Seven chatbot pricing pages read directly

Chatbase alternatives and competitors priced per reply and the volume where a custom bot costs less

Chatbase sells message credits, and a credit is not an answer. A Claude Sonnet reply burns three of them. We read the pricing pages of Chatbase, Chatling, DocsBot, Botpress, Intercom Fin and Tidio Lyro, put every plan on the same unit, and worked out where a bot you own becomes the cheaper Chatbase alternative.

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the short answer

The strongest Chatbase alternatives split by what you are paying for. DocsBot and Chatling sell the same kind of credit for about 1 to 1.25 cents, against 3.3 to 5.7 cents on Chatbase. Intercom Fin charges $0.99 only when a conversation is resolved, and Botpress and Tidio Lyro bill per conversation at about $0.50 to $0.65. The number that changes the decision is the model multiplier: Chatbase charges 3 credits for every Claude Sonnet reply, so a premium model on Pro costs about $0.10 a reply against roughly $0.012 in raw API tokens. Somewhere between 5,000 and 17,000 premium replies a month, a custom bot built by a developer is cheaper than every plan here, build cost included.

The audit

What each Chatbase competitor publishes on its own pricing page

Most Chatbase alternatives lists are written by one of the alternatives, and the author ranks itself first. We do not sell a chatbot builder, so there is nothing here to rank. Every price below comes from the vendor pricing page or documentation, read in September 2026. These pages change, so recheck before you sign.

Tool	Published paid plans	Billing unit and extras	Who it suits
Chatbase	Hobby $40 a month (700 credits), Standard $150 (4,000), Pro $500 (15,000), 20 percent off yearly. Enterprise by sales	Message credit, 1 to 6 per reply by model. Extra credits $40 per 1,000, extra agent $25 a month, branding removal $99 a month. One agent per plan	Small teams that want a working bot this afternoon
Chatling	Starter $25 (1,750 credits), Growth $75 (6,000), Scale $295 (35,000), about 17 percent off yearly	AI credit, 0.5 to 25 per response by model. Extra credits $10 per 1,000, extra chatbot $3, branding removal $35 on Scale	The closest like for like swap at a lower credit price
DocsBot	Personal $49 (5,000 credits), Standard $149 (15,000), Business $499 (60,000), two months free yearly	AI credit from 1x per message, higher for larger models and actions. Extra 5,000 credits $49, extra bot $19	Documentation heavy support and internal knowledge bots
Botpress	Plus $150 a month (250 conversations, $25 AI usage), Team $750 (1,500 conversations, $150 AI usage)	Conversation, plus LLM usage beyond the included amount billed at cost. Extra 100 conversations $65 (Plus) or $50 (Team)	Teams with a developer who want real flow logic and control
Intercom Fin	$0.99 per outcome. Works inside Intercom (seats $29 to $132) or on Zendesk and Salesforce with a monthly minimum	Outcome: a confirmed resolution, a customer who asks for nothing more, or a completed workflow	Support teams that want to pay only when the bot actually closes the ticket
Tidio Lyro	Lyro from $32.50 a month for 50 AI conversations, on top of Tidio plans from $24.17	AI conversation handled, not resolution. Seven day trial	Small ecommerce stores that also want live chat in the same inbox
Custom build	No plan. A developer builds a retrieval bot on your documents, typically 60 to 160 hours	Raw model tokens, about $0.012 a reply on Claude Sonnet 5, plus hosting and a few hours of upkeep a month	High volume, premium models, or answers that must come from your own systems

Three different units hide in that table. Chatbase, Chatling and DocsBot sell credits per reply, Botpress and Tidio sell conversations, and Intercom sells outcomes. A conversation is usually several replies, and an outcome is a conversation that worked, so the headline prices are not comparable until you convert them. The Chatbase plans themselves, add-on by add-on, are broken down in Chatbase pricing per message credit. What Botpress counts as a conversation, and the volume where Team beats Plus, is in our Botpress pricing breakdown. Tidio's Lyro ladder runs from $39 for 50 conversations to $700 for 1,000 on monthly billing, and the helpdesk options that replace it are compared on our Tidio alternatives page.

One unit

Every Chatbase alternative priced per conversation

Our assumption: a support conversation gets four AI replies. Credit prices use each vendor mid plan at the monthly rate. Where a tool multiplies credits for bigger models, we show the cheapest model and, for Chatbase, the Claude Sonnet rate from its own documentation.

