Chatbase: Complete Guide to Features, Pricing & Limitations (2026)
Chatbase says it resolves 80% of tickets on flat-rate plans, but one reply burns 2-6 message credits and the agent stops when they run out. Real 2026 breakdown.
Summarize with AI
You've probably landed here after spotting Chatbase on a "best AI chatbot" list, or in the Shopify app store, and now you want the version with the trade-offs left in. I'm Mike, co-founder of My AskAI. We run AI customer service for 200+ ecommerce and SaaS teams and our agents have resolved over a million tickets, so Chatbase is a product we watch closely and compete with directly.
That means I have a horse in this race, and I'll point out where My AskAI does things differently. It also means the descriptions of how the product actually behaves come from someone who builds the same kind of software, rather than from a rewrite of Chatbase's homepage.
In my experience, most people reading this are in one of three spots:
- You already have a website or a Shopify store and you want to bolt on an AI agent fast, with no project plan.
- You tried the free tier, hit the 50-credit ceiling in an afternoon, and you're wondering whether the jump to a paid plan is worth it.
- You're trying to model what Chatbase will actually cost at your ticket volume, and the credit math isn't adding up.
I'll walk through what Chatbase is, how it works, where it fits, what it costs, what to expect from its performance, and how to roll it out without regrets.
What is Chatbase?
Chatbase is an AI customer-support platform. You build, train and deploy an AI agent on your own content, then put it in front of customers to answer questions, take actions, and hand off to a human when it's stuck. The homepage calls it "the complete platform for building & deploying AI support agents", and a dedicated solution page leads with "AI Customer Support That Resolves 80% of Tickets".
It's a genuinely impressive bootstrap story (and I don't say that lightly). Sole founder Yasser Elsaid started it in early 2023, and the company reached roughly $8M ARR with a team of around 18 people.
Chatbase says more than 10,000 businesses across 140+ countries use it today, with a logo strip that includes Chuck E. Cheese, Bridgestone, IHG and Sage. (Fun fact: it started life as a "ChatGPT for your PDFs" tool before pivoting into support.)
One framing point worth getting right up front: Chatbase is not a website-chatbot-only tool. On the Standard plan and up it ships its own Help Desk module (shared inbox, ticket views, assignment, conversation takeover), so it can either be a lightweight widget on your site or run as your help desk end to end. It markets itself around three pillars: purpose-built for LLMs, designed for simplicity (no-code), and engineered for security.
On G2 the score is 4.7 out of 5, though across a small base of 14 reviews, so I'd read it alongside the actual comments. Here's a representative one:
G2: Chatbase scores 4.7/5 from 14 reviews on G2. "Easy to use, and the ability to use different LM providers to test your responses." via a G2 reviewer (Mid-Market).
How easy is it to set up Chatbase?
This is the part Chatbase does best (I'd happily give it the win here). The documented flow is genuinely no-code, and the company says the whole thing takes under ten minutes. Word-on-the-street backs that up, and Capterra gives it an Ease-of-Use sub-score of 4.6 out of 5, its highest.
The setup steps are straightforward:
- Sign up (free, no credit card) and click "New AI Agent".
- Add data sources: files, text snippets, a website crawl, custom Q&A, or Notion.
- Click "Create Agent"; training takes a few minutes.
- Test it in the Playground, and use the Compare feature to try different models side by side (a genuinely nice touch).
- Deploy by pasting one JavaScript snippet into your site, or use the one-click installs for Shopify and Vercel.
There's a caveat hiding in the user reviews. Several people report agents getting stuck in "training" for hours, one mentions a 23-hour wait, which suggests performance can wobble under load. For most small knowledge bases, though, the ten-to-fifteen-minute claim holds up.
What channels does Chatbase work in?
Chatbase has broad channel coverage, which is one of its real strengths. You get the website widget or iframe, a WordPress plugin, and one-click installs for Shopify and Vercel.
On the messaging side it has native WhatsApp (with 1,000 free messages a month bundled in), Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Slack. Email is a supported channel, and in May 2026 it added inbound voice agents over Twilio.
