Botpress Pricing Explained: Conversations and Overages

What Botpress actually charges

Botpress starts at $150 per month billed yearly. That's the paid entry point, and it's a big jump from free. There's also a free plan with 100 conversations per month plus a $5 monthly AI credit, which is genuinely useful for testing an idea before you commit.

One thing that changed recently: all paid Botpress plans now include unlimited bots. That matters if you run several chatbots for different parts of your business, and it removes a common upsell trap — you are not billed per bot.

But the headline price isn't the whole story. Botpress is a developer-grade tool, and the pricing reflects that. It's built for technical teams who want to wire up custom AI workflows, connect their own language model, and control the logic behind every reply.

If you run a small service business and just want a bot to answer "do you deliver?" — Botpress is probably more machine than you need.

How Botpress counts conversations

This is the part that trips people up. Botpress bills by conversation, not by message or by seat. A conversation is generally a back-and-forth session with a user, and each one counts against your monthly allowance.

The free plan gives you 100 conversations per month. That sounds like a lot until you realize a busy website can burn through 100 chats in a few days. Once you're on a paid plan, you get a set number of conversations included, and anything beyond that is billed as an overage.

Here's the key number: conversation packs cost $65 per 100 conversations. Each additional block of 100 that you go over is billed at that pack price, so a heavy month adds blocks to the bill rather than a single small top-up.

The scaling risk is the part to plan for. A support bot handling a thousand conversations a month is buying several packs, and that overage line can grow to the size of a real budget item. The pricing isn't unreasonable for what Botpress delivers — but it rewards businesses that can predict their volume.

What an overage bill looks like

Take a store whose Botpress bot goes past its monthly allowance. Every 100 conversations beyond the plan is billed at $65, the pack price on the pricing page, and a single month can stack several of those blocks.

During a holiday sale the same store sends several times its usual traffic — four blocks instead of one, say — and the overage line grows with it. That's the shape of the risk: not a surprise unit price, but a volume curve.

Which points to a pattern worth copying: use Botpress where its power pays off, and use simpler tools for high-volume, low-complexity questions. Peak season is exactly when a split like that saves the most.

Where Botpress earns its price

To be fair, Botpress does things the cheaper tools can't. It's LLM-agnostic, meaning you can bring your own AI model and pay the provider directly at cost with no markup. For technical teams, that's a real advantage — you're not locked into one vendor's AI pricing.

The workflow engine is the most powerful in the tools we compared. You can build branching logic, connect knowledge bases, and use an API-first setup to plug the bot into your own systems. There's even a self-host option if you want full control.

So when does Botpress make sense? When you have a developer (or you are one) and your chatbot needs to do real work — qualify leads, pull order data, route complex requests. For those jobs, the $150 monthly starting point can be worth it.

For everyone else, the learning curve and conversation costs usually point toward simpler options.

Chatbase: the simpler AI bot alternative

Chatbase is the tool we'd suggest if you want a ChatGPT-style bot trained on your own content without the engineering overhead. It starts at $40 per month, and the free plan gives you 50 message credits per month with one agent.

The appeal is speed. You upload your docs or website, and you get an AI bot in minutes. It embeds on any site, and mid-tier plans include API access and integrations.

The catch: Chatbase has no live chat on cheaper tiers. If you need human handover, the built-in Helpdesk requires the Standard plan at $150 per month and up. It's also not built for e-commerce workflows, and free agents get deleted after 14 days of inactivity.

Chatbase fits websites and documentation sites well. It's less suited to stores that need order lookups or live human backup.

Tidio: the small business favorite

Tidio is what we'd recommend to most small e-commerce stores. It starts at $24.17 per month billed yearly, and the free plan includes 50 conversations per month. Tidio's onboarding is designed to get live chat running in under 10 minutes — that's the vendor's own claim, and no developer is needed either way.

The Lyro AI answers questions from your FAQ automatically, and the first 50 AI conversations are free for life. Shopify, WordPress, and WooCommerce integrations are deep, which matters if your store runs on one of those platforms.

The downside is that Lyro AI conversation credits run out quickly on cheaper plans, and advanced analytics are locked to higher tiers. So if your bot handles heavy volume, you'll need to watch those credits the same way you'd watch Botpress overages.

Still, for a store owner who wants chat plus a helpful AI bot without touching code, Tidio is the easier starting point — and the price is far gentler than Botpress.

Which one should you pick?

Here's how we'd frame the decision.

• **Choose Botpress** if you have technical help, need custom AI workflows, and can predict your conversation volume. The power is real, but so is the overage risk.
• **Choose Chatbase** if you mainly want an AI bot trained on your docs or website, and you don't need live chat on a budget.
• **Choose Tidio** if you run a small store and want live chat plus an AI FAQ bot with fast setup and a low entry price.

The honest takeaway: Botpress pricing comes down to volume. If your bot will handle a few hundred conversations a month, the overage packs are manageable. If you expect thousands, budget for them upfront or split the work across tools.