Free AI Chatbot for your website, trained on your own business
ReplySetter gives you a free AI chatbot that answers from your documents, follows a playbook you design on a canvas, and shows you exactly why it said every word. Paste one script tag to put it on your site. The free plan is yours forever, with no card and no markup on AI usage.
- Free plan forever
- No card needed
- No markup on AI usage
What is a free AI chatbot?
An AI chatbot reads the question, not just the keywords
A free AI chatbot is a chat assistant, usually a small bubble in the corner of a website, that uses a large language model to understand what a visitor is asking and write a useful answer in plain language. Instead of matching keywords to canned replies, it reads the whole message, looks up the facts it needs, and responds the way a well-briefed member of your team would.
That is the big difference from the chatbots most people remember. Older bots ran on decision trees: click "Pricing", then "Monthly", then "Talk to sales". The moment a visitor typed something the tree didn't expect, the bot fell apart. An AI chatbot handles the long tail of real questions, including typos, follow-ups, and three questions packed into one message.
A good AI chatbot answers from your facts, not the internet
A language model on its own knows a lot about the world and nothing about your business. Ask it your opening hours or refund policy and it will guess, confidently. A business chatbot needs a knowledge base: your pricing sheets, FAQs, policies and product guides, split into chunks and searched whenever a question needs a fact. This technique is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, and it's what keeps answers grounded in your truth.
ReplySetter includes a built-in knowledge base on the free plan. Upload your documents, and your free AI chatbot searches them mid-conversation instead of improvising.
What "free" should actually mean
Plenty of tools advertise a free AI chatbot and then cap you at a handful of conversations, hide the AI behind a trial, or stamp their own upsell on every message. Before you pick one, it's worth being clear about what free means.
With ReplySetter, the Free plan has no time limit and needs no card. You connect your own AI provider key (Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter), so you pay that provider directly for the tokens your chatbot uses, at their published rates, with no markup from us. The software, the flow builder, the knowledge base, the widget and the debugger cost nothing.
A free AI chatbot built on the same engine as our paid agents
The free plan isn't a cut-down demo. Your chatbot gets the same flow builder, knowledge base, model choice and debugger that teams use to run sales and support agents across every channel.
Answers grounded in your documents
The built-in knowledge base chunks and embeds your files automatically. Your free AI chatbot searches it whenever a question needs facts, so replies quote your policies, not a guess.
A playbook, not a single prompt
Design the conversation on a visual canvas: steps with their own instructions and objectives, AI conditions that route, and scenarios that catch off-script questions at any point.
See why it said every word
Every reply records which step answered, what the model was thinking, each tool call and the exact prompt. When an answer is off, you find the cause in seconds instead of guessing.
Test before a visitor ever sees it
Sandbox conversations run the real flow and knowledge without sending anything. Rate a reply, ask the AI to diagnose it, apply the suggested fix and re-run side by side.
Any model, with backups
Choose from Anthropic, OpenAI and 350+ OpenRouter models, and stack up to five backups. If one provider errors or stalls, the next answers, so your chat never goes silent.
Protected from bots and runaway costs
The widget only loads on sites you allow, makes bots solve a proof-of-work puzzle, rate-limits every visitor and IP, and has a daily cap on AI spend per widget.
What’s included in the free AI chatbot plan
Here’s exactly what you get for $0, and what needs a paid plan, so there are no surprises after you’ve built something you like.
