AI chatbot for a website: ready-made platform or custom bot, with pricing for Tidio, Chatbase, Intercom and the rest

If customers only message you through the website and ask about opening hours, delivery, prices and availability, with the answers all on one page, a ready-made platform will do. Shopify or WooCommerce online store: Tidio and Chatbase read orders. Salon or restaurant on Instagram and Messenger: ManyChat. Support team handling many conversations: Intercom or Zendesk, which charge per solution, not per seat.

The limitation is the channel and the system: almost no platform supports Viber, none can answer the phone, and a reply based on data from your warehouse or CRM requires an integration that has to be built.

Platform prices cannot be compared line by line because they count different things. Tidio counts conversations and AI conversations with Lyro separately. Chatbase counts message credits: 700 per month on Hobby. Crisp offers a package of “around 90” or “around 450” automated conversations. Seekadu counts AI responses, not conversations: one conversation with five questions equals five responses. Intercom charges $0.99 per result on Fin, while Zendesk charges $1.50 per resolution with a commitment and $2.00 per use, on top of the agent subscription.

So the calculation starts with your volume. Count how many conversations and enquiries you have per month (chat, Messenger, Viber, calls), how many messages there are on average in each one and how many people on your team will use the platform. Multiply that by the price in the table for the plan you actually need, not the entry-level plan. Then add the time of the person who will maintain the responses: on every platform, someone has to read the conversations and add to the content.

With a custom bot, the monthly cost is the model cost based on the number of conversations (via API, that is cents per conversation with the smaller models) and maintenance, if you want it, €100-€350 per month. When the assistant also answers the phone, we offer a monthly package with minutes and responses included; beyond that, you pay per minute and per response, with everything set out in the offer. More details: on the page how much an AI chatbot costs.

Tidio, Intercom and Zendesk explicitly list Bulgarian. Chatbase, Seekadu and Crisp mention dozens of languages without naming Bulgarian. There is one way to check: give the platform your website and ask it ten questions that your customers ask, using their own wording and spelling mistakes. We do the same with the model. For a real estate agency, we ran three test lines with a voice agent on three different models so the agency could choose for itself: Gemini sounded the most natural in Bulgarian and responded quickly, ElevenLabs had the most realistic voice but a slight delay between turns, while OpenAI was stable but sounded more machine-like.

Viber is the channel many Bulgarian customers use to write, and it is precisely the channel that ready-made platforms almost entirely lack. Of the seven listed above, only Crisp supports Viber, starting with the $95 plan. Since 5 February 2024, Viber has allowed bots only on commercial terms, directly or through an official partner, and does not publish prices. When an air-conditioning importer asked us for an assistant for the phone, website, WhatsApp, Viber and Messenger, this was our answer: WhatsApp runs through the official WhatsApp Business platform with the existing number; Viber allows only a new bot, with no access to the number’s existing chats, and its fee is paid directly to Viber. With WhatsApp, Meta does not charge for messages from the customer to the business and provides 1,000 free responses per number per month; you pay above that limit and whenever the business messages first.

The data: Crisp stores everything in Europe, Tidio processes data mainly in the EEA but is an American company, Intercom offers the EU only on higher-tier plans under contract, and Botpress processes data in the US. For a law firm, clinic or company handling personal data in conversations, this matters more than the price. With a custom bot, conversations are stored on our server or in your account, and only the question text is sent to the model.

The first signal is the channel. The air-conditioning importer wanted the assistant to answer the phone, including outside business hours, and record purchase, installation and service requests with the name, phone number, address and description, which would reach the team as a task and notification. No chat platform answers the phone. Our voice agent follows the same scenario as the chat.

The second signal is the system. A real estate agency wanted an enquiry about a listing to go straight to the broker responsible for that listing in their property management software. A law firm wanted AI to read case documents and answer recurring questions in WhatsApp and Viber, using two separate numbers and handling around 500 new messages a day after advertising; they were worried about losing the history if the number was suspended. This is not a platform setting but an integration that has to be built.

The third is ownership. When the scenario, conversations and knowledge base belong to you, you can switch models when a better or cheaper one becomes available, without moving everything. With a platform, you switch platforms.

A dental practice in Haskovo asked for a new website with a chatbot and said it preferred an “automatic, trainable bot”. Meanwhile, someone else had offered it a chatbot that “installs ready-made and has no monthly cost”. Both statements are true: a bot with ready-made questions and answers really has no monthly cost because it has no AI model. We proposed exactly that: answer buttons that the practice could edit itself from the admin panel, included in the website offer with no separate chatbot line item. That was enough for the practice; if the questions increase one day, the same place on the website can support an AI assistant.

For a mobile toilet rental company, we created a demo: a scenario-based assistant with five short questions (product, quantity, period, location, contact), a reference number and an admin panel with the enquiries. The company did not continue. The demo is open and shows what can be done without an AI model, using only well-designed questions.

The common thread: most companies that ask us about an “AI chatbot” need one of three things. A bot with ready-made answers on the website, a ready-made platform for the website and messaging channels, or an assistant connected to their phone and system. We tell them which one in the first conversation.

We have not yet launched a Viber bot for a client; in our offers, we list it as a separate line item, including the fee payable to Viber. We have not yet connected an assistant that checks orders in an online store to a live system; if your store is on Shopify or WooCommerce, Tidio or Chatbase can do this without development work. We do not promise an assistant that never makes mistakes: we promise an assistant that says when it does not know and hands the conversation over to a person. What you can see working is in the demos: the enquiry chatbot, the phone voice agent and the contact centre.