Updated August 2026 · 6 min read
Tidio is everywhere for a reason. The widget looks good, the Flows automation is properly useful, and the free plan is what sells it. Then the footnote lands: the 50 free Lyro AI conversations are a lifetime allowance. Use them, and they don't come back. That sentence is buried in their own pricing table, and it changes the maths completely.
Credit where it's due. Tidio's chat widget is one of the cleanest in the business, the ticketing is solid, and the Flows builder lets you automate a decent chunk of your frontline replies without touching code. On the annual billing toggle the Starter plan shows at $24.17 a month, which looks harmless. Flip to monthly and the same plan costs more, which is how a lot of people end up paying a price they didn't budget for.
Lyro, Tidio's AI agent, trains on your site and help centre and answers in your voice. That part is good. The problem is the meter. The free tier gives you 50 Lyro conversations, one time. After that, real AI means the Lyro AI Agent plan at $39 a month for a quota starting at 50 conversations a month, and the next rung up (Plus) begins at $300 a month plus usage. For a small business that just wanted a bot to answer "do you deliver on Saturdays?", that's a big step up in cost.
ChatNest is the one we obviously know best, so take the bias in that sentence for what it is. The free plan gives you 100 AI messages a day, and they refill every day. Paid plans are flat: £15, £29, £49 or £149, and the price doesn't climb per conversation. The bot trains on your pages, docs and FAQs and answers only from that content. There's a dedicated WooCommerce plugin, and a live inbox for the conversations that need a human. If you're on Tidio's free tier because you like free, ChatNest's free tier does more with the AI than Tidio's does, because it actually keeps going.
Tawk.to keeps live chat free forever, which is a strong deal on its own. Its AI Assist is an add-on from $29 a month, and removing the "Powered by tawk.to" branding costs another $29 a month. For a store owner who wants the chat for free and the AI as a separate decision, it works.
Chatwoot is the open source option. The Hacker plan is free for up to 2 agents and 500 conversations a month, but it has no AI. The Startups plan is $19 per agent a month and includes 300 Captain AI credits, with top-ups at $20 per 1,000 credits. Self-hosting the Community Edition is free in licence but you pay in server time and upgrades.
Crisp prices flat per workspace: free for 2 agents, $45 a month for the Mini plan with around 90 automated AI conversations included. Clean pricing, decent widget.
Intercom is the expensive exit, and for most small sites it's more platform than they need. We cover the numbers below.
If you live in Tidio's Flows and love the automation, stay. It's a good tool. Switch if the AI meter is the thing grinding you down, or if you're on the free plan and the 50 lifetime conversations are already gone. We put a full side-by-side table together at chatnest.uk/compare, prices checked August 2026, so you can see the free-plan limits and realistic monthly costs in one place.
100 AI messages a day, every day. No card, no lifetime allowances.
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