Live Chat Price: Five Meters, Five Different Bills

Live chat pricing pages look similar until you read the unit. One vendor charges for the people who log in, a second for the rooms they log into, a third for the chats themselves, a fourth for the privilege of removing a small badge, a fifth for a per-seat fee with the AI priced as a separate product, and a sixth for a per-seat fee with the AI priced per outcome. Two shops with identical headcount and identical chat volume can end up paying radically different amounts depending on which meter they landed on, and the only honest answer to "what does live chat cost" is "which one, and what are you counting".

The six meters, side by side

This is the table that does most of the work on the page. The unit is in the second column so it is impossible to miss.

We make Asyntai, so read that row as a disclosure. Enterprise is a signed order form with a negotiated allowance and is not on this table. Every figure above was checked against the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown.

Read the second column slowly. LiveChat and Olark look like they ought to be comparable, and they are both "per person", but Olark's AI is billed on top while LiveChat's AI features live inside the higher monthly fee. Intercom is also per-seat but its AI is billed per resolution, which is a different meter again. Crisp looks cheap at $45 until you notice you are paying per workspace, not per person, so two teams on the same Crisp bill can each hit the seat cap independently. Tidio looks expensive at $24.17 only if you forget that 100 conversations per month is more than most small shops ever need. tawk.to looks free, which it is, provided you tolerate the branding. The same point is made at greater length in what is the best live chat software.

The five meters

Five products bill on five different units

Same shop, same month, six different bills. The meter decides the number.

Vendor

Bills by

Published entry

LiveChat

per agent, per month

$19 / agent

Crisp

per workspace

$45 / workspace

Tidio

per conversation

$24.17 / mo

tawk.to

to remove branding

$19 / mo

Olark

per seat + AI on top

$29 / seat

The same shop, six different bills

3 agents, 1 workspace, ~350 conversations a month, branding off, no AI add-on. Bars scaled to the largest bill below.

Maximum bill shown: $87 (3 Olark seats at $29 monthly)

tawk.to

$19

Crisp

$45

Tidio

$24.17

Olark

$87

Where Asyntai sits

Same shop, Asyntai bills per message, not per seat. Starter plan, 2,500 messages a month included.

Asyntai

$39

The same shop, six different bills

Pick a shop and the meters fall out. A small ecommerce store with three agents on the team and 600 chats in the month is a useful test case because every vendor on the list has a tier that fits it. Work out what each meter charges:

The low number is tawk.to with its badge turned off, which is what you would expect for software that is otherwise free. The high number is Olark once you turn on its chatbot: the AI is a flat $400 a month on top of the per-seat fee, so three seats with the AI on is more than five times the live-chat-only bill. Everything else sits between those two.

Why the meters feel so different

The meters look arbitrary because the vendors are optimising for different customer shapes.

Per agent (LiveChat, Olark, Intercom). You pay for everyone who can see the inbox. This rewards shops that staff up only when they have to and penalises shops that keep a deep bench. The risk is that it prices out a one-person team at exactly the moment it could be useful.

Per workspace (Crisp). You pay for the room you put a brand or a region in. A workspace is a fixed bucket of seats; once you fill it you buy another workspace or you start paying per extra agent. This rewards shops that operate several distinct brands and penalises shops that put everyone in one room.

Per conversation (Tidio). You pay for the chats themselves, regardless of who handles them. This rewards shops with low chat volume and short conversations, because a long, complicated ticket still counts as one conversation. It penalises shops with high volume or with bots that start many conversations but resolve few.

Per branding removal (tawk.to). You pay nothing for the software and $19 a month to lose the badge. This is essentially a freemium with one feature for sale, and the published fee is the cleanest number in the entire table.

Per seat with AI billed separately (Olark). The base chat is per-seat, but the chatbot is its own product with its own $400/month annual fee. This rewards shops that want only the live chat widget and never the AI, and it punishes shops that assumed "Olark" meant "Olark with the AI on".