Free, forever
- 1 AI agent and 1 connected inbox: your website chat, Gmail or Outlook
- An embeddable chat widget with your colours, greeting and launcher
- Optional pre-chat form for name, email and phone
- Built-in knowledge base for your documents
- Visual job flows and reusable characters (personas)
- Test & Debug with full reasoning traces
- Suggest and draft autonomy: the chatbot drafts, you approve
- Bot protection, rate limits and a daily AI spend cap
- Any Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter model, on your own key
- Community support
On paid plans
- Fully automatic replies with no approval step (Basic)
- Appointment booking and CRM actions (Basic)
- GoHighLevel contact sync for chat visitors (Basic)
- Follow-up sequences, A/B testing and analytics (Basic)
- Custom API tools and external vector stores (Basic)
- More agents, more inboxes and a widget per client (Basic and Agency)
Upgrading keeps everything you’ve built. Compare plans
How to build a free AI chatbot for your website in 8 steps
Most people go from sign-up to a tested chatbot on their site in an afternoon. Here’s the whole path.
Create your free account
Sign up with an email and password. There's no card and no trial clock. You land in an empty workspace with the Free plan already active.
Add your AI provider key
Paste an Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter API key. Your free AI chatbot runs on that key, so usage is billed by your provider at cost and you can set spending limits on their side too.
Give your chatbot a character
A character is the persona doing the job: a name, avatar, how they speak, up to three voice styles, the model they think with and up to five backup models. Pick a fast, inexpensive model to start; you can switch any time.
Upload what it should know
Create a knowledge base and add your FAQs, pricing, policies, opening hours and product pages. Each document is chunked and embedded automatically. Keep facts here rather than in the instructions, so updating an answer is a document edit, not a rewrite.
Design the conversation
Start from a template or a blank canvas. Add agent steps with their own instructions, objectives and exits: for example, answer the question, then collect an email, then hand off. Add scenarios for the things people ask out of order, like pricing or speaking to a human.
Test it in a sandbox
Open a test session and chat with your free AI chatbot exactly as a visitor would. Nothing is sent anywhere. Open the debugger on any reply to see the step, the knowledge it found and the prompt, and fix what's off.
Create the widget and embed it
Set colours, greeting, launcher position and the optional pre-chat form, list the sites allowed to load it, then copy the single async script tag into your site's HTML. It works on any site where you can add a script: WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace or hand-written HTML.
Go live with approvals
On the Free plan your chatbot works in suggest or draft mode: it writes each reply and you approve it from the Approvals page before it sends. It's the safest way to launch, and every approval teaches you where the flow needs tuning.
Everything inside the free AI chatbot
A closer look at the pieces that make your chatbot accurate, safe and easy to improve.
A free AI chat widget installed with one line
Your free AI chatbot lives in a branded chat bubble. Choose the colours, greeting and launcher position, and decide whether visitors fill in a short pre-chat form first. Name, email and phone (with country validation) become the contact record, so you know who you're talking to.
The embed is a single async script tag with your widget's public key, so it won't slow your page down. Conversations arrive in the same Inbox as every other channel, with the full transcript.
- One async script tag
- Custom colours, greeting and launcher
- Optional pre-chat form
- Transcripts in your Inbox
Trained on your business, not on guesses
Add a document and ReplySetter splits it into overlapping chunks, embeds them and stores them in the built-in vector store, with nothing to configure. When a visitor asks something that needs a fact, the chatbot searches your knowledge with a tool and answers from what it finds.
Change a price or a policy, re-index the document in one click, and the next answer reflects it. The debugger shows exactly which passages were retrieved for every reply, so you can see when a document is missing or unclear.
- Automatic chunking and embedding
- Built-in store, zero setup
- One-click re-index
- Retrieved passages visible per reply
Design the conversation on a canvas
Most free chatbot builders give you one big prompt. ReplySetter gives you a job flow: the chatbot's playbook, laid out left to right. Each agent step has its own instructions, an objective it's working toward and exits that decide where to go next. AI conditions and switches route visitors without sending extra messages.
Scenarios jump in whenever a visitor goes off-script, such as asking for a human, raising a complaint or asking about pricing in the middle of something else. Every conversation remembers exactly where it is in the flow, so your free AI chatbot never loses the thread.
