The three lanes, honestly priced
1. Global SaaS subscriptions (₹2,000–₹35,000+/month)
The tools that dominate search results bill in dollars: Chatbase from $32/month (≈₹2,700) for 500 message credits, Tidio from $24.17/month with three separate meters, SiteGPT from $39/month with page caps, Crisp from $45/month per workspace, Intercom Fin at $0.99 per "resolution" (a conversation counts as resolved even when the customer just leaves). Dollar billing plus usage overruns make these hard to budget in rupees — and most of their free tiers cap at 50 messages.
2. Custom development (₹1–60 lakh)
Indian dev shops quote ₹1–8 lakh for basic NLP bots and ₹8–20 lakh+ for LLM-powered support automation, at ₹2,000–₹5,500/hour rates — before hosting, model costs and the retraining nobody budgets for. Custom makes sense for deeply bespoke workflows, not for "answer questions from my website", which is a solved product problem.
3. Credit-priced SaaS (Flocci Chat's lane)
Flocci Chat starts free: 500 credits on signup, every feature enabled, no card. The meter is one line: 1 credit = 1 answered visitor message. Crawling, uploads, tickets, analytics and unanswered turns are free. When you need more, credit packs are rupee-denominated, and the platform plans — Pro at ₹499/month, Pro+ at ₹2,999/month at account.flocci.in — cover not just Chat but every app in the Flocci suite from one wallet.
A realistic monthly budget for an Indian SMB
A site doing 10,000 visits/month typically sees 300–800 chatbot messages. On Flocci Chat that's ₹0 for the first ~500 answers, then pack-priced credits — versus a $120/month (≈₹10,000) Chatbase Standard tier or staffing a live-chat seat (₹15,000–₹30,000/month per agent, or Tawk.to's hired agents at $1/hour ≈ ₹62,000/month for 24×7). The cheapest support seat you can hire in 2026 is a grounded AI answering from your own website.
Hidden costs to check on any vendor
- Model multipliers: some tools burn 5–10 credits per answer on better models (SiteGPT's allowance varies 10×; Chatbase's premium models consume multiple credits). Flocci Chat's credit never multiplies.
- Branding removal: $39/month (SiteGPT) to $1,188/year (Chatbase) elsewhere.
- Seats: suite products charge per agent seat; Flocci Chat has none.
- Re-sync fees/effort: content freshness is automatic here (passive re-learning), a scheduled job elsewhere.