On the helpdesk side it has native integrations with Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho Desk and Help Scout. Two gaps are worth being precise about, because they're decision-relevant if either is your stack. Chatbase has no native Intercom App Store presence and no Gorgias integration at all, so both need Zapier or other middleware (Telegram and Discord are middleware-only too).
What are the limitations of Chatbase?
This is the section that matters most, because every product's marketing covers the strengths and you have to go looking for the rest.
Message credits are not messages
This is the single most-cited friction across every independent review. Chatbase's own FAQ explains that one response uses between two and six credits depending on the model you choose: a cheaper model burns two, a top-tier reasoning model burns six (older reviews documented GPT-4-class models eating up to 20-30 credits per reply).
One third-party review summed up the practical effect:
"Credits don't equal messages on a 1:1 basis, consumption varies dramatically by AI model, making budgeting difficult. When credits run out, chatbots stop responding entirely unless auto-recharge is enabled."
That's from one third-party review, and it lines up with what buyers say everywhere else.
The tiers jump in big steps
Pricing goes Free, $40, $150, $500, then custom, with no fine-grained metering in between, and unused credits don't roll over. If you outgrow a tier mid-month you either jump up a whole level or start paying auto-recharge fees (I've seen this catch teams out).
Support and billing have a reputation problem
Capterra's Customer Service sub-score is 3.8 out of 5, the lowest of all its categories, and in my reading of the reviews, billing disputes and slow responses are a recurring theme. There's a community thread on r/SaaS bluntly titled "Chatbase is great for FAQs, useless for revenue" that captures the sentiment of buyers who expected more.
It hallucinates
One Capterra reviewer flagged it directly:
"It sometimes makes up URLs with our domain. I don't like how this can mislead some users."
Chatbase's own response quality docs even recommend building a URL-to-page-name map specifically to stop the agent fabricating links. A useful fix, but to me also a tell that the problem is real.
There's no pre-launch simulation
You can't test the agent against your historical tickets before you put it live (a real gap, in our view). The Playground lets you try queries one at a time, but there's no way to replay a batch of real past conversations and see how it would have handled them, a gap one third-party review flags. You improve it in production, on live customers.
Smaller things that add up
There's no visual conversation-flow builder, file uploads are limited to .pdf, .txt, .doc and .docx (no CSV or Markdown), removing the "Powered by Chatbase" badge costs $1,188 a year, and on the free plan agents auto-delete after 14 days of inactivity.
None of these are dealbreakers for a small team that wants a fast FAQ bot. They become real problems when you're trying to forecast a budget or trust the agent on high-stakes conversations. The two I'd weigh hardest are the credit-billing opacity and the lack of pre-launch testing.
What knowledge sources can I train Chatbase on?
Chatbase ingests six source types: files (.pdf, .txt, .doc, .docx), text snippets, a website crawl (full domain, sitemap, or individual URLs with include/exclude filters), custom Q&A uploaded as a spreadsheet, Notion pages via OAuth, and historical tickets imported from Salesforce or Zendesk (one platform at a time).
There are hard caps to know about. Training data per agent is limited to 400 KB on Free, 10 MB on Hobby, 20 MB on Standard and 40 MB on Pro. Auto-Retrain, which keeps website crawls and Notion content fresh on a 24-hour cycle, is restricted to the Standard and Pro plans; on Hobby you re-train manually.
What features does Chatbase have?
Chatbase folded its older "chatbot" and "agent" products into a single AI-agent platform in its February 2025 relaunch (a sensible consolidation). The current feature set breaks into three layers.
The autonomous agent answers questions from your knowledge and reasons through multi-step queries. On top of that sit AI Actions, function-calling workflows that let the agent do things in your other systems: built-in actions cover Stripe (invoices, subscriptions), Shopify (order tracking, cart management), Calendly, web search, lead capture, escalation to a human, and a custom HTTP action for any API. The third layer is the Help Desk module on Standard and above, with ticket views, assignment and conversation takeover.
Around those you get a Playground with side-by-side model Compare, analytics covering chat volume, auto-grouped topics and sentiment (on a one-day delay), the Revise-to-Q&A feedback loop, HMAC identity verification for logged-in users, a public API on Standard and up, and the new voice capability. The notable absence, flagged by several reviewers, is a visual flow builder for designing multi-step conversational logic.