- Steps with objectives and exits
- AI conditions and switches
- Scenarios for off-script moments
- Conversation state is remembered
The only free AI chatbot that shows its working
When a chatbot gives a bad answer, most tools leave you guessing. ReplySetter records everything: which step and character answered, how scenarios scored, the model's reasoning, every knowledge search and tool call, and the raw prompts sent to the model, along with tokens and cost.
Rate a reply in a test session and ask the AI to diagnose it. It proposes a concrete change to the instructions or flow; apply it and re-run to compare the old and new answers side by side. You can also replay a real conversation as a test with one click.
- Reasoning, tool calls and prompts per reply
- Tokens and cost per run
- AI diagnose-and-fix loop
- Old vs new reply, side by side
You approve what it sends
On the Free plan your chatbot runs in suggest or draft mode. In suggest mode, every action it wants to take waits for you. In draft mode, lookups and notes run on their own, but anything that sends a message waits on the Approvals page for a click. You can edit a draft before approving it.
That makes the free plan a safe place to launch: nothing reaches a visitor that you haven't seen. When the drafts are consistently right, the Basic plan adds auto mode, where the chatbot replies instantly, around the clock.
- Suggest and draft autonomy on Free
- One Approvals page for every reply
- Edit before you approve
- Auto mode on Basic when you're ready
Built to keep bots out and costs down
A public chat box is an open door, and some visitors are scripts trying to run up your AI bill. ReplySetter's widget only loads on the sites you allow, enforced with CSP frame-ancestors and origin checks. Starting a chat requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle and passing a honeypot, with Cloudflare Turnstile as an optional extra.
Rate limits apply per conversation, per IP and per widget, messages have length caps and spam checks, and you can block an abusive visitor from the sessions list. A daily cap on AI spend per widget puts a hard ceiling on what a bad day can cost.
- Allowed sites only
- Proof-of-work, honeypot, optional Turnstile
- Per-conversation, IP and widget rate limits
- Daily AI spend cap per widget
Choose any model, keep a backup ready
Pick from live catalogs of Anthropic, OpenAI and more than 350 OpenRouter models, with the context size, price per million tokens and tool support shown up front. A small, fast model is plenty for most FAQ-style chat; a stronger one is worth it for complex products.
Stack up to five backup models from any provider. If the main model errors, hits a rate limit or times out, the next one answers immediately, so an outage at one AI company doesn't take your website chat offline.
- Anthropic, OpenAI and 350+ OpenRouter models
- Price and context size shown
- Up to five cross-provider backups
- Automatic failover on errors and timeouts
Free AI chatbot vs rule-based chatbot vs live chat
Three ways to answer website visitors, and where each one fits.
| Compared on | AI chatbot | Rule-based bot | Live chat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understands free-form questions | Yes, in plain language | Only expected keywords and buttons | Yes (a person reads it) |
| Available 24/7 | Yes | Yes | Only while staffed |
| Setup effort | Upload docs, describe the job | Map every branch by hand | Hire and train people |
| Answers from your documents | Yes, with a knowledge base | Only what you scripted | If the agent knows them |
| Handles follow-ups and context | Yes | Rarely | Yes |
| Cost per conversation | AI tokens, usually cents | Near zero | Staff time |
| Risk of a wrong answer | Low with good docs and testing | Low, but often no answer at all | Low |
Which one should you choose?
Rule-based chatbots are predictable, but they only answer what you anticipated, and visitors quickly learn to hunt for the "talk to a human" button. Live chat with real people gives the best answers, but only while someone is watching the widget, and it's the most expensive option per conversation.
A free AI chatbot sits between the two. It understands real questions like a person does, answers from your documents around the clock, and costs a few cents of AI usage per conversation on a small model. The trade-off is that you need to brief and test it well, which is exactly what ReplySetter's flows, knowledge base and debugger are built for. On the Free plan you also review every reply before it sends, so you get AI speed at drafting with a human check on every answer.
What you can do with a free AI chatbot
One free agent covers a lot of ground. These are the jobs people most often give it.