Tool and plan	How the number is built	Per reply	Per 4 reply conversation
DocsBot Standard	$149 divided by 15,000 credits, 1x model	About $0.010	About $0.04
Chatling Growth	$75 divided by 6,000 credits, 1 credit model	About $0.0125	About $0.05
Chatbase Standard, economical model	$150 divided by 4,000 credits, 1 credit a reply	About $0.0375	About $0.15
Chatbase Standard, Claude Sonnet	Same plan, 3 credits a reply per the Chatbase docs	About $0.1125	About $0.45
Botpress Plus	$150 divided by 250 conversations, $25 of AI usage included	Not billed per reply	About $0.60, plus AI usage past $25
Tidio Lyro	$32.50 divided by 50 AI conversations	Not billed per reply	About $0.65
Intercom Fin	$0.99 per outcome, nothing for conversations that fail	Not billed per reply	$0.99 per resolved conversation
Custom bot, Claude Sonnet 5	4,000 input and 400 output tokens at $2 and $10 per million	About $0.012 in tokens	About $0.05, plus fixed hosting and upkeep

Two things stand out. First, on the cheapest model Chatbase is roughly three times the credit price of DocsBot or Chatling, which is the most common reason people look for a Chatbase alternative. Second, the model you pick moves the bill more than the vendor you pick: the same Chatbase plan costs three times as much per reply the moment you switch to Claude Sonnet. Per-conversation and per-outcome tools look expensive in this table, but Fin charges nothing for the conversations it fails, so the fair comparison is against your resolution rate, not your message count. If you are weighing outcome pricing specifically, our AI customer service agent pricing page covers Fin, Gorgias and the per-resolution field in depth.

The break-even

When a custom bot costs less than Chatbase

The monthly Chatbase figure is the cheapest plan plus $40 per 1,000 extra credits. The custom figure is Claude Sonnet 5 tokens ($0.012 a reply) or Claude Haiku 4.5 ($0.006), plus $50 to $150 of hosting and 4 hours a month of upkeep at $60 to $150 an hour. Those running costs are our estimate, not a quote. The build itself is shown separately as payback.

Replies a month	Chatbase, Claude Sonnet (3 credits)	Custom bot, running cost	Verdict
1,000	$150 (Standard)	$302 to $762	Stay on Chatbase. Upkeep alone costs more than the plan
5,000	$500 (Pro)	$350 to $810	Roughly even. No case for a build on cost
20,000	$2,300 (Pro plus 45,000 extra credits)	$530 to $990	Custom saves $1,310 to $1,770 a month. A $3,600 to $24,000 build pays back in 2 to 18 months
50,000	$5,900 (Pro plus 135,000 extra credits)	$890 to $1,350	Custom saves $4,550 to $5,010 a month. Payback in under 6 months

Solving for the crossover, with the build spread over 24 months: a custom bot on a Sonnet class model beats Chatbase somewhere between about 5,000 and 17,000 replies a month, depending on how cheap the build and the upkeep are. On the 1 credit economical model the crossover moves out to roughly 16,000 to 54,000 replies, because a Chatbase credit is only $0.04 against about $0.006 in Haiku tokens. Two caveats keep this honest. Chatbase Enterprise pricing is not published and may undercut the overage rate at volume, so ask for a quote before you commit to either path. And the custom column assumes a competent build with prompt caching and sensible retrieval; a sloppy one can send three times the tokens per answer.

Whichever side you land on, retrieval quality decides whether the bot is worth paying for at all. The checks in how to tell if retrieval is working apply to a Chatbase agent and a custom one alike.

Reasons to switch

Which Chatbase alternative fits the reason you are leaving

Nobody searches for a Chatbase alternative in the abstract. They hit one specific wall, and each wall points to a different replacement.

Credits run out mid month

When credits hit zero, the Chatbase agent tells visitors it is unavailable. Chatling and DocsBot sell far more credits for the money, and overage on Chatling is $10 per 1,000 against $40.

You want a better model

Claude Sonnet costs 3 credits a reply on Chatbase and Opus 5 to 6. Botpress passes LLM usage through at cost, and a custom bot pays raw API rates, roughly a tenth.

Paying for answers that did not help

Credit and conversation pricing charge for every attempt. Intercom Fin charges $0.99 only when the conversation is resolved or a workflow completes.

Several brands or clients

Every Chatbase plan includes one agent, with more at $25 a month each and branding removal at $99. Chatling Scale includes 7 chatbots and DocsBot Business 10.

