A Chatbase alternative for shops, compared line by line

If you are pricing a Chatbase alternative, the two numbers that decide it are the monthly message credit allowance and the cost of a second agent. Chatbase lists Hobby at $40, Standard at $150 and Pro at $500 a month, carrying 700, 4,000 and 15,000 message credits, with 1 agent on every one of those tiers and extra agents at $25 per AI agent a month (Source: Chatbase pricing page, checked 4 September 2026).

chatfor.site is the closest like for like: both are document backed assistants rather than support platforms, both install as an embed, and both are the kind of ecommerce chatbot a shop can run without hiring anyone. This is a head to head on the axes that actually differ, with every competitor figure read off Chatbase's own live page on the day of writing.

Worth knowing: every Chatbase figure below came from chatbase.co/pricing on 4 September 2026, in US dollars, with the monthly view selected. The page also offers 20% off yearly plans. Pricing pages change without notice, so check theirs before you buy and treat this table as a starting point rather than a quote.

Chatbase pricing, as at 4 September 2026

Chatbase publishes a full comparison grid, which makes it one of the easier tools to price honestly. The columns that matter for a shop:

The add-ons are priced separately on the same page:

• Auto recharge credits: $40 per 1000 message credits, added automatically when your balance falls below a threshold you set.
• Extra agents: $25 per AI agent / month.
• Remove 'Powered By Chatbase': $99 per month.

(Source: Chatbase pricing page, checked 4 September 2026. The page also notes that on the free plan, "AI agents get deleted after 14 days of inactivity", and that Hobby, Standard and Pro each start with a 7 day trial.)

The single most consequential line in that grid is the agent count. One agent on Free, one on Hobby, one on Standard, one on Pro. If you run two shops, or you are an agency looking after client sites, you are adding $25 a month per site on top of whichever tier you are on.

chatfor.site versus Chatbase, head to head

(chatfor.site figures verified in lib/plans.ts on 4 September 2026. Chatbase figures from its pricing page, checked 4 September 2026.)

Read that table for the shape rather than the winner. Chatbase is bought by people who want an agent builder with a large integration surface: its comparison grid lists Stripe, Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Shopify, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Zapier, Twilio and more, plus voice and telephony from Standard upwards, and a choice of underlying models. chatfor.site is bought by people who want one job done: answer a shop's customers from the shop's own documents.

What does a message credit actually limit?

A message credit is a unit of consumption, not a unit of value: you spend it whether the reply helped or not. Both tools sell an allowance of replies under different names, so the practical work is converting your traffic into that unit before you compare prices.

Do the arithmetic in this order:

1. Count real conversations, not visitors. Look at how many people currently email or message you a question in a month.
2. Multiply by replies per conversation. A delivery question is one reply. A sizing conversation is often three or four.
3. That is your monthly unit consumption. Compare it against 700 message credits on Chatbase Hobby and 2,000 answers on chatfor.site Starter.
4. Add every add-on you would genuinely buy. Branding removal and extra agents are the two that most often change the ranking.
5. Then check what happens when you run out. Chatbase publishes auto recharge at $40 per 1000 message credits, which is a known overage price rather than a surprise.

Worth knowing: Chatbase's grid limits sources by size in megabytes and chatfor.site limits them by document count. Neither unit is better; they fail differently. A megabyte cap punishes one enormous PDF catalogue. A document cap punishes forty short policy pages. Look at what your material actually is before you decide which cap suits you.

The axes that matter more than the monthly price

Price is easy to compare and the least stable thing on any vendor page. These four axes survive a repricing, and they are what to test:

1. Does it answer only from material you supplied? chatfor.site answers only from the documents, pasted text, product entries and curated question and answer pairs you gave it. Chatbase's pricing page describes what you get on each tier, but not its grounding behaviour, so this needs testing in the product rather than reading off a page.
2. What does it do when your documents do not cover the question? chatfor.site is instructed to say it does not have that to hand rather than guess. Ask any tool who its chief executive is when nothing in your uploads mentions that, and the reply tells you most of what you need to know.
3. Can you see which passage an answer came from? On chatfor.site you can open any past conversation in the dashboard, see the passages the answer was drawn from, and overrule it. Without that, a wrong answer is a mystery you apologise for instead of a bug you fix.
4. What is the per answer allowance, and what happens at the ceiling? Compare the allowance and the overage price side by side, not the headline price alone.

Only the first two of those are really about safety, and they are worth being precise about. Restricting the source material narrows the surface for invention, and instructing an assistant to decline uncovered questions narrows it further. That is refusal by design, and it is a genuine improvement over an assistant drawing on general knowledge about your returns policy. It does not repeal how language models work. Anyone promising you a tool that cannot be wrong is overselling.

Getting the source material right is most of the job either way, and the same discipline applies to both tools: see how to organise the documents an assistant reads.

