Chatbase
Teach it about your business once. It answers customers for the rest of the day.
By Thiago Lourenço Martins
An agent that already read your entire website
Chatbase is a platform for building an AI agent trained on your business's own information — your website, a catalog PDF, a list of frequently asked questions — that then answers customers on its own, in your site's chat or on WhatsApp. Think of it like hiring an intern who reads the entire company manual in one afternoon and, the next day, is already at the counter helping customers. Except this one never gets your hours wrong, never makes up an excuse, and never asks for a day off.
The same five questions, hitting your WhatsApp all day long
Do you deliver to my neighborhood? Do you have it in size S? What time do you close? The same question, from different people, all day long — and every answer pulls you away from something only you can do.
A trained agent answers that on its own, even at 11pm on a Sunday, while you're having dinner with your family. And when a question falls outside what it knows, the idea is for it to hand off to a human — not make up a confident, wrong answer.
Who uses an agent like this — and for what
"Do you deliver to X neighborhood?" gets answered without you touching your phone — including at 2am, outside business hours.
The agent filters out the repeated questions (hours, shipping, returns) and only escalates to a human when the case is genuinely complicated.
When someone shows interest, the agent asks for a name and phone number before ending the chat — and you get a daily email summarizing the leads.
From zero to your first published agent
- Create your account
On chatbase.co, click "Build your agent for free". The free plan doesn't ask for a credit card.
- Click "New AI Agent"
On the main dashboard, this button creates a new, blank agent.
- Choose your training source
Files (PDF, docs), Text snippets, Website (it crawls your site on its own), Q&A, or Notion. Then click "Create Agent".
training takes 2 to 5 minutes - Test it in the Playground
Chat with your agent and adjust the Model, the Temperature, and the Instructions — the text that sets the tone and boundaries of its replies.
- Go to "Deploy" and enable the Chat widget
In the sidebar, click Deploy and flip the switch on the "Chat widget" card.
- Copy the code and publish
Click Manage → Embed, copy the script, and paste it before the
</body>tag of your site — or publish straight to WhatsApp from the same tab.
A ready-made text for the Instructions field
You are the customer support assistant for [company name]. Always answer in a simple, friendly tone. Base your answers ONLY on the information you were given about business hours, products, prices and payment methods — never make up a deadline or a price. If you don't know the answer, say so and offer WhatsApp [your number] to talk to a human. Whenever a customer shows interest in buying, ask for their name and phone number before ending the conversation.
Paste this into the Instructions field (AI tab, inside the agent's settings) and replace what's in brackets with your business's real details.
What separates a good agent from one that makes things up
Do this
- Train it with real sources — your website, a catalog PDF, actual frequently asked questions. The more specific, the less it "wanders" into a generic answer.
- Write Instructions that say what it should not do (promising a deadline you never confirmed, for example) — that avoids headaches later.
- If your site's prices or stock change often, turn on Auto-retrain (paid plans) — without it, the agent keeps answering with stale information.
Avoid
- Leaving Temperature high hoping for "smarter" answers — Chatbase itself recommends 0.2 to keep the agent from inventing things outside its sources.
- Training it and forgetting about it: on the free plan, the agent is deleted automatically after 14 days of inactivity.
- Publishing without watching your credits: every reply consumes an amount that varies by AI model — on the free plan (50/month), a business with real traffic burns through it fast.
A Portuguese-language walkthrough, if you'd rather watch
* Independent suggestion, chosen for its quality. We have no relationship or sponsorship with this channel. It's in Portuguese, but the on-screen steps are easy to follow along visually.
Publish your first agent in the next 5 minutes
Create a free account, click New AI Agent, pick Website as your source, and paste your own site's URL. Wait for training to finish and, in the Playground, ask something a real customer would ask.
It worked if the answer is correct and cites where it pulled the information from — not a generic, manual-sounding reply.
Right for your business, or not
Worth it if you…
- Have a website or catalog with stable information (hours, products, policies) and are tired of answering the same thing on WhatsApp
- Want to publish on more than one channel — website, WhatsApp, Instagram — with the same "brain" behind them
- Can write (or ask someone to write) 3 or 4 clear sentences about how the agent should behave
Think twice if you…
- Want a creative, flexible salesperson-style bot — Chatbase is trained to stay locked to your sources, not to improvise
- Have a tight budget and expect high conversation volume: the jump from Hobby ($32) to Standard ($120) is steep, and cost per reply varies
- Will leave the agent idle for a season — on the free plan, it disappears on its own after 14 days without use
What's good and what still bothers me about Chatbase
I built a test agent just by pointing it at a website URL — within a few minutes it was already answering questions about what was on the page, citing where it got the information. That part genuinely works, and the free plan doesn't ask for a card to get you there. What bothers me is the money side: the per-message credit system isn't intuitive (each AI model consumes a different amount), and the price jump from Hobby to Standard is steep for someone who just wants a bit more than the basics. For a business that already knows what it wants to automate, it's worth it. For someone who just wants to "try it out of curiosity," that 14-day free-plan clock works against you.
