Free plans in this category are real, not bait. But they are capped, and the caps are not always where you would expect.
Here is what to check before you build a business process on one.
The five limits that matter
1. Monthly messages. The headline cap. Count a message, not a conversation — one visitor asking four questions can be four messages. A hundred messages is far less than a hundred enquiries.
2. What happens at the cap. This is the important one and it is rarely on the pricing page. Does the bot stop answering entirely, or fall back to capturing enquiries? A bot that goes silent mid-month is worse than no bot, because the widget is still sitting there inviting questions.
3. How it is trained. Free tiers often allow pasted text and manual Q&A but not automatic website crawling, which is the feature that makes setup take minutes instead of an afternoon.
4. Branding. Expect "powered by" on free. Reasonable, and usually the first thing worth paying to remove.
5. Number of bots. One is standard. Fine unless you run several sites.
What free is genuinely good for
Proving it works on your content before paying for anything. This is the real value, and you should use it.
Low-traffic sites where the enquiry volume genuinely fits inside the cap.
Testing the failure mode. Ask it something it cannot possibly know and see what it does. That behaviour will not change when you upgrade, so evaluate it while it is free.
What free is not good for
Anything where going quiet mid-month costs you money. If enquiries are a meaningful revenue channel, the cheapest paid tier is usually a rounding error against one recovered job.
Work out your own number
Look at how many enquiries you received last month across all channels, multiply by three or four for the back-and-forth of a conversation, and compare that to the cap. If it is close, you will exceed it in a good month, and a good month is exactly when you do not want it to stop.
The only test that matters
Every product in this category demos well on its own website. Point one at your site and ask it the three questions your customers actually ask. You will know within a minute.
Build one from your URL free — no signup, and it deletes itself afterwards.
Related: how much should an AI chatbot cost and pricing models explained.