Tidio Pricing: The Chat Plan and the Lyro AI Meter Are Two Separate Bills

Most people arrive at Tidio's pricing page looking for one number and leave with three. That's not a trick, it's the actual architecture: Tidio sells a customer service plan, a Lyro AI Agent quota, and a Flows quota as separate products, each with its own meter, each of which can be bought on its own or bundled. Tidio says so directly in its FAQ: "each of our three core products - Lyro AI Agent, Customer Service and Flows - can be purchased individually or as part of a bundled plan in any configuration."

Understanding that structure matters more than memorizing a tier table, because the tier table is where people get surprised. Your chat plan's conversation limit and your Lyro conversation limit are different numbers that refresh on different terms and appear as different line items.

One caution before the figures. This page is written from a capture of Tidio's pricing page taken on 2026-08-21. Large parts of that page are an interactive cost calculator that renders in the browser, and the price it computes for any given slider position did not survive the capture. So this post gives you every figure Tidio actually publishes in static text, and tells you plainly where the number isn't available rather than filling the gap from a competitor's blog post. Treat all of it as accurate as of publication and check the live page before you commit budget.

The five customer service plans

Those are the only customer service plan prices on the page. Growth is labelled "starts at" and covers a range from 250 up to 2,000 billable conversations, and Tidio does not publish what the increments between 250 and 2,000 cost. Plus carries a base of $300/mo with "+ monthly usage" attached and no rate card for that usage. Premium has no price at all.

Ten seats on every self-serve plan is worth pausing on, because it's the most merchant-friendly thing on the page. Free, Starter and Growth all include 10 agents at no extra charge, and Tidio's FAQ confirms it: "You can add up to 10 agents on self-serve plans and custom numbers on the Plus package." A four-person team pays the same as a one-person team. Compared to the per-seat model that most helpdesks run, that's a genuinely different and better deal for small teams, and it's a large part of why Tidio shows up on shortlists.

About those .17 prices

Starter is $24.17 and Growth starts at $49.17. Prices ending in seventeen cents are the residue of dividing an annual figure by twelve, and the toggle sitting directly above them in the capture reads "Annually (2 months free)." The capture does not record which side of that toggle was active, and the month-to-month prices do not appear anywhere on the page in static text.

You could do the arithmetic yourself and land on plausible monthly numbers. Don't budget off it, and don't trust the third-party articles that state those numbers as fact, because most of them are working from the same inference or from a price Tidio has since changed. Flip the toggle on Tidio's own page and read both columns.

What counts as a billable conversation

Tidio's meter is not "chats." It's billable conversations, and its definition is unusually favourable:

"Billable conversation" refers to any live chat, ticket, email or social media channel conversation that includes a message from a human agent (you). Unanswered messages initiated by visitors/customers are not counted.

Three consequences follow, all of them in Tidio's own FAQ.

Spam doesn't cost you anything. If a message arrives and nobody replies through Tidio, it never enters the count. A conversation only becomes billable once a human agent answers it or proactively starts it.

Length doesn't cost you anything either. A thread with forty messages counts as one billable conversation, "regardless of how many messages are sent or received on the thread."

And critically: "Responses from Flows and Lyro AI Agent are not counted as 'agent replies'." A conversation that Lyro handles start to finish does not consume a billable conversation. It consumes a Lyro conversation instead, which is a different meter with a different bill. That single sentence is the whole architecture in miniature, and it's why the plan table above tells you less about your invoice than you'd assume.

Lyro is the second bill

Lyro is Tidio's AI agent, and on the pricing page it is an add-on with its own price:

• Lyro AI Agent: starts at $32.50/mo., from 50 Lyro AI conversations.

The free allowance is the part that catches people. Tidio's comparison table states it flatly: "Your first 50 conversations are free (lifetime). You can upgrade your monthly limit to 50 - 1 000." Lifetime, not monthly. The FAQ repeats it from the other direction: "Every Tidio account starts with 50 Lyro conversations, but you need to upgrade to the Lyro AI Agent plan to refresh it monthly."

So a store on the Free plan gets fifty AI conversations ever. Starter's feature list shows the same "50 Lyro AI Agent conversations (one-off)" allotment, which means paying $24.17/mo for Starter does not buy you a renewing AI quota either. To get AI answering questions on an ongoing basis, you buy a Lyro quota on top of whatever chat plan you're on, and the meter starts at $32.50/mo.

A Lyro conversation is defined as "a customer interaction initiated through any channel integrated with Tidio that has at least one reply from our AI Agent," counted once no matter how many times Lyro replies or whether the customer comes back later.