The hidden cost on the per-seat meters

Per-seat pricing has a quiet second dimension: the people you want to be able to look at the inbox without taking chats. Supervisors, marketing, the founder who wants to read transcripts. LiveChat bills every login as a seat. Olark does the same. Intercom does the same. If your team of three agents has two supervisors who need read access, you are paying for five seats, not three, and that is before the chatbot bill lands.

Crisp's per-workspace meter absorbs some of this because the workspace is sold in seat bundles ($95 for ten seats on Essentials), so a few extra read-only users cost nothing until you cross the cap. Tidio's per-conversation meter ignores it entirely, because conversations do not care who is logged in.

When per-conversation looks expensive

Tidio's Growth tier is $49.17 a month for 250+ conversations. If your shop is the 3-agent, 600-chat example above, you sit in a band above 250. The published entry tier is $24.17 for 100 conversations. Once you exceed 250 in a month, the bill jumps to the Growth tier, which is the price for any shop that has outgrown the Starter band. The per-chat unit cost falls as you go up the ladder, but the headline number rises, which is why a Tidio quote can feel jumpy compared with a per-seat quote.

When per-seat looks expensive

Per-seat pricing is at its worst in three situations.

• A founder-only operation. One person needs to log in. LiveChat Starter is $19 a month for that one person, and the same $19 does not buy much else. Tidio Starter at $24.17 buys 100 of them in a month.
• Seasonal spikes. If you double your team for Black Friday and shrink again in February, per-seat pricing makes you pay for the peak headcount every month of the year, not the two months you actually needed it.
• AI as an add-on. Olark's $400/month AI fee is a flat line on the invoice that has nothing to do with how many seats you carry. A three-person team with the AI on pays $487 a month; a ten-person team with the AI on pays $690 a month. The marginal seat is cheap; the AI is not.

When per-conversation looks cheap

It is cheap in two situations, and both of them are worth naming because the comparison articles rarely do.

• Most chats are answerable. If your top ten questions (where is my order, what are your opening hours, do you ship to my country, how do I return this) account for 80% of incoming volume, then a per-conversation meter is paying for outcomes, not headcount. Tidio Growth at $49.17 absorbs 250 conversations a month on a meter that does not care whether a bot or a person handled them.
• Your team is large. A 20-agent contact centre on a per-seat meter at $29 to $132 each is paying between $580 and $2,640 a month before they have answered a single chat. The same volume of conversations on a per-conversation meter is a much smaller number, and it scales with the work, not the team.

The chatbot question, priced

Most live chat products now bundle some form of AI. The way they bill it is the second-most-important number on the pricing page after the base fee.

Intercom Fin. $0.99 per resolved conversation, charged once per conversation. A shop that resolves 1,000 conversations a month through Fin pays $990 on top of its seat fees. There is no AI subscription fee; you pay per outcome.

Olark AI Website Agent. $400 a month on annual billing ($4,800 a year), first seat included. You pay $400 a month whether the agent resolves one conversation or ten thousand. There is no per-resolution meter.

LiveChat, Crisp, Tidio, tawk.to. AI features live inside the tier. No separate published AI fee on the pricing pages I checked on the date above. This is not the same as saying the AI is free: it is bundled into a higher tier, so you are paying for the seat or workspace upgrade that includes it.

Intercom's $0.99 per resolution and Olark's $400 a month are not comparable as headline numbers. The first is variable, the second is fixed. The first favours low AI volume, the second favours high AI volume. Work out which side of that line your shop sits on before comparing them.

The free tiers, ranked honestly

Free tiers are the easiest place to overpromise. Three of the six products have one, and they are not the same shape.

tawk.to is the most genuinely free. The full product, with no usage cap, is free forever. The $19 a month buys the removal of a small badge in the widget. For shops where the badge is acceptable, the software costs zero.

Crisp has a Free plan at $0 for 2 seats and 100 profiles. This is enough for a two-person team on one brand. The moment you add a third agent or a second brand, you are on the paid ladder.