Free AI chatbot for customer support
Answer the questions your team hears every day (shipping times, returns, account access, opening hours) straight from your help docs, and route anything sensitive to a person.
Lead capture on your website
Greet visitors, answer the question that brought them in, and collect a name and email with the pre-chat form or mid-conversation, so a curious visitor becomes a lead instead of a bounce.
After-hours questions
Visitors ask at midnight and on weekends. Your free AI chatbot drafts an answer from your knowledge base so it's ready for you to approve first thing, and the visitor's details aren't lost.
Product and e-commerce questions
Sizing, materials, compatibility, delivery areas: upload your catalogue notes and policies and let the chatbot handle the questions that otherwise stall a purchase.
Service businesses
Clinics, salons, trades, law and accounting firms: explain services and prices, qualify the request and collect contact details. Booking straight into a calendar is on the Basic plan.
SaaS onboarding and docs
Point the chatbot at your documentation and changelog so new users get answers in the product's own terms, and see in the debugger which docs they keep needing.
Agencies prototyping for clients
Build and test a client's chatbot on the free plan, show them the reasoning behind every answer, then move to Agency for a widget per client synced to their own CRM.
An AI assistant for your inbox
Your free agent can work a Gmail or Outlook inbox instead of a website: it reads incoming email and drafts replies from your knowledge for you to approve.
Free AI chatbot examples: three playbooks to copy
Each one maps straight onto a job flow: one agent step per line, with scenarios for the moments people go off-script.
Free AI chatbot playbook for a local service business
For clinics, salons, trades and studios, whose visitors want to know what you offer, what it costs, and when they can come in. The goal is a qualified enquiry with contact details, ready for your team.
- Greet and answer: answer the visitor's first question from your services and pricing documents.
- Qualify: ask what they need, where they are and how soon, one question at a time.
- Capture: collect a name, email and phone number if the pre-chat form didn't already.
- Hand off: confirm someone will be in touch and summarise the request for your team.
- Scenarios: urgent requests, complaints and "can I speak to someone" jump straight to a hand-off.
Free AI chatbot playbook for customer support
For shops and SaaS products that answer the same questions every day. The goal is to resolve the common questions from your help content and route everything else to a person with the details already gathered.
- Understand: identify whether it's about an order, an account, billing or the product.
- Answer: search the knowledge base and reply in two or three short sentences, linking the relevant policy.
- Check: ask whether that solved it, and offer one follow-up before handing off.
- Escalate: for refunds, account changes or anything not covered, collect an email and an order or account reference.
- Scenarios: angry or upset messages skip straight to a calm hand-off.
Free AI chatbot playbook for B2B lead qualification
For agencies, consultancies and software companies whose website visitors are potential clients. The goal is to answer product questions well and qualify fit before your sales team spends time on a call.
- Answer: handle the question that brought them in, from your product and case-study documents.
- Discover: ask about their company, team size and what they're trying to solve.
- Qualify: an AI condition checks the answers against your ideal-customer criteria.
- Route: good-fit leads are asked for an email and a preferred time for a call; others get helpful resources.
- Scenarios: pricing questions at any point get your published pricing, then return to where the conversation was.
8 tips for a free AI chatbot your visitors trust
The model matters less than how you brief it. These habits make the biggest difference to answer quality.
1 Give your chatbot one clear job
"Answer questions about our plans and collect an email from interested visitors" beats "be helpful". A narrow job makes better answers and makes it obvious when a reply is off. Split bigger jobs into steps in the flow, each with its own objective.
2 Put facts in the knowledge base, behaviour in the instructions
Instructions should say how to behave: tone, what to ask, when to hand off. Facts (prices, hours, policies) belong in documents. That way a price change is a document edit and the chatbot can't contradict your own pages.
3 Write the documents for a reader
Retrieval works best on clear, self-contained passages. A FAQ with one question and answer per section beats a PDF of slides. If the debugger shows the wrong passage being retrieved, the fix is usually rewriting that document, not the prompt.