Tested and checked against official sources on July 15, 2026.
In favor
- Sets up a genuinely publishable agent (website, WhatsApp, Instagram) in a few minutes, without writing a line of code
- The free plan doesn't ask for a card and already ships with 50 message credits a month to really test it before deciding
- Answers in Portuguese natively, and since January 2026 even the chat window's own buttons and notices can localize into 40+ languages — not just the reply
- The Standard plan ($120/month) already unlocks helpdesk, telephony and automatic source retraining — you can scale without switching tools
Against
- The credit system is opaque: each reply consumes a different amount depending on the AI model chosen, so predicting how many conversations fit your plan isn't trivial
- The free plan's agent gets deleted automatically after 14 days of inactivity — if you're testing on and off, you risk losing your work
- The price jump is steep: from Hobby ($32/month) to Standard ($120/month), there's no middle ground for a business that grew a bit but doesn't need telephony
- Removing the "Powered by Chatbase" badge costs an extra $1,188 a year — for a small business, that outweighs the subscription itself
From the free tier to a plan that can carry a real small business
Yes, it's free to start — but the ceiling is low. Free gives you 50 message credits a month and 1 agent; for a business with real traffic, the next tier (Hobby, from $32/month) tends to come up fast.
$0 — 50 message credits/month, 1 agent, limited models, 1 member. The agent is deleted after 14 days of inactivity.
$32/month ($384/year) — 500 credits/month, 2 members, advanced models, integrations, attachments and basic analytics.
$120/month ($1,440/year) — 4,000 credits/month, 3 members, helpdesk, voice, telephony, API and auto-retrain.
$400/month ($4,800/year) — 15,000 credits/month, 5 members, advanced analytics and source suggestions.
Custom pricing — higher limits, SSO, white-labeling, audit logs, and priority support with a dedicated CSM.
Worth knowing: yearly plans get a 20% discount, and there are standalone add-ons ($40 per 1,000 extra credits, $300/year per extra agent, $1,188/year to remove the Chatbase badge). Official prices in USD, as of July 2026 — subject to change.
What people ask before training their agent
Is Chatbase really free?
There's a permanent Free plan, no credit card needed: 50 message credits a month, 1 agent, and limited model access. That's enough to test it for real, but watch out — if the agent sits unused for 14 days, it gets deleted automatically.
Do I need a credit card to try it?
Not for the Free plan. You go straight to the dashboard through the "Build your agent for free" button on the site. Paid plans (Hobby, Standard, Pro) come with a 7-day trial before you're charged.
Does Chatbase work in Portuguese?
Yes. The agent detects the language someone writes in and answers in Portuguese automatically, as long as you train it with Portuguese sources. And since January 2026 you can even localize the chat window's menus, tooltips and buttons into 40+ languages, including Portuguese — it's not just the reply that gets localized, it's the whole widget.
Does it work on mobile?
The widget you publish runs smoothly in a mobile browser — Chatbase's own documentation lists this as one of the strengths of the embedded chat. To set up the agent itself (training, tuning replies, publishing), the dashboard is built for desktop use.
Can I use it on WhatsApp?
You can. In the Deploy tab, besides the website chat, Chatbase offers publishing to WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, email, phone (Standard and Pro plans) and other integrations — the same trained agent can serve several channels at once.
How much does each conversation actually cost?
This is the least transparent part: each plan gives you a fixed number of message credits per month (50 on Free, 500 on Hobby, 4,000 on Standard, 15,000 on Pro), but each agent reply consumes an amount of credits that varies depending on the AI model you pick — it's not always 1 credit per reply. To predict your spend properly, it's worth watching usage during the first few weeks.
When another tool makes more sense
Chatbase isn't the only way in to automating support. If what you actually want is to automate what happens after Chatbase captures a lead — pushing it to a spreadsheet, alerting you by email, updating a CRM — Zapier is a strong fit for wiring all that together, and we've covered it here too. If your case is simpler — you just want ready-made replies to paste manually into WhatsApp, without publishing a trained agent anywhere — ChatGPT gets that done without deploying anything to a site. Outside this site, ManyChat leans more toward button-driven flows inside Instagram and WhatsApp than answering from documents; and Tidio is a simpler website-chat option, with a free plan, for anyone who just wants a live chat with a basic bot behind it, without much source-and-model configuration.
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