Free live chat software, free forever for 1 agent

The honest answer depends on three things, and none of them is the size of your company. It depends on how many conversations arrive in a day, how many hours you want to be reachable, and whether one person can own the channel without it wrecking their other work.

A site with a handful of chats a day, one person answering, and a clear set of published answers is comfortably served by free live chat. It is a real product tier, not a countdown to a sales call.

The signals that you have outgrown it are equally concrete. Visitors waiting because the only agent is already in two conversations. Questions arriving outside the hours you can cover. Or a growing pile of repeated questions that somebody keeps answering by hand.

None of those are reasons to upgrade on day one. They are reasons to keep an eye on the queue, which is the number that should drive the decision rather than optimism about growth.

Most of the value in the first week comes from four small pieces of configuration, all available before you spend anything. They take under an hour together and they are what separates a chat widget that helps from one that sits there.

Start with the greeting. It sets expectations before the visitor types, and a greeting that states your hours honestly prevents most of the disappointment that chat can cause.

Then write canned responses for the questions you already know arrive. Five is enough to begin. They cut reply time without anyone typing faster, and they keep your answers consistent between people.

Finally, decide what happens when nobody is available, and get into the habit of reading transcripts. The offline capture path means a visitor at midnight leaves a message rather than a bad impression.

AI coverage earns its place when you can name the questions you want it to absorb. Before that point it is a configuration exercise; after it, it is a straightforward trade of setup time against repeated typing.

The assistant answers from content you supply - your pages, your FAQs, text you write - which is why the month of transcript reading matters first. You end up training it on questions people really ask instead of the ones you imagined.

It also handles two things a small team cannot: the hours nobody is online, and visitors who arrive in a language nobody on shift speaks. In both cases the alternative is not a slower human answer, it is no answer at all.

Keep the handoff generous. Anything about an account, a payment or a complaint should reach a person with the conversation history attached, and reviewing what the assistant said should become as routine as reviewing what your agents said.