4 Tell it what to do when it doesn't know
Say explicitly: if the answer isn't in the knowledge base, say so and offer to have someone follow up. A chatbot that admits a gap keeps trust; one that improvises a refund policy loses it.
5 Plan the off-script moments
People ask for a human, complain, or ask about pricing mid-flow. Add a scenario for each, so the chatbot handles it the same way every time, wherever the conversation is.
6 Match the voice to your brand
Use the character's voice styles to set tone: friendly and brief for a consumer brand, precise for a B2B product. Keep chat replies short; long walls of text read badly in a chat bubble.
7 Test with real questions
Pull ten real questions from your inbox, support tickets or sales calls and run them in a test session before launch. Include the awkward ones. Rate each reply and use diagnose-and-fix on the misses.
8 Review drafts, then tighten
During the first weeks, the Approvals page is your feedback loop. Every draft you edit points at an instruction or document to improve. When you're rarely editing, the chatbot is ready for more autonomy.
Keeping your free AI chatbot cheap, safe and spam-free
The plan is free; the AI runs on your own key. Here’s how to keep that usage small and predictable.
You pay your AI provider directly, at cost
The Free plan costs nothing, and ReplySetter adds no markup on AI usage. Your chatbot uses your own Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter key, so tokens are billed by your provider at their published price. Every run records its tokens and cost, so you always know what a conversation costs.
Pick the right size of model
Most website questions don't need the largest model. A small, fast model with a good knowledge base handles FAQ-style chat well and costs a fraction of a frontier model. Upgrade the model only for the steps that need deeper reasoning.
Cap the downside
Set a daily AI spend cap on the widget, and a usage limit in your AI provider's dashboard as a second line of defence. Rate limits per conversation, IP and widget stop any single visitor or script from running up the bill.
Keep bots out of the conversation
Proof-of-work and a honeypot stop most automated abuse before a single token is spent, and Cloudflare Turnstile can be added on top. Because the widget only loads on sites you allow, nobody can embed your chatbot on theirs.
How to choose a free AI chatbot: 8 questions to ask
Whichever tool you pick, ask these before you invest an afternoon in building. Here’s how ReplySetter answers them.
| Question | Why it matters | ReplySetter Free |
|---|---|---|
| Is it free forever, or a trial? | Trials end just as the chatbot gets good. | Free forever, no card |
| Who pays for AI usage, and is it marked up? | Markups make heavy chat expensive. | Your own key, no markup |
| Can it answer from my documents? | Without RAG it guesses at your facts. | Built-in knowledge base |
| Can I see why it gave an answer? | You can't fix what you can't see. | Full reasoning trace per reply |
| Can I test it without real visitors? | Launch day shouldn't be the first test. | Sandbox test sessions |
| Can I choose the model? | Cost and quality vary a lot by model. | 350+ models, 5 backups |
| What stops bots running up the bill? | Public chat boxes attract scripts. | Proof-of-work, rate limits, daily cap |
| Do I approve replies or does it send alone? | Control matters most at launch. | You approve; auto on Basic |
Free AI chatbot vs Basic: when to upgrade
Stay on Free as long as it does the job. Most people upgrade when they want the chatbot to reply instantly on its own, book appointments, or work more channels.
| Capability | Free | Basic |
|---|---|---|
| Agents | 1 | 5 |
| Connected inboxes | 1 | 5 |
| Website chat widget | Yes | Yes |
| Autonomy | Suggest, draft (you approve) | Suggest, draft and auto |
| Knowledge bases | Built-in | Built-in, Supabase, Pinecone, Vectorize |
| Booking and CRM actions | No | Yes |
| GoHighLevel SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram | No | Yes |
| Follow-up sequences | No | Yes |
| A/B testing and analytics | No | Yes |
| Custom API tools | No | Yes |
| Price | $0, forever | $97 per month |
Agency ($297/month) adds unlimited agents, 25 inboxes and a chat widget per client. See full pricing
Free AI chatbot: frequently asked questions
Is ReplySetter's free AI chatbot really free?
