Free tiers are usually real, with limits
Trial and free-plan policies vary widely. Check whether access expires, whether a payment method is required, and whether the request and website allowances are large enough for a real evaluation. QaribuBot publishes its current trial terms directly from its plan configuration on the pricing page.
The key question to ask about any 'free' plan is whether it's actually usable long-term or just a funnel into a forced upgrade. A free tier with a hard 14-day trial clock is a different product decision than a free tier with an ongoing monthly quota — the latter lets you genuinely test whether the tool earns its paid upgrade before you commit any money.
What drives the price up
The main lever is chat volume — how many conversations your widget handles per month — not features. A busier site simply needs a higher request cap, while implemented features such as transcript export, team seats, and crawl capacity may also differ by tier. QaribuBot publishes those current differences directly from its live plan configuration.
This is a genuinely different pricing model from most SaaS tools, which price by seats or by feature tier. Chatbot pricing tracks usage because the underlying cost to the vendor scales with usage too — more conversations means more AI inference cost on their end, so it makes sense that your price scales the same way.
Watch for per-seat or setup-fee pricing
Some enterprise-oriented tools charge per team member who can log into the dashboard, or require a paid onboarding package before you can even test them. For a small business where one or two people will ever touch the dashboard, per-seat pricing adds cost with zero corresponding value — you're paying for a pricing model designed around a support team's org chart, not your actual usage.
A genuine setup fee is a stronger red flag still. If a script-tag install genuinely takes minutes, a mandatory paid onboarding fee is pricing the sales process, not the product.
A realistic small-site budget
For a site getting a few hundred to a couple thousand chat conversations a month, entry-level chatbot packages are generally well below the cost of even part-time live-chat staffing. Compare current live prices against the request volume you actually expect.
If your site is getting tens of thousands of conversations a month, you've likely outgrown 'small site' pricing tiers regardless of vendor, and it's worth comparing plans built specifically for that volume rather than assuming the entry-level tier scales indefinitely.
How to estimate what you'll actually need
A rough rule of thumb: expect somewhere between 1% and 5% of your monthly site visitors to open the chat widget and ask something, depending on how visible the widget is and how much visitors typically need help. If you get 5,000 monthly visitors, that's roughly 50–250 conversations a month — comfortably within most free or entry-level paid tiers.
