AI chatbot
By Saurav | Founder of saavos | Building in public toward $10k MRR
[!TLDR] I tested five AI chatbot platforms for saavos and ended up spending $0 on three of them. The two I paid for: $19/month (saavos, which I built) and a $32/month Chatbase trial. Total out-of-pocket over four months: $147. Here's what each dollar bought and what I'd skip if I started over.
I'm the founder of saavos. That means I built the product, yes — but it also means I went through the exact same evaluation anyone else does when picking a chatbot for their site. I tried competitors on my own URL before shipping anything. Real accounts. Real free tiers. Real invoices.
This isn't a comparison chart with vendor marketing copy summarized. It's a log of what I opened, paid for, and cancelled.
Botpress is the one that every developer finds first because it's open source and the docs are thorough. I set up a local instance. The flow builder is genuinely impressive if you want to build a branching decision tree for a complex product.
I killed it in two days.
Not because Botpress is bad — it's good for what it is. But "what it is" is a developer platform, not a finished product. To deploy something usable, I'd need to host it, maintain updates, write the RAG integration myself, and wire up an embed widget. That's two weeks of build work for a feature I needed live in a week.
Botpress Plus starts at $150/month for managed hosting. At $0 MRR, that felt like the wrong place to start.
Pricing from botpress.com/pricing, confirmed 2026-05-18.
Chatbase is the product most people in the "indie SaaS chatbot" space have tried or are currently using. I paid one month of the Hobby tier — $32, which is $40/month billed monthly or $32 annual. I did annual. That invoice is in my Dodo Payments history.
What I got for $32:
What I didn't get: citations on answers. Chatbase shows sources in the interface but doesn't surface inline citations the way I wanted. For a product that's supposed to answer questions accurately, I want the visitor to see "this came from your FAQ page, line 3." Chatbase doesn't do that out of the box.
The 500-credit limit at Hobby is also real. A single visitor session with 5 back-and-forth messages is 5 credits. At 100 monthly visitors with a 15% engagement rate, that's ~75 sessions — 375 credits just on that. Leaves 125 credits for anything else.
I cancelled after one month. Not because Chatbase is a bad product. Because I realized I was evaluating my own thesis as much as their product.
FastBots was $16/month when I tried it. (It's $39/month now — see what happened with that price increase.) I used the free tier: 50 messages/month, one chatbot.
The free tier was enough to confirm one real differentiator: live agent takeover. FastBots includes human handoff at the entry tier. Visitor is chatting with the bot, you get a notification, you jump in. saavos doesn't have this. If human handoff is a real requirement for you, FastBots at $39 is the only product in the sub-$50 bracket with it.
I didn't convert to paid because live agent wasn't a requirement for me. The chatbot's job was FAQ deflection, not sales triage.
I scheduled a demo. Looked at the pricing page. Did not sign up.
Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per resolved conversation on top of platform fees. At 200 chatbot resolutions/month — a reasonable number for a small SaaS — that's $198/month in resolution fees alone, before seats, before the Intercom base. That's $2,376/year for a product I'm deploying to deflect FAQ questions.
The product is good. The pricing model is right for a Series B company with a support team. At $0 MRR, it would eat 20-30% of realistic first-month revenue on support software alone.
Intercom pricing verified at intercom.com/pricing, 2026-05-18.
Tidio's live-chat product is $25/month at the Starter tier. The AI chatbot (Lyro) is not included at Starter — that's $50/month for the Growth plan. I tested the free tier: 50 Lyro conversations/month, live chat up to 50 conversations/month.
The live-chat side works well. If you need live chat plus AI chatbot in a single platform — especially for Shopify, where Tidio integrates cleanly — it's a legitimate option.
For my use case (no live chat, just AI answers from my docs), Tidio Growth at $50/month made less sense than paying $19/month somewhere else for the same core RAG-deflection feature.
I built this, so obviously I run it. But I want to be specific about why I chose $19/month as the price point rather than "because that's what the market supports."
When I looked at my own invoices and my own cancelled trials, the job I needed done was narrow: answer questions from my pricing page and FAQ, 24/7, with citations back to the source. That's it. I didn't need WhatsApp. I didn't need live agent handoff. I didn't need model selection.
saavos at Starter does exactly that. URL crawl, Claude Sonnet on every paid plan, citations on by default, one embed script. The $19 is not a marketing number — it's the number where I personally stop feeling the monthly payment as a real budget decision.
