Chatbase Pricing Per Message Credit, Model and Month

Chatbase pricing runs from $40 a month for 700 message credits (Hobby) to $150 for 4,000 (Standard) and $500 for 15,000 (Pro), with 20 percent off on annual billing and Enterprise priced by sales. A credit is not a message, though. The Chatbase documentation charges 1 to 6 credits per reply depending on the model, so the same Standard plan buys 4,000 answers on an economical model and about 1,333 on Claude Sonnet. That puts a reply anywhere from about 3 cents to 34 cents, and it is the model setting, not the plan, that decides your bill.

How much does Chatbase cost per month?

These are the plans on chatbase.co/pricing, read in September 2026, with the price of one credit worked out from each. Every paid plan includes one AI agent. The free tier gives 50 credits and deletes agents after 14 days of inactivity, so it is a test drive rather than a plan.

Some third-party reviews still quote older Chatbase plans with different credit counts. The table above is the live page. If a price you are quoted does not match it, trust the pricing page and ask sales about the difference before you sign an annual term.

How many message credits does each model use?

This is the line most Chatbase pricing guides skip. The Chatbase help documentation lists a credit cost per response for every model. Multiply it by the credit price and you get what one answer actually costs.

On Hobby the spread is wider still: $0.057 a reply on an economical model and $0.34 on the newest Opus. A support conversation usually takes several replies, so a four reply conversation on Claude Sonnet costs about $0.40 to $0.45 on Standard or Pro. That is close to what per-conversation tools such as Botpress and Tidio Lyro charge, which surprises most buyers who picked Chatbase because it looked cheaper.

Is Chatbase Pro worth it over Standard?

Only above a specific volume. Overage credits cost $40 per 1,000, so you can run Standard past its 4,000 credits and pay as you go. Standard plus overage reaches Pro's $500 at 12,750 credits a month. Below that, Standard with extra credits is cheaper than Pro. On annual billing the crossover drops to 11,000 credits. The same arithmetic applies one tier down: Hobby plus overage stays cheaper than Standard up to about 3,450 credits.

Credits are not the only difference, which is why this is a starting point rather than a rule. Pro includes 5 seats against 3 on Standard, and 40 MB of training data against 20 MB. If you need the fourth seat or the larger knowledge base, you are paying for those, not for credits. If you do not, check your last three months of usage before you upgrade.

What do Chatbase add-ons cost?

Three add-ons are published, and two of them matter to agencies and multi-brand companies more than to anyone else:

• Extra AI agent: $25 a month each. Every plan includes one agent, so a second website or a separate internal bot is an add-on even on Pro.
• Remove the "Powered by Chatbase" branding: $99 a month ($1,188 a year). White labeling as a feature sits on Enterprise.
• Auto recharge credits: $40 per 1,000.

Worked example: a marketing agency running bots for three clients on Standard, unbranded, pays $150 plus two extra agents at $50 plus $99 for branding, so $299 a month before any overage, and all three bots share one pool of 4,000 credits. If each client gets 1,500 Sonnet replies a month, that is 13,500 credits, so ten more blocks of 1,000 at $400, or $699 in total. At that usage Pro is the cheaper home: $500 plus the same $149 in add-ons is $649, with 15,000 credits covering all three bots. That is the 12,750 credit crossover above in practice.

What happens when Chatbase credits run out?

The bot stops answering. According to the Chatbase documentation, visitors see a message that the AI agent is currently unavailable, and the owner has to check the account. For a support bot on a pricing page or a checkout flow, that is a lost sale rather than an inconvenience, so either turn on auto recharge or set a usage alert well before the limit. Auto recharge at $40 per 1,000 credits is the more expensive way to buy credits, but it is cheaper than a dead chat widget during a launch.

When the bot hands a conversation to a person, the ticket still has to be answered and tracked. If your team is working those handoffs out of a shared inbox, a help desk with SLA tracking makes it obvious which ones are close to breaching before the customer follows up.

How much does Chatbase cost compared with Chatling and DocsBot?

On the published plans, more per credit. Chatling Growth is $75 for 6,000 credits (about $0.0125 each) and DocsBot Standard is $149 for 15,000 (about $0.010), against $0.0375 on Chatbase Standard. Overage on Chatling is $10 per 1,000 credits, a quarter of the Chatbase rate. All three multiply credits for bigger models, so the honest comparison is on the model you will actually run. We put all seven options, including Intercom Fin, Botpress and a custom build, on one per-conversation unit in Chatbase alternatives priced per reply.

When does Chatbase stop being the cheap option?

When you run a premium model at volume. A custom retrieval bot calling Claude Sonnet 5 directly pays about $0.012 in tokens for a typical answer (4,000 tokens in, 400 out at $2 and $10 per million), roughly a tenth of the $0.10 to $0.12 the same class of model costs through Chatbase credits. The catch is the fixed side: hosting, a few hours of upkeep each month, and a build of roughly 60 to 160 engineering hours.

The custom column is our estimate: tokens, $50 to $150 of hosting and 4 hours of upkeep a month at $60 to $150 an hour. It excludes the build, which at the same rates is $3,600 to $24,000. At 20,000 replies a month that build pays back in about 2 to 18 months; at 50,000, in under 6. At 1,000 or 5,000 replies it never does, and staying on Chatbase is the right call. Chatbase Enterprise pricing is not published and may beat the overage rate at high volume, so get that quote before deciding.

If the numbers point toward a build, the question becomes who builds it. Our chatbot developers page covers what to screen for and what they charge, and the wider cost picture, from subscription bots to enterprise builds, is in how much an AI chatbot costs. If you would rather pay only when a conversation is resolved, the per-outcome options are compared on our AI customer service agent page.

Is Chatbase worth the money?

For a small business answering a few hundred to a few thousand questions a month on an economical model, yes. It is fast to set up, the bill is predictable, and nothing on the list above beats it by enough to justify a migration project. It stops being worth it in three situations: you run a Sonnet or Opus class model on every reply, you run several branded bots and pay $25 plus $99 a month for each extra, or the bot has to look up orders and bookings in your own systems. In the first two, a cheaper credit vendor or a custom bot saves real money. In the third, you need a developer whichever platform you choose.