The calculator offers Lyro quotas at 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 500, 750 and 1,000 conversations a month, plus a 1,000+ option. Tidio does not publish a price for any of those steps except the first. The prices are computed by the calculator in the browser. If you expect 300 Lyro conversations a month, the only way to find out what that costs is to move the slider on Tidio's page. We're not going to guess at it here.

Flows is the third bill

Flows is the rule-based automation product, metered by unique visitors reached rather than by conversations.

• Flows: starts at $24.17/mo., from 2,000 visitors reached.

Every plan includes 100 visitors reached for free. Tidio's FAQ spells out the ceiling: "Although your Flows can have an unlimited number of chats, the Free Customer Service plan limits them to interact with only 100 unique visitors per month. However, you can interact with up to 100 000 visitors per month by purchasing extra quota." The calculator's steps run 2,000, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000, 75,000 and 100,000. As with Lyro, only the entry price is published.

Both the Lyro and Flows limits refresh 30 days from the date of payment rather than on a calendar month.

The smaller line items

Removing Tidio branding costs extra on Growth. The comparison table lists "No Tidio branding" as unavailable on Free and Starter, an add-on at 16.67 USD/mo. on Growth, and included on Plus and Premium. It's a small number, but it's a real one and it's easy to miss.

Lyro Actions are gated behind a paid Lyro quota. "Your first Action is free. Full access is available with the purchase of a paid Lyro AI Agent quota (50-1 000 conversations)." Same for product recommendations, which the table marks as "Available with the purchase of a paid Lyro AI Agent quota." Actions are capped at 10 on Plus and 10+ on Premium.

Native Shopify actions start at Growth. They're marked unavailable on Free and Starter. If order lookups inside chat are the reason you're evaluating Tidio, Growth is your floor on the chat side and a paid Lyro quota is your floor on the AI side.

Premium introduces a different billing model entirely. It's the only tier with pay-per-resolution billing, a guaranteed 50% Lyro AI resolution rate, and "From 3 000 Lyro AI conversations." No rate is published for a resolution, and the tier is contact-sales only.

Everything is preceded by a 7-day free trial of all features and plans, no credit card required, after which the account drops to the Free plan automatically.

What Tidio's pricing page does not tell you

Written plainly, because a pricing article that papers over its gaps is worse than a short one:

• The month-to-month prices for Starter and Growth, if the captured figures are annual.
• What Growth costs at any volume above its 250-conversation entry point.
• Any Lyro price above the $32.50 entry, including the 100, 150, 200, 300, 500, 750 and 1,000 conversation steps.
• Any Flows price above the $24.17 entry.
• The "+ monthly usage" rates on Plus, and how much the "discounted usage rates" discount.
• Premium's price, and its per-resolution rate.
• What happens when you exceed a quota mid-month: no overage rate is published, and the page doesn't say whether Lyro simply stops replying.

That last one is the question I'd ask sales first.

Who this pricing model suits badly

Tidio's structure is coherent for a store where humans do most of the talking. You get ten seats and a real shared inbox for $24.17/mo, you're only billed when a human actually answers, and you bolt on AI later if volume justifies it. For a team that wants live chat first and automation second, that ordering is correct and the free tier is a fair place to start.

It fits worse when you want the AI to be the default responder. Then you're buying two products whose meters move independently, sized against two forecasts you can't make accurately, with the second product's price ladder not published. A store trying to answer "what will support cost me at 1,200 conversations a month" has to model a chat plan in the Growth range, plus a Lyro quota somewhere on an unpriced ladder, plus Flows if it wants proactive automation, plus $16.67 to take the badge off. That's the structural complaint, and it's separate from whether Lyro answers well, which it may. We walk through the switching decision in more detail in our Tidio alternative breakdown, and the same split-meter problem shows up elsewhere in the category, including in ManyChat's per-contact pricing.

Ernest takes the opposite approach for Shopify and WooCommerce stores: one meter, AI included at every tier. Free is $0 for 100 conversations that never expire, then $49/mo for 500, $149/mo for 2,000, and $299/mo for 10,000. There's no separate AI quota to buy, no per-seat charge and no per-resolution fee, so the number you budget is the number on the invoice.

The honest limits, since Tidio wins on several of them. Ernest runs on the storefront widget and email only, with escalation to a human by email. Tidio's plans include Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp integrations at every tier, and if that's where your customers message you, Ernest cannot cover it. Tidio also works as a plain live chat tool with a human answering everything, which Ernest isn't built to be. And Ernest always requires merchant approval before a refund goes out, so if you want fully autonomous refunds, that's not on offer.

If you're weighing the wider field rather than just these two, our roundup of customer service chatbots sorts the options by the reason you're shopping. And whichever way you go: before you sign anything with Tidio, move both sliders on their calculator to the volumes you actually expect and write down the total. The entry prices are the only ones published, and they are not the ones you'll pay.