Picking a Tidio alternative without stacking add-ons

Most people looking for a Tidio alternative are not unhappy with the chat widget. They are unhappy that the AI answering, the automated flows and the removal of vendor branding are three separate add-ons on top of a plan priced by billable conversation (Source: Tidio pricing page, checked 4 September 2026).

If what you actually need is an ecommerce chatbot that answers questions about delivery, returns and sizing from documents you have already written, a platform with a shared inbox, ticketing, email management and marketing flows is a lot of machinery to rent. This page compares the options on the two things that decide it: what the billable unit is, and where the answers come from.

Worth knowing: every price on this page was read off the vendor's own live pricing page on 4 September 2026, in US dollars, and quoted with the vendor's own wording. Pricing pages change without notice, so confirm on the vendor's page before you buy. Do not treat a blog table as a quote.

What Tidio charges, as at 4 September 2026

Tidio splits its pricing into a customer service platform, priced by billable conversation, plus separately quoted quotas for the Lyro AI Agent and for Flows.

The add-ons sit alongside those plans:

• Lyro AI Agent: starts at $32.50 /mo. from 50 Lyro AI conversations. Your first 50 Lyro conversations are free, described on the page as a lifetime allowance, and the monthly limit can be raised from 50 to 1 000.
• Flows: starts at $24.17 /mo. from 2 000 visitors reached. Your first 100 Flows visitors are free.
• No Tidio branding: listed as an add-on at 16.67 USD/mo.

(Source: Tidio pricing page, checked 4 September 2026. Annual billing is the view shown by default, described on the page as "2 months free"; a monthly toggle is available. The page also states a 7 day free trial with no credit card required.)

Two definitions from Tidio's own FAQ do more work than the prices. A billable conversation is "any live chat, ticket, email or social media channel conversation that includes a message from a human agent (you)", and "Responses from Flows and Lyro AI Agent are not counted as 'agent replies'". A Lyro conversation is "a customer interaction initiated through any channel integrated with Tidio that has at least one reply from our AI Agent", counted once however many times Lyro replies (Source: Tidio pricing page, checked 4 September 2026).

That split is the thing to understand before you compare anything. Human replies eat your plan quota. AI replies eat a different quota you buy separately. A shop where the assistant handles nearly everything is buying mostly Lyro conversations, and the plan price is close to a platform fee.

Tidio also states that Lyro "uses solely your support content to generate personalized responses" and that it "solves up to 67% of customer problems" (Source: Tidio pricing page, checked 4 September 2026). The first claim is a design decision worth crediting: Tidio restricts Lyro to your material, as chatfor.site does. The second is Tidio's own figure, not an independent one, and should be read that way.

Why do people look for a Tidio alternative?

People search for a Tidio alternative for four reasons that show up repeatedly, and only one of them is price. In rough order of how often it decides the switch:

1. Quota arithmetic. Working out a monthly cost needs a plan tier, a Lyro quota and possibly a Flows quota, and those move independently.
2. Paying to remove branding. A 16.67 USD/mo. add-on to take a vendor's name off your own shop reads badly to some owners, even at that price.
3. Too much platform. Ticketing, email management, departments, macros and permissions are genuinely useful to a support team and pure overhead to a sole trader.
4. Wanting one unit, not three. Owners want to know what a month costs, once, not to model three sliders.

If any of those is your reason, the shape of tool you want is different from Tidio's, not merely cheaper.

chatfor.site: one unit, and answers only from your own documents

chatfor.site does one job. 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. Install is the same shape as adding Google Analytics.

The design decision that matters: it answers only from the material you supplied, and is instructed to say so when your documents do not cover a question rather than guess. Ask who the chief executive is when nothing in the uploads mentions that, and it says it does not have that to hand. This is refusal by design. Narrowing the source material narrows the surface for invention. It does not repeal how language models work, and any vendor telling you their tool cannot get things wrong is overselling.

The second decision that matters: you can open any past conversation in the dashboard, see which passages an answer was drawn from, and overrule it. That is what turns a bad answer into a five minute fix instead of an apology.

What each tier adds, exactly as sold: Free gives you your own colour and wording plus community support. Starter removes the chatfor.site badge and adds email support. Growth adds conversation history and search, lets you place the assistant inside a page rather than only in a corner bubble, and adds priority email support. Business adds usage reporting per assistant and a named contact. Every plan begins with a free account, so nothing needs a card until you choose to pay.

The widget itself: launcher as an icon or a text label in your brand colour, a custom welcome message, optional sound, an optional nudge, and optional pre chat contact capture with a note you write. The free plan carries a chatfor.site badge and paid plans do not. Visitors are rate limited to 30 messages a minute each, enforced in Postgres rather than per server instance.

Underneath: retrieval augmented generation over your own documents, embeddings computed locally through transformers.js with bge-small-en-v1.5 so indexing a document carries no per document API cost, generation by Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, data stored in Supabase hosted in Ireland, magic link sign in and no passwords.

One answer averages 1,794 input and 87 output tokens, which at the model rates the figure was measured against, $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, is about $0.0045 of model cost. That is published because it explains the allowance: answers are the unit because answers are what costs money.

