A chatbot for your small business, without the monthly bill
Chat software is priced for companies with a support department. You are not that. You need four questions answered at nine at night, and there is no good reason that should cost you $600 a year.
What are you being quoted?
Put in the monthly price you have been offered. We are not going to guess at anyone's pricing — use the real number in front of you.
Nothing here is sent anywhere. The math runs in your browser, same as the chatbot does.
Why small businesses get overcharged for this
It is not price gouging. It is a pricing model built for a different customer, applied to you anyway.
An AI-powered chatbot calls a language model every single time a visitor types a message. That call costs the provider real money, so they meter it and pass it on. That is where per-conversation pricing comes from, and for a company running ten thousand support tickets a month, it is completely reasonable.
You are not running ten thousand tickets. You are answering "are you open Sunday" for the four hundredth time.
The questions are fixed, so the answers can be too
Your hours do not change based on who is asking. Neither does your service area, your cancellation policy, or whether you take a particular insurance. Those answers can be written down once and delivered ten thousand times at zero marginal cost, because nothing has to be generated — it just has to be retrieved.
That is what a rule-based chatbot does. There is no server, no API call, and no meter, because the answers are already sitting in the page when it loads.
What you are actually paying for with a subscription
Dashboards, analytics, team inboxes, ticket routing, CRM integration, and the AI layer. Those are real features and some businesses genuinely need them. But if you are a two-person shop and what you needed was a bubble that tells people your hours, you are financing a support platform to get a FAQ.
We build the expensive version too, and we will tell you when you need it. Most of the time you do not.
The six questions worth automating
Across the small business sites we have worked on, nearly all chat traffic lands on the same handful. Write these six well and the bot has paid for itself — which, at zero, it already had.
The single most asked question on any local business site, and the one most likely to send someone to a competitor when they cannot find it.
Include holidays and the seasonal change most people forget.For anyone who travels to the customer, this decides the whole conversation. Answer it with a radius and an invitation to give a zip code.
Say what happens just outside it — do not leave them guessing.Give a range and the reason it is a range. Refusing to answer entirely reads as evasive; a number you cannot honor is worse.
Never let a bot quote a firm price you have not approved.Lead time is the second question every home service customer asks. If emergencies are different, say so and give the phone number.
This one converts. Do not bury it.Free trust, instantly. Offer to send certificates before work starts and you have separated yourself from half your competition.
Applies to trades, medical, childcare and finance alike.Always include it. A bot that cheerfully hands off is trusted more than one that traps you, and the handoff is where the money is.
Make it a tel: link so mobile users just tap it.What you give up by going free
Every page like this one lists advantages. Here is the other column, because you will find out anyway and it is better you hear it now.
- It cannot answer what you did not write. Ask it something off-script and it says so and offers a phone number. Useful behavior, but it is not open-ended conversation.
- There is no dashboard. No analytics, no conversation history, no team inbox. Leads arrive as email. If you need reporting, you need the paid kind.
- It does not know your inventory or calendar. No live availability, no stock levels, no booking system. Those need a real integration, which is a custom build.
- You update it by rebuilding it. Changing an answer means regenerating the snippet and pasting it again. Thirty seconds, but it is not a login-and-edit dashboard.
- Six questions is the practical ceiling. More than that and visitors stop reading the buttons. That is a design limit, not a technical one, but we enforce it because it is right.
If three or more of those are dealbreakers, you want a custom build and you should call us. If none of them are, stop reading and go build the free one.
Small business questions
How much should a small business pay for a chatbot?
For the questions most small businesses get asked, nothing. Hours, service area, pricing ranges and booking are fixed answers, and a rule-based bot delivers them with no server and no per-conversation cost. Paying monthly makes sense when you need a bot that can answer things nobody scripted.
Why do chatbot companies charge per conversation?
Because an AI bot calls a language model every time someone types, and that call costs the provider money. The model gets passed to you. A rule-based bot makes no such call, so there is nothing to meter.
Is a free chatbot really good enough?
For most small businesses, yes. The questions filling your phone line are repetitive with fixed answers. A rule-based bot handles those perfectly and hands anything unusual to a human — which is what you would want anyway.
What happens when it gets asked something it doesn't know?
It says so and offers a phone number or a message form. It does not guess. That is deliberate: a bot that improvises can quote a price or promise a warranty you never approved.
Will a chatbot make my business look impersonal?
Less impersonal than a contact form nobody answers until Monday. A short bot that answers four real questions and then offers a phone number reads as responsive, not automated.
Can I change the answers later?
Yes. Rebuild it with the free tool, paste the new code over the old block, save. Changing your hours takes about thirty seconds and costs nothing.
Do I need a developer?
No. If you can edit your site's footer or add a custom HTML block, you can install this. If you would rather not touch it at all, we will do it for a one-time $199 and send you a screenshot when it is live.
Two minutes, and then it is done
Pick your industry, edit the answers, copy the code. No account, no card, no meter. If it turns out you need the expensive kind, we build those too — and we will say so.