Eight support chat pricing pages read directly

Tidio alternatives with every Tidio chat alternative priced per AI conversation

Tidio bills on three meters at once: human conversations, Lyro AI conversations and Flows visitors. The AI meter is the one that grows fastest, at $0.70 or more for every conversation Lyro touches. We read the pricing pages of Tidio and seven alternatives, put them on the same unit, and worked out where a chat agent you own becomes the cheaper Tidio alternative.

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the short answer

The right Tidio alternative depends on which Tidio meter hurts. If it is the human side, Crisp charges a flat $45 to $295 a month per workspace with unlimited conversations. If it is Lyro, remember that Tidio charges $0.70 to $0.78 for every AI conversation it handles, resolved or not. Intercom Fin charges $0.99 only when a conversation is resolved, and Gorgias charges $0.85 to $1.00 per automated interaction inside a Shopify helpdesk. A custom chat agent pays roughly $0.05 a conversation in tokens, and once the build is counted it beats Lyro's published rate somewhere between 700 and 2,700 AI conversations a month.

The baseline

What Tidio actually charges, meter by meter

These are the US prices on tidio.com/pricing, read in September 2026. Annual billing gives two months free, which is why the headline prices end in odd cents: $29 becomes $24.17 and $39 becomes $32.50. Everything below is the monthly rate unless marked.

Tidio meter	What it counts	Published ladder (monthly)	Per unit
Customer Service, Starter	Billable conversations, meaning a human agent replied. 10 seats	$29 for 100 ($24.17 yearly). Includes a one time pool of 50 Lyro conversations	$0.29
Customer Service, Growth	Same unit, plus add-on access for Lyro and Flows	$59 for 250, $89 for 400, $129 for 600, $159 for 800, $179 for 1,000, $249 for 1,500, $349 for 2,000	$0.17 to $0.24
Lyro AI Agent, Core	AI conversations Lyro handles, whether or not it resolves them. 3 AI actions	$39 for 50, $75 for 100, $110 for 150, $140 for 200, $210 for 300, $350 for 500, $525 for 750, $700 for 1,000	$0.70 to $0.78
Lyro Plus and Premium	Higher limits. Premium starts at 3,000 Lyro conversations, guarantees a 50 percent resolution rate and bills per resolution	Plus is a $300 a month platform fee plus usage at lower rates; both quoted by sales	Not published
Flows	Visitors reached by automations	From $24.17 a month (yearly) for 2,000 visitors, up to 100,000	Separate meter

The ladder has a shape worth noticing. On the human side, the price per conversation falls from $0.29 to about $0.17 as you grow. On the AI side it barely moves: $0.78 at 50 conversations, $0.70 at 1,000. A store that answers 2,000 chats a month and lets Lyro take half of them pays about $179 for the humans and $700 for the AI, so the AI add-on is about 80 percent of the bill. That is the usual reason people start looking for a Tidio alternative, and it tells you which alternatives are worth reading about.

The audit

Tidio competitors and what their own pricing pages say

Almost every Tidio alternatives list ranking today is published by one of the alternatives, and each one ranks itself first. We do not sell a chat widget, so there is nothing of ours in this table. Prices come from each vendor page in September 2026; recheck before you sign.

Tool	Published plans	How the AI is billed	Who it suits
Crisp	Mini $45 a month (4 seats), Essentials $95 (10 seats), Plus $295 (20 seats), flat per workspace, unlimited conversations. Extra seats about $10	Included AI credit: $5 (about 90 conversations), $25 (about 450) and $75 (about 1,350) by plan	Small teams whose Tidio bill is mostly human conversations
LiveChat	Essential $19, Growth $79 per agent a month yearly ($25, $99 monthly). Enterprise custom	AI agent included; 10 (Essential) or 200 (Growth) AI resolutions a month, then $49.50 per 50, about $0.99 each	Staffed chat teams who price by seat, not by volume
Intercom Fin	Helpdesk seats from $29 a month yearly, or Fin on Zendesk and Salesforce with a monthly minimum	$0.99 per outcome: a confirmed resolution or a completed workflow. Nothing for failures	Support teams that want to pay for results, not attempts
Gorgias	Helpdesk Starter $10 (50 tickets), Basic $50 yearly (300), Pro $300 yearly (2,000), Advanced $750 yearly (5,000)	$1.00 on Starter, $0.90 on Basic and Pro, $0.85 on Advanced per automated interaction; each also counts as a ticket	Shopify stores that want order lookups and refunds inside the helpdesk
Chatling	Starter $25 (1,750 credits), Growth $75 (6,000), Scale $295 (35,000)	Credits per reply, more for larger models. Extra credits $10 per 1,000	A cheap AI widget without a helpdesk attached
DocsBot	Personal $49 (5,000 credits), Standard $149 (15,000), Business $499 (60,000)	Credits from 1x per message, higher for larger models and actions	Documentation heavy products and internal help bots
Custom agent	No plan. A developer builds it on your help center and helpdesk, typically 60 to 160 hours	Raw model tokens, about $0.05 for a four reply conversation on Claude Sonnet 5, plus hosting and upkeep	Stores past about 1,000 AI conversations a month, or bots that must act in your own systems