If you need the other features, I'd tell you to pay more for them. Chatbase at $32 for model selection and Notion training. FastBots at $39 for live agent. Those are real reasons, not marketing fluff.
Every platform I tested claimed "set up in 5 minutes." Here's the real breakdown:
| Platform | Time to live chatbot, actually |
|---|---|
| Botpress | 2+ days (self-hosted setup) |
| Chatbase | ~40 minutes |
| FastBots | ~25 minutes |
| Tidio | ~30 minutes (live chat part) |
| saavos | ~8 minutes |
The fastest path I found — including my own product — was 8 minutes from sign-up to embedded bot answering questions from my FAQ page. The slowest was Botpress at "it depends on your DevOps comfort level."
Setup time doesn't show up in a monthly bill. But if you're spending two days evaluating five platforms, that's founder time with an actual opportunity cost.
Skip the Botpress rabbit hole unless you're an engineering team that wants control over every layer. The hosted managed tier ($150/month) is competitive on features but not on price for a solo founder pre-PMF.
Start with free tiers. All five platforms I tested have them. They're real enough to train on your actual URL and see whether the answers are good or garbage. Chatbase's free tier deletes after 14 days of inactivity — watch for that. The others (saavos, FastBots, Tidio) don't expire.
Don't commit annually before one month of production use. The Chatbase annual plan saved me $8/month over monthly billing. I cancelled after one month anyway and ate the annual lock-in cost. Not worth the discount.
Four months. Five platforms tested. $147 spent ($32 Chatbase, the rest free tiers, then $19/month ongoing for saavos). One bot in production.
If I had just gone straight to a $19/month product and skipped the evaluation phase, I'd have saved 8 hours and $32. But I also wouldn't have known that Chatbase's credit system is tight at Hobby, that FastBots' live-agent differentiator is real, or that Botpress is genuinely a different product category.
The evaluation was worth it. Just probably could've been done in two weeks instead of four.
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$0-$49/month covers the realistic range. Free tiers on Chatbase, saavos, FastBots, and Tidio are functional enough to evaluate on your real URL. First paid tier at $19-$39/month covers most FAQ-deflection use cases. Avoid per-resolution billing (Intercom Fin, Tidio Lyro on some plans) until you are at $5k+ MRR and know your resolution volume. All pricing confirmed from vendor pages, 2026-05-18.
Depends on what you need. At $32/month annual (Hobby tier), you get 500 message credits/month, model selection including GPT-5 variants and Claude, Notion and YouTube training sources, and WhatsApp integration. That is a genuinely broader feature set than $19/month alternatives. If those features matter to your use case, yes. If you just need website FAQ deflection under a tight monthly budget, $32 is more than you need to spend.
The per-resolution model makes it hard to cap. At $0.99 per resolved conversation, a chatbot handling 200 resolutions/month costs $198 in resolution fees alone, plus platform fees and seats. For a small SaaS at sub-$5k MRR, the monthly cost can exceed 10-20% of revenue. Intercom Fin is purpose-built for companies with support teams and predictable high volume. Pricing confirmed from intercom.com/pricing, 2026-05-18.
The open-source version is free but requires self-hosting and engineering setup. Botpress Plus (managed cloud) starts at $150/month. For a solo founder who needs a chatbot live in under an hour, neither option is the right starting point. Botpress is a developer platform; the others are finished products. Worth it if you need fine-grained flow control or enterprise compliance. Pricing confirmed from botpress.com/pricing, 2026-05-18.
Yes, but there is no data migration between platforms. Your conversation history stays with the old tool. Setup on the new platform takes 20-40 minutes: retrain from the same source URLs or PDFs, update the embed script tag in your site HTML, and test the fallback message. The switching cost is time, not data.
For no-expiry free tiers: saavos (50 messages/month, Claude Haiku, permanent), FastBots (50 messages/month, no expiry), Tidio (50 live-chat conversations, no expiry). Chatbase has a free tier but deletes bots after 14 days of inactivity. Botpress has a free cloud tier limited to 100 conversations/month. For testing on your real URL before committing, saavos and FastBots have the most useful free tiers for FAQ-deflection use cases.
Builds tools for solopreneurs and small SaaS teams who don't have an afternoon to spare.
Paste your URL. Train your bot. Drop one script tag. No credit card.