Search for a free chatbot for your website and you get two kinds of result: genuine free plans, and 14-day trials wearing the word "free" as a hat. Both are worth knowing about, but only one of them is still there next month.

Here is what a free AI chatbot realistically gives a small webshop, where the limits normally sit, and how to get one live.

What a free plan usually includes

Free tiers differ, but the shape is fairly consistent across the market:

  • A capped number of conversations per month. Often somewhere between fifty and a few hundred, which covers a shop with modest traffic.
  • A chat widget you can embed on your website with a single line of code.
  • A knowledge base you fill with your own shipping, returns and product information.
  • Basic customization — colours and the widget name, so it matches your brand rather than the vendor's.
  • One website and usually one seat.

That is genuinely enough to automate the questions that arrive every day. Veyra's free plan works this way: one line of script, no credit card required, and the AI chatbot answers from the content you give it.

Where the limits usually bite

The paid features tend to be the ones you need only once you are busy: extra seats for a bigger team, several websites under one account, deeper integration with your shop platform, WhatsApp or SMS channels, and detailed reporting.

Two things are worth checking before you commit to any free chatbot. First, what happens when you hit the cap — does the bot stop answering, or does it quietly keep going and invoice you? Second, whether a human can take over a conversation on the free plan. A chatbot with no route to a person is a dead end, and that matters more than any feature list. We cover why in chatbot to human handover.

Free plan or free trial?

The distinction matters more than the marketing suggests. A free plan stays free within its limits. A 14-day or 30-day free trial gives you everything and then asks for a card. Both are legitimate, but they answer different questions.

Take the free trial when you are choosing between two serious tools and want to test the paid features properly under real traffic. Take the free plan when you simply want an assistant answering questions on your site and would rather not put a renewal date in your diary. For most early-stage shops the second fits better — you can always upgrade once the volume justifies it.

How to add a free chatbot to your website

The workflow is the same almost everywhere, and takes an afternoon at most:

  • Create an account and add your domain.
  • Paste in your content — shipping page, returns policy, FAQ, and the answers you type most often in email.
  • Customize the widget so it looks like part of your shop.
  • Embed the script before the closing head tag. Shopify, WordPress, Webflow and Wix all have a place for this; the step-by-step is in adding an AI chatbot to your website.
  • Read the transcripts for a week and fix every answer the bot got wrong.

That last step is the one people skip and the one that decides whether the chatbot is useful. Guidance on doing it well is in training a chatbot on your own data.

Frequently asked questions

Is a free AI chatbot good enough for a real shop?

For a small webshop, yes — with one condition. Free AI chatbots answer routine questions about delivery, returns and products perfectly well. What they must also do is admit when they do not know and pass the conversation to you. Judge any free website chatbot on that behaviour, not on how confident it sounds. The wider picture is in our guide to the customer service chatbot.

Do I need a developer?

No. Modern chatbot builders are pasteable. If you can add a tracking script to your site, you can add a chatbot.

Will it slow my website down?

A well-built widget loads asynchronously, after your page content, so it should not affect your page speed scores. Check that the script tag carries the async attribute.

What if I outgrow the free plan?

Then you have proof it works before you pay anything — which is the point of starting free. Look for a paid tier that adds seats and volume without changing how the product behaves.

Worth trying

A free chatbot is a low-risk experiment. Load your returns policy, ask it your three most tiresome customer support questions, and watch what it does when it is out of its depth. You can see the full scope on our features page, or start with the free plan and no credit card required.