Chatling and DocsBot are here because they are the cheapest way to put an AI widget on a site, and we compared them credit by credit on our Chatbase alternatives page. Neither is a helpdesk. If your team lives in Tidio's shared inbox, the honest shortlist is Crisp, LiveChat (priced for ten agents on its own page), Intercom and Gorgias, or keeping Tidio for the humans and moving only the AI. If Intercom is the front runner, check the seat and outcome math on our Intercom alternatives page before you sign, because at a few thousand conversations the Fin line outgrows the seats. If Gorgias is on your list, our Gorgias pricing breakdown shows the ticket volumes where each plan wins and what an AI resolution really costs once the ticket is counted.

One unit

Every Tidio alternative priced per AI conversation, and per resolution

Our assumptions: a chat gets four AI replies, and half of the AI conversations are resolved without a human. We use 50 percent because it is the rate Tidio itself guarantees on Premium, so it is a fair benchmark for Lyro rather than a number we picked to make it look bad. Your rate will differ; the right column moves with it.

Tool and plan	How the number is built	Per AI conversation	Per resolution at 50 percent
Tidio Lyro Core, 1,000 a month	$700 divided by 1,000 handled conversations	$0.70	$1.40
Tidio Lyro Core, 1,000, billed yearly	$583.33 a month divided by 1,000	About $0.58	About $1.17
Intercom Fin	$0.99 per outcome, $0 for the half that fail	About $0.50 on average	$0.99, plus seats
Gorgias AI Agent, Pro yearly	$0.90 per automated interaction; an unresolved chat goes to a human	About $0.45 on average	$0.90, plus the helpdesk plan
Crisp Essentials	$25 of included AI credit covers about 450 conversations by Crisp's estimate	About $0.06 of credit	About $0.11, inside a $95 flat plan
Chatling Growth	$75 divided by 6,000 credits, four 1 credit replies	About $0.05	About $0.10
Custom agent, Claude Sonnet 5	Four replies at about $0.012 each in tokens	About $0.05	About $0.10, plus hosting and upkeep

Two readings matter. First, Lyro is priced like an outcome product but bills like a volume product: at a 50 percent resolution rate you pay about $1.40 per solved chat, more than Fin or Gorgias charge for a guaranteed one. Second, the cheap credit tools look ten times cheaper, but they are widgets without a helpdesk, order actions or handoff logic, so the fair comparison for a store is Fin or Gorgias. The wider per-resolution field, including Salesforce Agentforce and Zendesk, is covered on our AI customer service agent pricing page.

The break-even

When a custom chat agent costs less than Tidio Lyro

The custom running cost is $0.05 a conversation in tokens, $50 to $150 of hosting and 4 hours a month of upkeep at $60 to $150 an hour, which is $290 to $750 fixed. The build, 60 to 160 hours at the same rates, is $3,600 to $24,000, spread here over 24 months as $150 to $1,000 a month. These are our estimates, not a quote.

AI conversations a month	Tidio Lyro (monthly list)	Custom, running plus build over 24 months	Verdict
300	$210	$455 to $1,765	Stay on Lyro, or move the AI to a cheaper widget. A build cannot pay back
1,000	$700	$490 to $1,800	Close. A lean build wins by about $200 a month; an expensive one loses
3,000	Above the published ladder. At the $0.70 top tier rate, about $2,100	$590 to $1,900	Custom wins at every build cost in our range, unless the Plus or Premium quote is far below list
10,000	Quote only. At $0.70, about $7,000	$940 to $2,250	Custom saves roughly $4,750 to $6,050 a month against the list rate

Solving for the crossover: Lyro costs $0.70 a conversation and a custom agent $0.05, so each conversation saves $0.65 against a fixed $440 to $1,750 a month. That puts the break-even at about 680 to 2,700 AI conversations a month, build included. Two honest caveats. Tidio does not publish Plus or Premium prices, and a volume quote could land well below $0.70, so get it in writing before you commission a build. And the custom column assumes a competent build with prompt caching and sensible retrieval; a careless one can send three times the tokens per answer. The pre-launch checks in how to evaluate an AI agent before you ship it apply either way.

Reasons to switch

Which Tidio chat alternative fits the reason you are leaving

Stores rarely leave Tidio for one abstract reason. Each of these walls points to a different answer.