Tidio has a Free plan at $0 for 50 conversations per month. A small operation that handles fewer than 50 chats a month can run on this indefinitely.

LiveChat, Olark and Intercom have no free tier. Trial periods only.

What changes the answer

Five inputs move the bill more than any others, and they are the ones to fix in your head before you ask vendors for quotes.

1. Headcount. Per-seat meters scale linearly with this. Per-conversation meters do not. Per-workspace meters step when you cross a seat threshold.

2. Chat volume. Per-conversation meters scale linearly with this. Per-seat meters do not, unless you staff up to handle the volume.

3. Number of brands. Per-workspace meters (Crisp) punish you for each new workspace. Per-seat and per-conversation meters mostly do not.

4. AI usage. If you want a chatbot, decide whether you want it metered per resolution (Intercom Fin at $0.99) or as a flat fee (Olark at $400 a month). The break-even is around 400 resolved chats a month; below that, Intercom is cheaper; above that, Olark is.

5. Branding tolerance. If the tawk.to badge is fine, your software cost is $0. If it is not, add $19 a month. This is the only line item in the entire comparison that is purely a presentation choice.

The mistake most people make

The most common mistake is to compare headline prices across meters, which is meaningless. "$19 a month" is the tawk.to branding removal, the LiveChat entry seat, and roughly half of one Olark seat. They are not the same product and they do not buy the same thing. The mistake is to take the lowest number on the page and stop reading.

The second most common mistake is to assume "Olark" or "Intercom" or "Crisp" includes the chatbot. Two of those three price the AI separately or at a higher tier, and the gap between "live chat only" and "live chat with AI on" is large enough to double the invoice on a small team.

The third most common mistake is to ignore read-only seats. If your marketing person needs to read transcripts and the vendor counts them as a seat, your three-seat team is a five-seat team on the invoice.

A worked bill for the worked example

Take the 3-agent, 600-chat shop again and work out a full bill for two of the meters, including the bits that are easy to forget.

These two numbers are not the answer to "what should I buy". They are the answer to "what does each meter actually charge once you stop reading the headline". The right product depends on whether you would rather have seat headroom (Crisp) or pay only for the AI conversations that resolve (Intercom).

What to ask the vendor before you sign

1. What is the unit? Per agent, per workspace, per conversation, per branding, or per seat with AI on top. Do not sign until the unit is in writing on the order form.
2. What counts as a seat? A person who logs in, or a person who can log in? Read-only viewers included or extra?
3. What counts as a conversation? A chat that starts, a chat where the bot fails over to a human, a chat that lasts more than 30 seconds, or every opened widget?
4. Is the AI included or billed separately? A subscription fee, a per-resolution fee, or a usage fee that does not appear on the public pricing page?
5. What is the annual price? LiveChat Starter is $19 a month on annual billing and $25 on monthly billing. That 32% gap is on you if you forget to commit.
6. What is the overage policy? When you exceed the tier, do you jump to the next plan or do you pay per unit on top of the plan?

How Asyntai fits on this meter

Asyntai bills per message, which is the fourth common meter in this market and the one most directly tied to outcomes. The published ladder is Free for 100 messages, Starter at $39 for 2,500 messages, Standard at $139 for 15,000 messages, and Pro at $449 for 50,000 messages. Enterprise is a signed order form with a negotiated allowance and is not on the self-serve table.

The arithmetic for the same 3-agent, 600-chat shop, assuming roughly four messages per chat, looks like this:

That is a low number against the per-seat meters, and the reason is straightforward: a per-message meter does not charge for the agents who happen to be logged in, and it does not charge a flat AI fee on top. It charges for the conversations the shop actually had. Install is a JavaScript chat widget, a single script tag, or Code Injection on Squarespace; PII redaction, an append-only audit log and an output classifier separate from the prompt are configured per workspace.

This is not an argument that per-message is always the right meter. It is an argument that you should know which meter you are on before you compare prices, because the meters do not measure the same thing.