An AI chatbot builder that lets you train ChatGPT on your data and add it to your website.
Chatbase is a platform for building custom AI agents trained on your own content, founded in 2023 by Yasser Elsaid, a solo founder who bootstrapped it to over $10 million in annual revenue with zero outside investment. It started as a simple "chat with your PDF" tool and has grown into a full agent-building platform used by over 10,000 businesses.
What makes Chatbase's story notable for this audience is that it's still run lean and bootstrapped, not backed by a large venture-funded team pushing enterprise-first pricing. That said, the product itself has moved further upmarket over the past year, adding voice, telephony, and outbound campaign features aimed at larger support teams, not just a solo founder's website widget.
The most common use case is training an AI agent on your website, docs, or help center content, then embedding it as a chat widget so visitors get accurate, specific answers instead of a generic FAQ page. You upload URLs, files, or paste text directly, and the agent answers using only that content.
A solo course creator connects their curriculum FAQ and lets the agent field enrollment questions around the clock. A solo SaaS founder gives the agent access to specific actions, like looking up an order or checking a subscription status, so it resolves real requests instead of just answering questions.
On higher tiers, the same agent can be deployed across email, Slack, WhatsApp, and even phone calls, using the same trained knowledge base across every channel instead of rebuilding it per platform.
Upload URLs, PDFs, or paste text directly, and the agent answers strictly from that source material. No coding required to get a working agent live.
Every plan is billed by message credits, not seats. Free includes 50 credits/month; higher tiers scale up to 15,000/month on Pro, with auto-recharge available if you run out mid-month.
Publish the same trained agent to your website, WhatsApp, Slack, Messenger, Instagram, and (on Standard and up) email and voice, from one build.
Give the agent specific tools to actually resolve requests, like looking up an order, checking a subscription, or processing a return, rather than just answering informational questions. Limited to 0 actions on Free, scaling up on paid tiers.
Access to advanced models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Meta, and others depending on your plan, rather than being locked to one provider.
Solo founders who want a genuinely custom AI agent trained on their specific product, docs, or policies, rather than a generic chatbot template. Course creators and SaaS founders fielding repetitive questions who want the agent to also take real actions, not just answer questions.
A solo founder with very low website traffic and few repetitive questions. The message-credit pricing model means you're paying per conversation, which only pays for itself at real volume.
No-code agent builder, custom instructions and guardrails, personalization (paid plans), auto retrain agents (Standard and up), source suggestions (Pro), tickets as a source (Pro)
Website widget, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Slack, email (Standard and up), voice and telephony (Standard and up)
API access, Stripe, Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, HubSpot, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Helpscout, Gorgias, Sunshine, Zapier, Twilio, Shopify, Calendly, WordPress
Basic analytics (Hobby and up), advanced analytics (Pro and up)
1 to 5 workspace seats depending on plan, custom roles and permissions (Enterprise)
GDPR compliance, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA-eligible (Enterprise), zero data retention option (Enterprise), SSO (Enterprise), audit logs (Enterprise)
Free Plan: 50 message credits/month, 1 agent, 1 workspace member, limited models, 1MB training content. Your agent gets deleted after 14 days of inactivity, so this isn't a plan you can set up and forget about.
Hobby — roughly $40/month (estimated monthly billing) / $32/month (billed annually, $384/year): 700 message credits/month, 2 members, access to advanced models, integrations, basic analytics, attachments.
Standard — roughly $150/month (estimated monthly billing) / $120/month (billed annually, $1,440/year), marked "Popular": 4,000 message credits/month, 3 members, Helpdesk, voice and telephony, outbound campaigns, API access, personalization, auto retrain agents, 10 AI actions per agent, advanced integrations like Stripe and Zendesk.
Pro — roughly $500/month (estimated monthly billing) / $400/month (billed annually, $4,800/year): 15,000 message credits/month, 5 members, advanced analytics, source suggestions, tickets as a source, 20 AI actions per agent.
Enterprise: Custom pricing. Adds SSO, white-labeling, audit logs, HIPAA eligibility, zero data retention, and a dedicated success manager.
Add-Ons: Auto-recharge credits at $40 per 1,000 message credits, an extra agent at $300/year, and removing "Powered by Chatbase" branding at $1,188/year.
Annual vs. Monthly: Annual billing saves 20% across every paid tier.
If You Cancel: No explicit data export policy was found in research for this page. Confirm directly with Chatbase before relying on it as a permanent record of your agent's training content or conversation history.
⚠️ Worth knowing: message credits are the real cost driver, not the plan price. A busy solo founder's agent can burn through Hobby's 700 monthly credits fast, and removing the "Powered by Chatbase" watermark costs nearly $100/month on its own, on top of whatever plan you're already paying for.
Prices last verified August 2026. Some monthly (non-annual) figures are estimated from the stated 20% annual discount; confirm exact monthly rates on Chatbase's pricing page before subscribing.
A static FAQ page that visitors have to search through themselves, since the agent answers in plain language from the same underlying content.
A rule-based, scripted chatbot with canned menu options, since Chatbase's agent reasons over your content rather than following a fixed decision tree.
Manually answering the same repetitive questions by email, one at a time, for anything the agent can now handle on its own.
Your existing help center or knowledge base content, since the agent's accuracy depends entirely on what you've already written. Chatbase doesn't generate that content for you.
A full CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, which Chatbase integrates with on Standard and up rather than replacing.
A human support inbox for anything genuinely complex.
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