Chatbase Pricing: The Five Tiers, the Credit Meter, and the Add-Ons

Chatbase does not price like a helpdesk. There is no per-seat charge that climbs as you hire, and no per-ticket or per-resolution fee. You buy a monthly allowance of message credits, a small number of workspace seats comes along with it, and everything else is an add-on. If you have been comparing it against Zendesk or Gorgias on a spreadsheet, the columns will not line up, because the billable unit is different.

This post is written from a capture of Chatbase's pricing page taken on 2026-08-21. Every figure below appears on that page. Where the page does not publish something a buyer needs, this post says so instead of borrowing a number from somewhere else, and there are more of those gaps than you would expect from a page this detailed. Treat all of it as accurate as of publication.

The five tiers

Those are the prices on the monthly side of the billing toggle. The page advertises 20% off yearly plans, but it does not print the discounted monthly-equivalent figures anywhere in static text, so the annual numbers above are not something this post can give you. Each paid tier carries a 7-day trial.

The seat counts are the part worth reading twice. Five people is the ceiling on a $500/month plan. Chatbase is not selling you agent desks, so seats are an afterthought in the pricing rather than the meter, which is good if you are one person and awkward if you are eight.

What the Free plan really includes

Free gets 50 message credits a month, one member, and limited access to models. Two further limits appear in the comparison table and are easy to miss. The Free plan's training content size is 1 MB, and its AI Actions per agent count is 0.

That second one matters more than the credit count. Actions are how an agent does something rather than saying something, and on Free the number is zero. You can build an agent that answers from documents you have uploaded. You cannot build one that looks anything up. The page also states that AI agents get deleted after 14 days of inactivity on the free plan, so it is a place to try the product, not a place to park one.

What a message credit is, and what Chatbase doesn't say it is

The meter is the message credit, allocated monthly and reset monthly. That much is clear from the plan cards.

What a single credit buys is not on the page. Chatbase's pricing FAQ carries the question "How do message credits work?" and the answers are rendered on click, so the captured page has the question and not the answer. The same is true of "When are my message credits renewed?" and "What is the difference between subscription credits and auto-recharge credits?" The existence of that last question tells you the two kinds of credit behave differently, and the add-on copy tells you which way: auto-recharge credits are described as "credits that don't expire", which strongly implies that your plan's monthly credits do. Chatbase does not state that outright on the pricing page, and you should read the FAQ answers on the live page before you plan around either behaviour.

So the conversion you most want, credits per customer conversation, is not published where you would look for it. A support exchange is several messages. Whether each of those consumes one credit, or whether a longer or more complex answer consumes more, is a question the pricing page raises and does not settle. Divide 700 credits by your monthly chat volume at your own risk.

What happens when credits run out

The page never says. It describes exactly one mechanism for the situation, which is an add-on.

Auto recharge credits: "When your credits fall below the threshold you set, we'll automatically add credits that don't expire to your account, ensuring uninterrupted service." The price is $40 per 1,000 message credits. The phrase "ensuring uninterrupted service" is the closest the page comes to telling you what happens without it, and it is an implication rather than a statement. If your agent stops answering at zero, degrades, or queues, Chatbase does not put that in writing on the pricing page.

That is a meaningful gap for anyone whose traffic is seasonal. A store running a Black Friday promotion wants to know whether the agent goes quiet at 2 a.m. on the busiest night of the year or whether the bill simply grows. Those are very different outcomes and the page supports either reading.

The three add-ons

Run the arithmetic on the first one against the plans. Standard's included credits work out to $0.0375 each, Pro's to about $0.033, and Hobby's to about $0.057. Recharge credits at $40 per 1,000 are $0.04 each. So topping up costs slightly more than Standard's or Pro's included rate and slightly less than Hobby's, which is a reasonable way to price it and not the punitive overage rate you sometimes see. It does mean your real cost per credit only ever moves in one direction once you start recharging.

The $99 branding removal is the add-on most likely to catch a small business by surprise. It is more than twice the price of the Hobby plan itself, so a solo operator who wants an unbranded widget on their own site is at $139/month minimum. White-labeling proper is listed as an Enterprise feature.