The Lyro bill outgrew the store

Lyro stays near $0.70 a conversation all the way to 1,000. Move the AI to Fin or Gorgias if you want to pay per resolution, or to a custom agent if volume is past the break-even.

Paying for chats the bot did not solve

Lyro counts every conversation it handles. Intercom Fin charges only for outcomes, and Gorgias passes unresolved chats to a human instead of charging a second time.

Too many meters to forecast

Human conversations, AI conversations and Flows visitors each have their own ladder. Crisp charges one flat price per workspace with unlimited conversations.

Order lookups and refunds

Lyro Core includes 3 AI actions. Gorgias is built around Shopify order actions, and a custom agent can call any system you give it access to.

A staffed team, not a bot

If most chats need a person, per-seat live chat such as LiveChat at $19 to $79 an agent can be simpler to budget than per-conversation plans.

Answers from your own data

Stock levels, shipping status, account balances and B2B price lists live in your systems. Getting them into a chat reliably is integration work on any platform.

How to switch

Moving off Tidio without losing a week of chats

Most of the value in a Tidio account is your history and your answers, not the widget. The work is proving the replacement answers at least as well before customers see it.

01

Export the transcripts first

Pull the last few months of Lyro and human conversations before you cancel. The real questions, including the ones Lyro fumbled, become your test set.

02

Decide what moves: humans, AI or both

Many stores keep Tidio as the shared inbox and move only the AI. That halves the migration and still removes the biggest line on the bill.

03

Rebuild answers, not flows

Help center articles and saved replies move to any tool. Flows, actions and integrations are platform specific and get rebuilt.

04

Score both on the same 50 chats

Grade resolved, partly resolved and wrong. A cheaper agent that gets refunds or shipping dates wrong costs more than it saves.

05

Swap the widget during a quiet week

Replace the script, keep the old account on the lowest plan for a billing cycle, and read the new transcripts every day.

The honest version

Where BotGigs fits, and where it does not

BotGigs is not a chat widget and does not bill per conversation. It is where you hire the person who builds the agent. Describe the chats it has to handle, the monthly volume, the helpdesk you run and the systems it must read, such as Shopify orders or a returns portal, 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 store's chat worth rebuilding. Under a few hundred AI conversations a month the table above says stay on Tidio or move to a flat plan like Crisp, and that takes an afternoon and no developer. Hiring pays off past the break-even, or when the agent has to act inside your store and not only answer. For stores weighing the whole AI stack, from product search to returns, see AI for ecommerce, 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

Tidio alternative questions buyers actually ask

What is the best alternative to Tidio?

It depends on what you are paying Tidio for. For cheap human live chat, Crisp charges a flat $45 to $295 a month per workspace with unlimited conversations. For AI that only bills when it solves the ticket, Intercom Fin charges $0.99 per outcome. For a Shopify store that wants AI inside the helpdesk, Gorgias charges $0.85 to $1.00 per automated interaction. Above roughly 700 to 2,700 AI conversations a month, a custom agent costs less than Lyro.

How much does Tidio Lyro cost?

On the Tidio pricing page, the Lyro AI Agent Core plan runs from $39 a month for 50 AI conversations to $700 a month for 1,000 on monthly billing, with two months free on annual billing, which is where the $32.50 starting price comes from. That is $0.70 to $0.78 per AI conversation. Above 1,000 a month, Plus and Premium are quoted by sales.

Is Tidio free?

Tidio offers a 7 day trial without a card, and its entry plan includes a one time pool of 50 Lyro AI conversations. After that, the customer service plans start at $29 a month on monthly billing ($24.17 billed yearly) for 100 billable conversations, and Lyro is a separate paid add-on from $39 a month.

Does Tidio charge per conversation?

Yes, on two separate meters. Customer service plans count billable conversations, which Tidio defines as conversations a human agent replies to. Lyro counts AI conversations it handles, whether or not it resolves them. Flows, the automation add-on, is metered by visitors reached. Each meter has its own ladder, so a growing store can move up on all three at once.

Is Intercom cheaper than Tidio?

Per conversation handled, often not, because Intercom charges seats from $29 a month plus $0.99 per Fin outcome. Per conversation resolved, it can be. Lyro bills $0.70 or more for every AI conversation it handles; if half of them resolve, that is about $1.40 per resolution against $0.99 on Fin, which charges nothing when the bot fails.

Can I build my own Tidio style AI chat agent?

Yes. A retrieval chat agent trained on your help center, with order lookup and a handoff into your helpdesk, is a common project for a chatbot developer, usually 60 to 160 hours. At Claude Sonnet 5 API rates a four reply conversation costs about $0.05 in tokens, against $0.70 on Lyro, but you pay for the build and upkeep.