Free until you want your own name on it

Tawk.to gives away a full small business support stack. Its own site describes free live chat with an omnichannel inbox covering email, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and Telegram, a contact CRM with pipeline management, a knowledge base, ticketing, scheduling, and native apps for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows. Installation is a single script snippet.

The money comes from four published add ons rather than from tiers. Removing the small Powered by tawk.to badge is $29 a month, and the site says plainly that if you leave the badge in place the product is free for life. Its AI Assist chatbot starts at $29 a month with a forever free plan for sites with limited chat volume.

The other two add ons are labour rather than software. Trained human chat agents are offered at $1 an hour, and virtual assistants covering design, admin, human resources, bookkeeping and data entry start at $7 an hour. That is an unusual and genuinely useful thing to be able to buy at that price.

The company also publishes very large usage figures for the product. Those are claims about their scale, not about your site, but they do tell you the thing is not going anywhere and is not short of operational experience. The add on prices above are what tawk.to published on the checked date. They move, so check their pricing page before planning around them.

Written to be used rather than to be waved at. If any of these describe you, this is the wrong product and the rest of the page will not change that.

• Budget is the constraint. Nothing here beats free. If the choice is between tawk.to with a badge and nothing at all, install tawk.to today and come back when the badge starts to matter.
• You need people, not answers. At $1 an hour for trained human agents, tawk.to sells staffing that no software comparison can match. If your problem is that nobody is watching the chat, that is the fix.
• You want live chat, ticketing, a knowledge base and a CRM without paying for any of them. All four are in the free product. None of the four exist here at any price.
• You want mobile and desktop apps so somebody can answer from a phone. There is no mobile app of any kind here, and no app software development kit either.
• You are happy with the badge. It is small, it is honest, and keeping it is what makes the rest free forever. Paying $29 a month to remove a badge from an otherwise free product is a decision you should make deliberately, not by default.

• Grounding you can audit. Every answer carries numbered citations back to the exact material, and below the match threshold you set it refuses without reaching the model, returning wording you wrote.
• Nothing on the widget says who built it, from $29 a month upwards, and there is no separate white label charge at any tier.
• On tawk.to's own published figures, removing the badge and adding their AI chatbot start at $29 a month each. At a comparable spend, Starter here is $29 for three assistants across three sites each, 1,000 replies, 500 pages indexed and 50 files, with the branding already gone.
• Full control of appearance including custom CSS, with the launcher in a closed shadow root and the panel in its own frame, so it cannot inherit or break your site styles.
• Retrieved material is treated as untrusted data rather than as instructions, so a page that has been tampered with cannot redirect the assistant's behaviour.

Read off their own site on that date, quoted narrowly. Prices and packaging in this category change often, so treat this as a snapshot and check both before you decide.

Listing this is more useful than filling it in. Every line here is something that was not clearly published, or was behind a sign-up.

• The AI Assist price is published as a starting figure, so what a busier site actually pays for it was not visible without an account.
• The limits on the forever free AI Assist plan, described only as being for sites with limited chat volume, are not quantified on the pricing page.

Should I just use tawk.to?

If cost is the deciding factor, yes, and we would rather say so than waste your afternoon. Come back if you need the badge gone, citations on every answer, or a hard refusal when your material does not cover a question.

What does this do that the free product does not?

It answers only from material you indexed, cites the source by number for every claim, and refuses below a threshold you set without reaching the model at all. Those are the three things worth paying for here.

Can I hire people to answer chats through this?

No. There is no staffing offer, no live human chat in the widget, and no shared inbox. When a visitor asks for a person it takes a name, an email and a message and emails it to you.

Is there a free tier here at all?

Yes: one assistant, one site, 50 replies a month, 50 pages indexed, five files, and our name on the panel. It is a way to test the thing, not a way to run a business on it.