What chatfor.site is, in one paragraph

You upload the policies, price lists, FAQs and product guides you already have, paste in anything that only exists in an old email, add product entries and curated question and answer pairs, then drop one script tag on your site, the same shape as adding Google Analytics. The launcher can be an icon or a text label in your brand colour, with a custom welcome message, optional sound, an optional nudge and optional pre chat contact capture. Visitors are rate limited to 30 messages a minute each, enforced in Postgres rather than per server instance. Underneath it is retrieval augmented generation over your own documents: embeddings run locally through transformers.js with bge-small-en-v1.5 so indexing carries no per document API cost, generation is Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, and data lives in Supabase hosted in Ireland. Sign in is a magic link, so there are no passwords.

The unit economics are published, which almost no vendor does. One answer averages 1,794 input and 87 output tokens, and at the rates that figure was measured against, $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, that is about $0.0045 of model cost per answer. Answers are the billing unit because answers are what costs money.

When Chatbase is the right choice, and when it is not

Being straight about this is more useful than a scoreboard.

Chatbase suits you if:

• You want a long list of native integrations, including helpdesks and CRMs, rather than a widget on one site.
• You want voice or telephony, which its grid lists from Standard upwards, with concurrent call limits of 10 on Standard and 20 on Pro.
• You want to choose the underlying model, which its grid offers across several providers on paid tiers.
• You need enterprise controls such as SSO, audit logs, white labelling or zero data retention, all listed under Enterprise.

A Chatbase alternative suits you better if:

• You run more than one site and do not want to pay $25 per AI agent a month for each.
• Vendor branding on your own shop is not something you want to pay $99 a month to remove.
• You want a strict document only assistant that declines rather than improvises, and a dashboard where you can see the source passage behind every answer.
• Your source material is many small policy pages rather than a few very large files.

For the wider category rather than this pairing, what per seat platform pricing looks like at the enterprise end and how conversation based quotas stack up cover the two other pricing models you will meet.

How should you test a Chatbase alternative before paying?

Both tools have a free tier, so a real comparison costs nothing but an afternoon. Run the same script against both, in this order, and do not skip step three:

1. Upload the same three documents to each: delivery, returns, sizing. Not your whole website.
2. Ask the ten questions you actually receive. Write them out first so you do not flatter either tool with easy ones.
3. Ask one question your documents definitely do not cover. Compare the two replies. This is the test that separates document backed assistants from confident ones.
4. Ask something adversarial: a discount you do not offer, a delivery promise you have never made.
5. Open each transcript and try to work out why it answered as it did.
6. Only then convert your traffic into credits and answers and total up a month, add-ons included.

Worth knowing: Nielsen Norman Group's usability research on chatbots found that problems start when a visitor leaves the expected path: "as soon as users deviated from the prescribed script, problems occurred" (Source: Nielsen Norman Group, 2018). Your step three above is a deliberate deviation, which is exactly why it is the most informative five minutes of the whole test.

Baymard Institute puts the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 studies (Source: Baymard Institute, 2025). No chat assistant fixes a figure like that, and treat any vendor that implies otherwise with suspicion. But a shopper who cannot find out whether you deliver to Ireland is an avoidable loss, and it is avoidable with a document you have already written.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free Chatbase alternative?

chatfor.site's free plan is $0 forever with 100 answers a month, one assistant and 25 documents, against Chatbase's free plan at $0 with 50 message credits a month, one agent and 1 MB of training content. Chatbase also notes that free agents are deleted after 14 days of inactivity. Both checked 4 September 2026.

How many agents does Chatbase include?

One, on every published tier. Chatbase's own comparison grid lists 1 agent on Free, Hobby, Standard and Pro, with extra agents sold as an add-on at $25 per AI agent / month (Source: Chatbase pricing page, 4 September 2026). If you run several sites, model that add-on before you compare headline prices.

What happens when message credits run out?

Chatbase sells auto recharge credits at $40 per 1000 message credits, added automatically once your balance falls below a threshold you set, and states those credits do not expire (Source: Chatbase pricing page, 4 September 2026). Knowing the overage price in advance is worth as much as the headline tier price.

Does a document based chatbot ever invent answers?

It can. Restricting the source material to your own uploads narrows the surface for invention, and instructing the assistant to decline uncovered questions narrows it further, but no product repeals how language models work. Being able to open a conversation, see the source passage and overrule the answer is what makes a wrong one fixable.

Is chatfor.site cheaper than Chatbase?

On the pages checked on 4 September 2026, the entry paid tiers were chatfor.site Starter at $29 a month for 2,000 answers and Chatbase Hobby at $40 per month for 700 message credits. Which works out cheaper for you depends on your reply volume, how many assistants you need and whether you want branding removed.

Can I move my content across without redoing everything?

Usually yes, because the inputs are the same kind of thing: documents, pasted text, product details and curated question and answer pairs. Export the source files you originally uploaded rather than the trained agent, then upload them again. Budget an hour, mostly spent working out which versions are still current.

Sources

• Chatbase pricing page, checked 4 September 2026: chatbase.co/pricing
• Intercom pricing page, checked 4 September 2026: intercom.com/pricing
• Tidio pricing page, checked 4 September 2026: tidio.com/pricing
• Baymard Institute, "Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics", last updated 22 September 2025: https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
• Nielsen Norman Group, Raluca Budiu, "The User Experience of Chatbots", 25 November 2018: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chatbots/
• chatfor.site plans and measured per answer token counts, verified in lib/plans.ts, 4 September 2026