How do I improve Chatbase responses?
Chatbase's response-quality playbook is a five-step, live-iteration loop: tighten the agent's instructions and scope, make sure your data sources are clean and machine-readable, use the Revise feature to overwrite wrong answers (which then move into the Q&A tab for reuse), switch to a more capable model for nuanced questions, and add that URL-to-page-name map to curb fabricated links.
It works, but it's reactive by design. Because there's no pre-launch simulation, every improvement happens after a real customer hits the gap. You watch the Activity dashboard, spot what the agent fumbled, and patch it for next time.
What resolution rate can I expect from Chatbase?
Every resolution number attached to Chatbase is either a vendor claim or a customer figure that Chatbase reports. The headline is "resolves 80% of tickets"; elsewhere it describes a "60-80% auto-resolution rate" as its North Star metric, and cites 90-92% for a fully optimized ecommerce agent. There is no independently audited benchmark for Chatbase, so I'd treat all of these as marketing figures until you've seen them on your own data.
Two things are worth holding in mind. First, most of these are deflection figures (a measure of conversations the bot closed without a human), which isn't the same as resolution, the share of issues genuinely solved. Industry analysts have long flagged that deflection numbers can overstate real outcomes.
Second, for context on where the field sits: across our own aggregate of 38 vendors and 195 deployments, the median AI handling rate is roughly 70% (My AskAI's own rolling rate is 72%). That's a directional benchmark rather than a like-for-like scoreboard, because every vendor defines its numerator differently. Treat an "80%" from one tool and a "72%" from another as broadly indicative; they aren't measuring the same event.
The more useful point for a buyer: an "80% of tickets" claim only means something once you can verify it on your own tickets.
What AI model does Chatbase use?
Chatbase is multi-model by design (genuinely one of its nicer touches). It advertises access to 35+ models from seven providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Meta, MoonshotAI and xAI) and lets you pick the model per agent and A/B test them in the Playground. Its current "highly recommended" picks include GPT-5 Mini, Grok 4 and Kimi K2.
Architecturally it's a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system: your content is chunked, embedded and stored in a vector database, and at query time the relevant chunks plus the user's message go to the chosen model. Full model choice is gated to the Standard and Pro plans; the Free tier limits you to a smaller set. The flip side of all that choice is the credit model, since the most capable models (the ones I'd actually reach for) are also the ones that burn the most credits per reply.
What languages does Chatbase work in?
Chatbase supports 95+ languages with automatic detection, although the homepage still markets the older "80+" figure. You can train the agent in one language and have it answer in the customer's, and its nonprofit case study documents an English-trained agent replying in Portuguese, Turkish, German and more across 12 countries in its first month. The new voice agents cover the same 95+ language range.
How secure is Chatbase?
Chatbase is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, the latter since March 2024. It encrypts data at rest and in transit, offers user roles on all plans, and reserves SSO, audit logs and custom roles for the Enterprise tier. It also states that customer data is never used to train models (a line I'd confirm in the DPA if you're handling anything sensitive).
The gaps to note if you're in a regulated space: there's no public HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS or data-residency disclosure on the security page. Chatbase references a Trust Center, but it's gated, so healthcare and regulated-enterprise buyers will need to request access to do a proper review.
Who is using Chatbase?
Beyond the 10,000-business claim and the enterprise logo strip, Chatbase publishes a handful of case studies I find more useful (the logos are Chuck E. Cheese, Bridgestone, IHG, Miele, Sage and Synergym). Aplazo, a Mexican BNPL company, reports a 2.2x lift in merchant closed-won rate.
FairFigure cites 98% accuracy on customer questions and an MVP built in a week, which is a genuinely quick turnaround. The Testicular Cancer Foundation's "TC Navigator" agent answered 484 questions in its first 30 days across 12 countries (a multilingual spread I found genuinely impressive).
How much does Chatbase cost?
Chatbase is flat-rate, billed on message credits, with roughly 20% off for annual billing:
- Free ($0): 50 credits/month, 1 agent, 400 KB of training data, limited models. Agents auto-delete after 14 days of inactivity.