Extra agents at $25/month each are worth understanding before you design around them. The comparison table lists an agent count per tier, and the Free plan's count is 1. The captured table does not cleanly attribute agent counts to the paid tiers, so this post will not assert what Hobby or Standard include. What is certain is that agents are a metered resource with a published per-unit price, which is unusual, and it means "one agent for the store, one for the internal wiki, one for the marketing site" is a line item rather than a free choice.

What each tier unlocks

Credits are not the only thing that changes as you move up. The feature gating is aggressive, and this is where most buyers end up on a higher plan than the credit count alone would suggest.

Free is limited to a restricted set of models. Hobby ($40) adds access to advanced models, integrations, basic analytics, and attachments. Standard ($150) is where the platform features arrive in a block: helpdesk, voice, telephony, outbound campaigns, API access, personalization, auto retrain agents, and what the page calls "Advanced integrations (Stripe, Zendesk, and more)". Pro ($500) adds advanced analytics, sources suggestions, and tickets as a source.

The integration list in the comparison table runs to twenty-odd names including Stripe, Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, HubSpot, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Helpscout, Gorgias, Odoo, Zapier, Twilio, Shopify, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Calendly and WordPress. Standard and Pro show the full set. Hobby shows a subset, and the captured page does not identify which integrations are in that subset. If a specific one is the reason you are buying, confirm it is on Hobby before paying for Hobby.

Enterprise has no published price at all. It is listed as "Let's Talk" with higher limits, flexible billing, custom roles and permissions, SSO, white-labeling, audit logs, priority support, a success manager, SLAs, HIPAA eligibility, and zero data retention. Chatbase does not publish a starting figure, a seat count, or a credit allowance for it.

Chatbase is good at the thing it charges for

None of the above is a complaint about the product. Chatbase does something genuinely hard well: you point it at your own content and get a working custom agent quickly, with a real choice of underlying model across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral and others, and a long list of places to connect it. The company puts its customer count at over 10,000 businesses. For a SaaS company that needs an agent trained on its docs, or a business that wants one agent spanning a website, Slack and a helpdesk, that flexibility is the product and the credit meter is a fair way to sell it.

The pricing is also honest in shape. A credit allowance plus published add-on rates is more legible than "contact sales", and $40 to start with real model access is not expensive for what it does.

Who this pricing model suits badly

A store that wants order lookup and returns working on day one.

The credit meter is not the problem there. The problem is that Chatbase sells a platform to build on, and the pricing is arranged accordingly. The free plan gives you zero AI Actions, so the version you can try for nothing cannot look up an order. Integrations begin at Hobby, and the full integration list plus API access begins at Standard, which is $150/month. Then you still have the build: connecting the store, defining what the agent may do, writing your return window into instructions it follows reliably, and testing it against a guest checkout, a split shipment and a partial refund before you let it near a customer. That work is normal for an agent platform. It is work, and it happens after the invoice.

The forecasting is the second issue. If you are budgeting support against next month's order volume, you want a unit you can count. Conversations you can count from last month's inbox. Message credits, with no published conversion to conversations, you cannot, and the FAQ answers that would settle it are not on the page.

For comparison with both numbers on the table: Ernest prices by conversation rather than credit, with a free plan of 100 conversations that never expire, then $49/month for 500 conversations, $149/month for 2,000, and $299/month for 10,000, AI included at every tier and no per-seat fee. Against Chatbase's Standard at $150/month for 4,000 message credits, those are not directly comparable units, which is precisely the point being made here. Ernest is also narrower: Shopify and WooCommerce only, storefront widget and email only, no voice, no WhatsApp, no Instagram, and no model selection. Chatbase's list covers all of those and Ernest's does not.

If you are weighing the platform-versus-product decision rather than the price, we have written it up at length in what a Chatbase alternative for ecommerce needs to do differently, and a direct feature comparison in Chatbase vs Ernest. If the metered-billing question is what brought you here, Gorgias pricing is the other end of the same problem, where the unit is a resolution instead of a credit.

Whichever way you go, read the four credit FAQs on Chatbase's own pricing page before you commit a budget. They are the four questions this page could not answer for you, and they are the ones that determine your bill.