Three different things get called free
Every vendor on this page uses the word, and they mean three different things by it. Sorting them first saves a week of evaluation.
A free-forever plan is a real product with a ceiling — a seat count, a conversation count, a daily cap. An open-source plan is free software and paid infrastructure: you get the code, you run the database. A free trial is a paid product with a clock on it, and it is increasingly what a vendor means when their pricing page says free.
That third category grew this year. Retrieval-based AI costs the vendor money per answer, not per seat, so several products that ran generous free tiers in 2024 have quietly moved them behind a trial or retired them outright. Three of the tools below are in that position today, and we say so in each entry rather than repeating a figure from an old blog post.
The shortlist
Ordered by how quickly a small team can get real answers in front of real customers without paying anything.
Prices and plan contents below are what each vendor's own public pricing page stated on 20 September 2026. Support pricing moves fast — check theirs before you commit.
helpo
- Best for
- A team with docs, a help centre or a product site who wants an AI agent answering from that content — not just a chat box a human has to sit behind.
- What you get
- One project, 20 AI replies a day, the embeddable widget, a shared real-time inbox and retrieval over your own knowledge base. No card, no time limit.
- The catch
- One project and a daily reply cap. Human takeover, tickets and lead capture start on the Team plan at $99/mo; Starter is $29/mo for 1,000 AI replies a month.
Tawk.to
- Best for
- A small site that needs a staffed live-chat box today and has no budget at all.
- What you get
- Tawk.to presents the entire product as free and says it powers over a billion interactions a month. Its /pricing URL redirects to a founder's letter explaining the model rather than a plan table, so the add-on list is the page to read before committing.
- The catch
- It is live chat with canned shortcuts, not retrieval over your documentation. Revenue comes from optional paid add-ons — branding removal and hired agents — so check their pricing page for what those cost now.
Crisp
- Best for
- Solopreneurs who want a genuine shared inbox and a widget, and are happy to answer everything themselves.
- What you get
- A Free-forever plan with two seats, the website chat widget, shared inbox, mobile apps, chat SDKs, a contact form, e-commerce integrations and push notifications.
- The catch
- The free plan explicitly includes no AI credits. AI arrives on Mini at $45/mo per workspace (four seats, around 90 automated conversations) and Essentials at $95/mo, where it is metered in credits rather than included outright.
HubSpot free Service tools
- Best for
- Teams already keeping contacts in HubSpot who want ticketing beside the CRM record rather than in a second system.
- What you get
- Free for up to two users with no credit card, bundling the free service, sales, marketing, content and data tools together.
- The catch
- Live chat carries HubSpot branding until you pay for Starter. The help-desk workspace, knowledge base, customer portal and the Customer Agent are Professional-tier, and Professional also carries a required one-time onboarding fee.
Chatwoot (self-hosted)
- Best for
- Teams with someone who can run a server, and a data-residency rule that rules out most SaaS.
- What you get
- The self-hosted edition. Chatwoot Cloud is a 15-day trial rather than a free tier; paid cloud plans include Captain AI credits — 300 a month on Startups, 500 on Business, 800 on Enterprise — with more at $20 per 1,000.
- The catch
- Free means you own Postgres, Redis, upgrades and uptime. Captain AI is a paid-plan feature, so the self-hosted path gives you the inbox without the AI teammate.
Zammad (self-hosted)
- Best for
- European teams who want a serious ticket system with German hosting and an ISO 27001 data centre.
- What you get
- The open-source self-hosted edition. Hosted plans start at €7 per agent per month billed annually (€9 monthly) on Starter, capped at five agents, with email, web form and SMS channels.
- The catch
- There is no free hosted tier at all, live chat only appears on Professional, and AI features are opt-in and billed at €0.03 per AI call on top of the seat price.
Tidio
- Best for
- Small stores that want visual chat flows alongside an AI agent.
- What you get
- Tidio's plan table now opens at Starter — $24.17/mo billed annually, 100 billable conversations, 50 one-off Lyro AI conversations. The long-standing free tier is no longer shown among the listed plans, so check their pricing page for whether it still exists for new accounts.
- The catch
- Lyro, the AI agent, is a separate add-on from $32.50/mo for 50 AI conversations. The entry price buys you the inbox, not the answers.
Freshdesk
- Best for
- Larger support teams that need routing, multiple SLA policies and analytics more than they need a chatbot.
- What you get
- Freshdesk's pricing page now lists Growth, Pro and Enterprise only; their own copy puts the entry price at $15. Every tier includes the first 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions, then $49 per 100.
- The catch
- The free agent tier is not among the current plans — check their pricing page if you were counting on it. The AI copilot is a further $29 per agent per month.
Zoho Desk
- Best for
- Teams already inside Zoho who want email and web-form ticketing at the lowest possible per-seat price.
- What you get
- The current editions start at Express. AI agents are included from that tier, either bring-your-own-key or on Zoho's own model with a monthly token allowance.
- The catch
- The old three-agent free plan is not listed among the current editions, so check their pricing page. The live chat widget and the knowledge-base Answer Bot start on Standard, so the cheapest path is email and forms only.
Why the free tiers are shrinking
A seat-based product can give away two seats forever because an idle seat costs nothing. An AI-based product cannot: every answer is an embedding call, a vector search, a rerank and a generation, and all four have a unit cost. So free tiers have moved from unlimited-with-branding to capped-by-volume.
We are in that same position, and our free plan is capped the same way — 20 AI replies a day. We publish the cap instead of running a 14-day clock because a cap tells you what the product does forever, and a trial only tells you what it does this fortnight. If 20 replies a day covers your traffic, stay on it.
How to choose
The question is not which free tier is most generous. It is which ceiling you will hit first, and what it costs to go through it.
- If most of your tickets are questions already answered somewhere in your docs, pick a tool with retrieval and citations on the free tier. Deflection is the only thing that reduces the work.
- If your tickets are account-specific — where is my order, change my address — pick for the inbox and the integrations, not the AI. No model answers those without your data.
- Count seats before conversations. A two-seat free tier is a hard wall the day you hire a third person; a conversation cap degrades gracefully.
- Check what happens at the ceiling. A tier that stops answering is survivable. A tier that starts billing per resolution means your best month is also your most expensive.
- If you are choosing open source to avoid a bill, price the hours. Postgres, Redis, backups and upgrades are not free, they are just paid in a different currency.