- Hobby ($40/month): 700 credits, 10 MB per agent, 2 members, basic integrations.
- Standard ($150/month, marked "Popular"): 4,000 credits, the Help Desk module, voice, API access and advanced integrations (Stripe, Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, HubSpot, Shopify, Slack, WhatsApp and more). This is the real entry point if you want Chatbase to do support properly.
- Pro ($500/month): 15,000 credits, 40 MB per agent, advanced analytics, Sources Suggestions, and tickets as a data source.
- Enterprise (custom): SSO, audit logs, white-labeling and SLAs.
Add-ons stack on top: auto-recharge credits at $40 per 1,000, extra agents at $300/year each, and badge removal at $1,188/year.
The credit-to-message conversion is where the real cost hides. Because one reply costs two to six credits, the headline credit allowance translates into far fewer real conversations than it looks:
| Plan | Monthly credits | Approx. replies at ~3 credits/reply | What that covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby ($40) | 700 | ~230 | A low-traffic site or a single product FAQ |
| Standard ($150) | 4,000 | ~1,300 | A small support team's chat volume |
| Pro ($500) | 15,000 | ~5,000 | Steady mid-volume support |
If you handle, say, 10,000 conversations a month, even the Pro plan's 15,000 credits won't stretch. You'd be into auto-recharge territory at $40 per 1,000 credits, and your bill becomes a moving target that depends on which models your agents trigger.
This is the gap My AskAI was built to close. Our pricing is per ticket rather than per credit-by-model: chat tickets work out at roughly $0.10 each on Scale, or $0.12 on Pro, and there's no decoder ring for how many "credits" a given reply costs.
Does Chatbase have a free trial?
Not a time-boxed trial, but a permanent free plan with no credit card required. You get one agent, 50 credits a month (enough for maybe 10-25 responses), 400 KB of training data and a limited model selection, with no integrations, API, help desk or voice. The snag for slow evaluators is that agents auto-delete after 14 days of inactivity, so if you sign up and get pulled onto something else, your work can vanish.
A free tier is a genuinely good way to kick the tires, and I'd never tell anyone not to use one. Tiny teams underestimate one thing: free-of-money is rarely free-of-time.
The hours you spend curating knowledge, fixing wrong answers and watching credit consumption are real, and at a small company the founder's time is the runway (I've watched this play out plenty of times). Sometimes a $0 tool you babysit costs more than software you pay for and forget about, so it's a trade worth making on purpose rather than by default.
Is Chatbase worth it?
For the right team, yes. If you're an SMB or an ecommerce store that wants an AI agent live within a day, on a flat budget, across web, WhatsApp, Slack, Shopify and now voice, Chatbase is, I'd say, a fast, capable, well-built choice with a real product-market-fit story behind it.
It's a weaker fit if you're in healthcare or another HIPAA-regulated space, if you're a mid-market team that needs deep CRM customization, if you need to QA the agent against your ticket history before launch, or if you want pricing you can forecast without a credit calculator. Those are the seams where buyers tend to start looking at alternatives.
What are the Pros and Cons of Chatbase?
Pros
- Live in under ten minutes: genuinely no-code setup, backed by Capterra's 4.6/5 ease-of-use score (see "How easy is it to set up").
- Real model choice: 35+ models with side-by-side Compare lets you tune quality per agent (see "What AI model does Chatbase use").
- Broad channels at one price: web, WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram, Shopify and voice in a single flat-rate platform (see "What channels does Chatbase work in").
Cons
- Opaque credit billing: replies cost 2-6 credits depending on the model, credits don't roll over, and the agent stops when they run out, making budgets hard to forecast (see "Limitations" and "How much does Chatbase cost").
- Support and billing reputation: Capterra's Customer Service sub-score is 3.8/5, its lowest, with recurring billing complaints (see "Limitations").
- No pre-launch testing: you can't simulate the agent against historical tickets before going live, so it's tuned on real customers (see "Limitations" and "How do I improve Chatbase responses").
- Integration and compliance gaps: no native Intercom or Gorgias, and no public HIPAA (see "What channels" and "How secure is Chatbase").
FAQs
What is Chatbase used for?
