Chatbase Hobby

What the price actually is

Billed monthly. Tiers are bounded by message credits and the number of chatbots rather than by seats, and messages beyond the allowance are billed on top of the subscription.

The usage this is priced against

A small business support bot answering 1,000 messages a month over its own documentation: each answer retrieves a few passages, sends roughly 6,000 tokens of context, and returns 400.

Someone using it half as much sees double the multiple. The assumption is the argument — if you disagree with it, the number below is not about you. Change it in the calculator.

The cost math, in full

Rates come from a dated rate card of representative published API prices, not from the vendor. Nobody outside these companies knows what they actually pay; volume discounts and in-house serving both push real costs below these figures, which makes every multiple here a floor rather than a ceiling.

Why this verdict, not the number

Point it at a website, chunk, embed, retrieve, answer. The hosting, the widget and the ingestion of awkward source formats are real work, and for a small business with no engineer they are the entire reason to pay. What the price is not buying is anything about the answering itself, which runs on a licensed model doing the most documented task in the field. Compare this against Intercom Fin in the same category: one charges for a bot, the other charges only when a conversation is actually resolved, and that difference is the whole argument.

What the price buys besides tokens

• UX craft
• Integrations

Ingesting a messy website into a usable index without anyone writing a scraper, and a widget that drops into a page. For a business without engineers that is a genuine service; it is also the part that is easiest to replace as the tooling commoditises.

What you lose if you leave

Hosting, the embed widget, and never thinking about chunking. Someone has to run the thing, and if it is not the vendor it is you.

The honest cheaper path

Open tools such as AnythingLLM, Flowise or Open WebUI do the same pipeline over your own key, self-hosted. Cheaper per message by a wide margin, and you own the uptime.

Recompute it for yourself

Where every number came from

• pricingChatbase pricing
• rate-cardOpenAI API pricing
• rateRate card entry: frontier-small
• rateRate card entry: embedding-standard

Price recorded 13 Aug 2026 · entry last reviewed 13 Aug 2026. Think something here is wrong? File a correction — we publish them, including the ones that embarrass us.