Tidio

Live chat for a small business website, with an AI agent called Lyro that answers customer questions on its own without a person watching the widget.

Support & inbox Agents

Checked 25 Sep 2026

Open tidio.com

What you'd use it for

Adding a chat widget to a small business site that can close out routine customer questions on its own, without hiring someone to watch it.

Answer visitor questions unattended using a knowledge base built from your site content, PDFs, and manual entries
Look up a customer's order status and shipping details and relay them mid-conversation
Trigger actions in connected systems during a chat, such as creating a support ticket or updating a customer record, not just replying
Hand off a conversation it can't resolve to a human, with a log of the questions it got wrong so you can fix the knowledge base
Run from a browser widget or a mobile app, so a person can jump into a live chat from their phone

The verdict

Tidio is a straightforward pick for a small business that wants a chat widget live on its site the same day, with Lyro genuinely capable of closing out routine questions unattended rather than just drafting replies for review. The catch is the billing split -- the base plan buys a conversation allowance and live-chat tooling, but Lyro itself is a separate add-on billed per resolved AI conversation, so the number that decides your real monthly cost is how many questions the AI actually closes, not which plan card you picked. That suits a business with predictable, low-volume enquiries; anyone expecting AI handling to be bundled into the advertised plan price will be surprised the first time volume climbs.

What it costs

Tier	Price	For	Includes
Free	$0	Solo entrepreneurs starting out.	Up to 50 conversations handled.
Starter	$29/month	Handling all customer conversations in one tool.	100 conversations, smarter reply features.
Growth	From $59/month	Faster replies with automation and team collaboration.	250 conversations, rising with volume tiers up to 1,500+ at higher prices.
Plus	$300/month	Premium features and advanced team management.	Priority support, AI and human conversations billed separately at lower per-unit rates at scale.
Premium	Custom pricing	Guaranteed ongoing AI deployment at volume.	Expert insights, custom solutions, dedicated team partnership.

Read from Tidio's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.

What you need to start

A website you can embed the widget on, or a supported platform such as Shopify or WordPress
Support content already written down somewhere to feed Lyro's knowledge base before it answers accurately
A separate Lyro AI budget on top of the base plan once the one-time 50 free AI conversations run out, since Lyro bills per resolved conversation rather than being bundled into any plan's price

Under ten minutes to a live widget with no credit card needed for the free plan or the 7-day trial; closer to an afternoon to load Lyro's knowledge base so it answers real questions correctly.

Your first run The widget itself is live within minutes of installing the script or platform plugin. A working AI agent takes longer -- Lyro needs your help pages, PDFs, or FAQs loaded into its knowledge base first, and that groundwork is closer to an afternoon's task than a first-five-minutes one.

Where it breaks

Browser widget plus a mobile app for responding on the go. Billing counts "billable conversations" — a thread where a human agent replies, or Lyro AI Agent responds — not every message; ignored or spam messages don't count against the limit.

First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.

When not to use it

Not for a business that assumes Lyro's cost is baked into the advertised plan price -- it bills separately per resolved AI conversation, so growth in support volume shows up as a second, less predictable line item on top of the base plan. Also not for a team past ten agent seats, since every self-serve plan caps there and the next step up is a large jump to the top custom-priced tier.

Lyro, Tidio’s AI agent, is built to close the loop entirely: it reads a visitor’s question, checks against a knowledge base built from your site and support docs, and answers without routing to a human first. On the higher tiers that’s not a drafting assistant a person edits before sending — it’s the actual reply, sent while nobody is watching the chat widget.

The billing unit — a “billable conversation” — is specific and worth understanding: it only counts once a human or Lyro actually replies, so a spam message or something nobody responded to doesn’t eat into your monthly allowance. That’s a fairer model than counting every inbound message, but it also means the real number of conversations a plan supports depends on how much gets replied to versus ignored.

Pricing on Growth in particular scales with volume — the entry price covers 250 conversations, and it climbs through several published tiers as that number rises, so a business should size against actual monthly conversation volume rather than the headline $59 figure alone.

Against Intercom Fin, the comparison is scale and price: Intercom is built for larger support operations with deeper integrations, Tidio is priced and positioned specifically for very small businesses running their first AI-handled chat widget, and its adoption numbers reflect that smaller-business focus.

Alternatives

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Intercom Fin

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Crisp

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