Chatbase is used to build and deploy an AI customer-support agent trained on your own content (your website, docs, files or Notion). It answers customer questions across your site, WhatsApp, Slack, Shopify and other channels, takes actions like order lookups, and escalates to a human when needed.
How much does Chatbase cost?
Plans run Free ($0), Hobby ($40/month), Standard ($150/month), Pro ($500/month) and custom Enterprise, all flat-rate and billed on message credits. The snag is that one reply costs 2-6 credits depending on the model, so the real per-conversation cost is higher than the headline credit count suggests.
| Plan | Price | Monthly credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 |
| Hobby | $40/mo | 700 |
| Standard | $150/mo | 4,000 |
| Pro | $500/mo | 15,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
What are the best Chatbase alternatives?
The usual alternatives are platforms that either bill more transparently or sit natively inside your existing helpdesk. We'd put My AskAI in the first camp (per-ticket pricing, native in Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias and HubSpot), alongside tools like Intercom Fin, Tidio and Botpress. The right pick depends on your helpdesk and how predictable you need the bill to be.
Is Chatbase any good?
For fast, no-code FAQ and support automation on a small-to-mid site, it's a capable product, with a 4.7/5 G2 score across a small review base and a 4.6 Ease-of-Use sub-score on Capterra. Its weaker areas are the credit-based billing, customer support, and the lack of pre-launch testing against your real tickets.
Does Chatbase integrate with WhatsApp?
Yes. Chatbase has a native, Meta-authenticated WhatsApp integration that bundles 1,000 free messages a month, and it captures the customer's name and phone number as a lead automatically.
Does Chatbase work with Zendesk, Intercom and Shopify?
Zendesk and Shopify have native integrations (Shopify is a one-click app-store install). Intercom is supported but not via a native Intercom App Store listing, and Gorgias isn't supported natively at all, so both lean on Zapier or middleware.
Chatbase vs Botpress, what's the difference?
Chatbase is a no-code, content-trained support agent that's fastest to launch; Botpress is a more developer-oriented platform with a visual flow builder for designing complex multi-step conversations. If you want a support bot live today, Chatbase wins on speed; if you need bespoke conversational logic, Botpress gives you more control.
What is a Chatbase message credit?
A message credit is Chatbase's billing unit. One AI reply uses between two and six credits depending on which model generated it, so credits and messages aren't one-to-one (this is the bit I'd really make sure you understand before committing). When your monthly credits run out, the agent stops replying unless you've enabled auto-recharge at $40 per 1,000 credits.
How many languages does Chatbase support?
Chatbase supports 95+ languages with automatic detection (the homepage still cites the older 80+ figure), and you can train the agent in one language and have it answer customers in theirs. The voice agents cover the same range, which we think is a fair bit of reach for an SMB-priced tool.
What AI models does Chatbase use?
Chatbase is multi-model, offering 35+ models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Meta, MoonshotAI and xAI, with per-agent selection and side-by-side comparison. Its current recommended models include GPT-5 Mini, Grok 4 and Kimi K2; full model access is on the Standard and Pro plans.
Does Chatbase have a free plan?
Yes, a permanent free plan, no credit card required, with one agent, 50 credits a month, 400 KB of training data and limited models. Agents auto-delete after 14 days of inactivity, so I'd treat it as an active evaluation rather than a parked project.
Who founded Chatbase and what company makes it?
Chatbase was founded in early 2023 by Yasser Elsaid and is run by Chatbase, Inc., a bootstrapped, New York-based company that reached roughly $8M ARR with a team of around 18 people.
Can Chatbase make refunds or take actions?
Yes. It's one of the things we'd genuinely credit Chatbase for. Through AI Actions, the agent can take real actions in connected systems, including Stripe billing operations, Shopify order and cart management, Calendly scheduling, lead capture and any custom HTTP API call you configure.
What resolution rate can Chatbase achieve?
Chatbase markets an 80% ticket-resolution figure and describes a 60-80% auto-resolution range as its North Star, with up to 90-92% cited for an optimized ecommerce agent. These are vendor-reported deflection figures rather than independently audited resolution rates, so treat them as a ceiling and verify against your own tickets.