Compliance

Chatbase lists HIPAA eligibility and SSO on Enterprise only. A custom bot on a HIPAA eligible cloud puts the agreement between you and your cloud provider instead.

The bot has to do things

Looking up an order, changing a booking or updating a CRM record needs real integrations and testing. That is developer work on any platform, and the point where custom starts to make sense.

How to switch

What moving off Chatbase actually involves

Leaving a no-code chatbot is easier than leaving a voice platform, because most of the value is your content. The work is in proving the new bot answers at least as well.

01

Export the questions people actually ask

Pull the chat logs from the Chatbase dashboard before you cancel. The real questions, including the ones the bot got wrong, become your test set.

02

Move the sources, not the settings

Documents, URLs and Q and A pairs move to any tool. Instructions, actions and integrations are platform specific and get rebuilt.

03

Keep the model constant at first

Run the new bot on the same model you used on Chatbase so any change in answer quality is retrieval, not a new model. Switch models once the baseline matches.

04

Score both bots on the same 50 questions

Grade correct, partly correct and wrong. A replacement that is cheaper but wrong more often costs you in tickets and refunds.

05

Swap the embed and watch a week of logs

Replace the widget script, keep the old agent paused rather than deleted for a week, and read the new transcripts daily.

The honest version

Where BotGigs fits, and where it does not

BotGigs is not a chatbot builder and does not bill per message. It is where you hire the person who builds the bot. Describe what the bot has to answer and do, the volume you expect and the tools it must connect to, and get back a scoped hire brief with matched chatbot developers, their rates and their delivery location. Posting the job is $99 a month.

What it will not do is make a small bot worth rebuilding. Under a few thousand replies a month the table above says stay on a credit plan, and the cheapest fix is often moving from Chatbase to Chatling or DocsBot, which takes an afternoon and no developer. Hiring pays off when the volume is high, when you need a premium model on every reply, or when the bot has to act inside your own systems. For projects that need retrieval over large or messy document sets, see RAG development services, and for a done for you build from a firm rather than an individual, the AI chatbot development company page compares what agencies charge.

Questions

Chatbase alternative questions buyers actually ask

What is the best alternative to Chatbase?

It depends on why you are leaving. For a cheaper credit, DocsBot and Chatling price a basic reply at about one to one and a quarter cents against 3 to 6 cents on Chatbase. For paying only when a ticket is solved, Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per outcome. For full control of logic and models, Botpress. Above roughly 5,000 to 17,000 premium model replies a month, a custom bot costs less than all of them.

How much does Chatbase cost?

Chatbase lists Hobby at $40 a month for 700 message credits, Standard at $150 for 4,000 and Pro at $500 for 15,000, with 20 percent off on annual billing. Extra credits cost $40 per 1,000, extra agents $25 a month and removing the Chatbase branding $99 a month. Enterprise is priced by sales.

How many credits does a Chatbase message use?

It depends on the model. The Chatbase documentation lists 1 credit per reply for its economical models, 2 for models such as GPT-5.2 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, 3 for Claude Sonnet and Grok 3, 4 for GPT-5.5 and Grok 4, and 5 to 6 for Claude Opus. The same plan therefore buys between 1 and 6 times as many answers.

Is Chatbase worth it?

For a small site answering a few hundred to a few thousand questions a month, usually yes: it is fast to set up and the bill is predictable. It gets expensive when you run a premium model at volume, because every Claude Sonnet reply costs 3 credits, which is $0.10 to $0.12 a reply on Pro or overage.

Is Chatbase HIPAA compliant?

Chatbase lists HIPAA eligibility under its Enterprise plan, which is priced by sales, not on Hobby, Standard or Pro. If patient information can reach the bot, get the signed business associate agreement and its scope in writing before launch, and compare that total against a custom build on a HIPAA eligible cloud.

Can I build my own Chatbase?

Yes. A retrieval chatbot trained on your documents with a helpdesk handoff is a common project for a chatbot developer, usually 60 to 160 engineering hours. At Claude Sonnet 5 API rates a typical answer costs about $0.012 in tokens, roughly a tenth of what the same model costs through Chatbase credits, but you pay for the build and upkeep.

Is Chatling cheaper than Chatbase?

On the published plans, yes. Chatling Growth is $75 a month for 6,000 AI credits, about $0.0125 a credit, against Chatbase Standard at $150 for 4,000, about $0.0375. Chatling also charges $10 per 1,000 extra credits against $40 on Chatbase. Both multiply credits for larger models, so compare on the model you will actually run.