Intercom Fin figure includes $29/seat base amortized over the conversation count.
The table is not designed to make saavos look best at every number. SiteGPT wins on pure message volume per dollar at higher usage. Intercom Fin is genuinely the right product for companies with support teams running hundreds of tickets per day and a budget to match. Tidio wins if you need live chat and AI in one interface with ecommerce integrations.
The point is: the number exists. It is a real constraint that shapes your actual monthly experience. Knowing it before you sign up is better than discovering it after your first busy week.
When a chatbot pricing page says "unlimited messages" in a feature row, it almost always means one of three things:
None of these is false advertising exactly. But none of them means what "unlimited" sounds like to a founder trying to budget their tooling.
The cleaner version of this is a visible number in the pricing table. 500 credits. 1,000 messages. 4,000 messages. Those are honest numbers you can plan around.
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No major chatbot platform offers genuinely unlimited messages as of 2026. All platforms have either a monthly message cap (Chatbase 500 credits, saavos 1,000, SiteGPT 4,000), a per-resolution fee instead of a cap (Intercom Fin at $0.99/outcome), or a tiered conversation limit that resets monthly (Tidio Lyro at 50–3,000/month depending on plan). "Unlimited" in feature lists typically refers to unlimited within a conversation, not unlimited monthly volume. Pricing confirmed from vendor pages, 2026-05-18.
A Chatbase message credit is one exchange — one user message plus one bot reply. A visitor session with five back-and-forth exchanges uses five credits, not one. The Hobby plan's 500-credit limit translates to roughly 100 visitor sessions at 5 exchanges each per month. Chatbase's Hobby plan is $32/month on annual billing. Confirmed from chatbase.co/pricing, 2026-05-18.
At the entry paid tier, SiteGPT Starter ($39/month) includes 4,000 messages — the highest message volume in the $20–$50 price range. saavos Starter ($19/month) includes 1,000 messages — fewer messages but at a lower price. If message volume is the primary variable, SiteGPT's $39 plan is better value above ~1,500 monthly messages. Below that, saavos's lower base price wins. All prices confirmed from vendor pages, 2026-05-18.
Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per resolved conversation plus per-seat platform fees from $29/seat/month. At 100 resolutions/month with one seat, total cost is approximately $128/month. At 200 resolutions, approximately $228/month. A flat-rate alternative at $19/month (saavos Starter, 1,000 messages) is $209/month less at 200 resolutions. Intercom Fin's model makes sense for enterprise teams comparing AI cost against human agent cost. For early-stage founders, flat-rate is almost always cheaper above 30 conversations/month. Confirmed from intercom.com/pricing, 2026-05-18.
saavos stops serving chat requests after the monthly limit and notifies the account owner; the $0.02/message overage is only available at the Business tier. Chatbase shows an upgrade prompt. SiteGPT offers an add-on block of 5,000 extra messages at $39. Tidio requires a plan upgrade. Intercom Fin has no hard cap — you receive a higher invoice. The practical recommendation: monitor conversation logs weekly so a spike week does not surprise you at billing.
Not necessarily. Message cap is one variable — model quality, source ingestion breadth, citation UX, and setup simplicity all affect which platform fits a given site. Chatbase's 500-credit limit at Hobby reflects a wider feature set (model selection, WhatsApp integration, Notion training). saavos's 1,000-message limit at $19 reflects a narrower scope — website-only, one model family — that serves most solo-founder FAQ use cases. The question is whether the limit works for your actual monthly traffic, not whether a higher limit signals a better product.
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