Two other Tidio alternatives worth pricing

Chatbase

Chatbase has the closest shape to chatfor.site: train an agent on your content, embed it, watch the credits. Its pricing page shows Free at $0 with 50 message credits a month, Hobby at $40, Standard at $150 and Pro at $500 a month, carrying 700, 4,000 and 15,000 message credits respectively, with 20% off yearly plans. Every one of those tiers lists 1 agent. Extra agents are $25 per AI agent a month, extra credits are $40 per 1,000 message credits, and removing the "Powered By Chatbase" branding is a $99 a month add-on (Source: Chatbase pricing page, checked 4 September 2026).

So both Tidio and Chatbase charge to remove their name from your site, at 16.67 USD/mo. and $99 a month respectively on the day these pages were checked. the credit by credit comparison with Chatbase goes through the rest.

Intercom

Intercom is the enterprise end. Its pricing page shows Essential at $29 per seat/mo, Advanced at $85 and Expert at $132 when billed annually, with monthly equivalents of $39, $99 and $139 per seat published in the page's own structured data, plus from $0.99 per Fin outcome on every tier. Fin can also be bought for an existing helpdesk from $0.99 per outcome with no seats required and a minimum monthly commitment (Source: Intercom pricing page, checked 4 September 2026).

An outcome is charged, in Intercom's words, when "A customer confirms their issue is resolved, or They don't ask for more help after Fin responds, or Fin completes a workflow (Procedure), including handoffs". If your typical chat is one question and then silence, that bills. There is more on where that lands for a small shop in why per seat pricing hurts a one person shop.

For a ranked view of the whole category rather than a like for like on Tidio, see which of these suits which kind of shop.

What should you compare instead of feature lists?

Feature lists are the least useful part of a chatbot comparison, because every vendor has 40 ticks and you will use six. Compare on four axes that hold their meaning after the next pricing page rewrite:

1. Does it answer only from material you supplied? Restricting the sources is the strongest available control on invented answers.
2. What happens when your documents do not cover the question? A tool that declines is safer than one that improvises. Test this deliberately.
3. Can you see which passage an answer came from, and overrule it? Without that, you cannot debug your own assistant.
4. What does one month cost, in one number? Add every add-on you would actually buy, then compare.

Worth knowing: Nielsen Norman Group's usability research on chatbots found the failure mode is going off script: "as soon as users deviated from the prescribed script, problems occurred", and that both preset buttons and free text input matter, because "Both of these input mechanisms were important and they should be both present" (Source: Nielsen Norman Group, 2018). Flow builders are good at the scripted path and poor at the deviation, which is precisely where document backed answering earns its place.

How to test the four of them in one afternoon

Tidio, Chatbase and chatfor.site all have a free tier, and Intercom has a 14 day free trial with no credit card. That makes a proper test nearly free, so do it properly:

• Upload only your three most important documents: delivery, returns, sizing. Resist uploading the whole site.
• Ask the ten questions you genuinely receive. Write them out first, so you cannot flatter the tool by picking easy ones.
• Ask one question your documents do not cover, and read the reply carefully. This single test separates the tools more than any feature table.
• Ask something adversarial: a discount you do not offer, a delivery promise you have never made.
• Open the transcript afterwards and try to find out why it answered that way.
• Only then total up a month, add-ons included.

Baymard Institute puts the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 studies (Source: Baymard Institute, 2025). No chat widget fixes a number like that, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling. But a shopper who cannot find out whether you deliver to Ireland is a cheap loss, and that particular loss is fixable with a document you have already written.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free Tidio alternative?

Yes. chatfor.site has a free plan at $0 forever with 100 answers a month, one assistant and 25 documents, and Chatbase has a free plan at $0 with 50 message credits a month and one agent. Tidio's own free plan is $0/mo. with 50 billable conversations. All checked 4 September 2026.

What is a billable conversation on Tidio?

Tidio defines it as "any live chat, ticket, email or social media channel conversation that includes a message from a human agent (you)". Unanswered visitor messages do not count, and replies from Flows and the Lyro AI Agent are not counted as agent replies. One thread bills once, however many messages it holds.

Does Tidio's AI answer only from my content?

Tidio states that Lyro "uses solely your support content to generate personalized responses" (Source: Tidio pricing page, 4 September 2026). chatfor.site works the same way and additionally instructs the assistant to say it does not have the information when your documents do not cover a question. Test both with a question you know is uncovered.

How much does it cost to remove vendor branding?

On the pages checked on 4 September 2026, Tidio lists "No Tidio branding" as an add-on at 16.67 USD/mo. and Chatbase lists removing "Powered By Chatbase" at $99 per month. On chatfor.site the badge is removed on the Starter plan at $29 a month, which also carries 2,000 answers and two assistants.

Do I need a shared inbox and ticketing?

Only if more than one person answers customers. Ticketing, departments, macros and permissions are the parts of a platform that earn their keep with a team and cost you nothing but money on your own. If you are alone, buy answering, not workflow.

Can I run assistants for several client sites?

Yes, but check the per assistant terms first, because this is where costs diverge fastest. chatfor.site allows two assistants on Starter, five on Growth and unlimited on Business. Chatbase lists one agent on every published tier, with extra agents at $25 per AI agent a month (checked 4 September 2026).

Sources

• Tidio pricing page, checked 4 September 2026: tidio.com/pricing
• Chatbase pricing page, checked 4 September 2026: chatbase.co/pricing
• Intercom pricing page, checked 4 September 2026: intercom.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