Yes. The Free plan has no time limit and needs no card. It includes one agent and one connected inbox, such as your website chat widget. You bring your own AI provider key, so you pay that provider directly for usage, with no markup from ReplySetter.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. You build the chatbot in the app: a visual flow canvas, a form for the persona and a document upload for the knowledge base. Installing it on your website means pasting one script tag, which every major website builder supports.
Which websites can I add the free AI chatbot to?
Any site where you can add a script tag to the HTML, including WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and custom-built sites. You list the sites allowed to load your widget, and it won't load anywhere else.
How do I train the chatbot on my business?
Upload documents to the built-in knowledge base: FAQs, pricing, policies, product guides. They're chunked and embedded automatically, and the chatbot searches them whenever a question needs a fact. To change an answer, update the document and re-index it.
Does the free chatbot reply to visitors automatically?
On the Free plan the chatbot runs in suggest or draft mode: it writes each reply and you approve it on the Approvals page before it's sent. Fully automatic, instant replies (auto mode) are on the Basic plan, and you can switch whenever you're confident in the drafts.
Which AI models does it use?
Whichever you choose: Anthropic and OpenAI models with your own key, or more than 350 models through OpenRouter. You can add up to five backup models from any provider that take over automatically if the main one fails.
How much will the AI usage cost me?
It depends on the model you pick and how much your chatbot talks. Usage is billed by your AI provider at their published rates. ReplySetter records the tokens and cost of every run, and you can set a daily spend cap on the widget so costs can't run away.
How do you stop bots and spam?
The widget only loads on allowed sites, starting a chat requires a proof-of-work puzzle and passing a honeypot, and Cloudflare Turnstile can be added. Rate limits apply per conversation, per IP and per widget, and you can block abusive visitors by IP.
Can it collect leads?
Yes. Turn on the optional pre-chat form to ask for a name, email and phone (with country validation) before the chat starts, or have the chatbot ask during the conversation. Visitors' details become the contact record for the conversation.
Can it hand off to a human?
Yes. Add a scenario for requests to speak to a person, and the flow can stop the AI and leave the conversation for your team. On the Free plan you're already reviewing every reply, so you're always one click from taking over.
Can I see why the chatbot gave a particular answer?
Yes, for every single reply. The debugger shows which flow step and character answered, the model's reasoning, the knowledge passages it retrieved, each tool call and the exact prompt sent to the model, along with tokens and cost.
Can I use the free plan for email instead of a website?
Yes. Your one connected inbox can be a Gmail or Outlook mailbox instead of a website chat widget. The same agent then reads incoming email and drafts replies from your knowledge base for you to approve.
What happens when I outgrow the free plan?
Upgrade at any time and everything stays: your flows, characters, knowledge and conversation history. Basic adds auto replies, booking and CRM actions, more channels, follow-ups and analytics; Agency adds unlimited agents and a widget per client.
What's the difference between a free AI chatbot and ChatGPT on my website?
A general assistant like ChatGPT knows nothing about your business and can't be limited to your topics. A business chatbot answers from your own documents, follows the conversation steps you design, collects lead details, hands off when it should, and only runs on your sites.
Can the free AI chatbot speak other languages?
The models it runs on understand and write many languages, so the chatbot can reply in the visitor's language. Write your instructions to say which languages to use, and test a few conversations in each before going live.
Is my data used to train AI models?
Your documents are stored in your ReplySetter knowledge base and sent to the AI provider you choose only as context for a reply. How that provider treats API data is set by their terms, so check the policy of the provider whose key you connect.
More about the features behind it
Build your free AI chatbot today
Upload what it should know, design the conversation, test it in a sandbox and put it on your site with one line of code. Free forever, no card needed.