Why everyone is offering you a chatbot
Chat is where the software industry’s money is. Help desks, CRMs and website builders all sell a chat bubble, and most of them now sell an AI agent to sit behind it. The pitch is the same everywhere: customers want instant answers, and you can’t afford to miss one.
For a company with a support team and thousands of conversations a month, that pitch is often right. For a plumber, a photographer or an online shop run by two people, it’s a tool built for somebody else’s problem.
The one question that decides it
Do you get the same questions many times a day?
A chatbot, AI or scripted, is a machine for answering repeat questions. It pays off when the same few questions (“Where’s my order?”, “Do you ship to Ireland?”, “What are your opening hours?”) arrive dozens of times a day, and the answers are already written down somewhere.
If most of your enquiries are different, a chatbot has nothing to work with. “Can you fit a new boiler in a Victorian terrace next Thursday?” isn’t a question a bot can answer. It will ask for the customer’s email and pass it to you, which is a contact form with extra steps.
What each one costs
The prices below are each product’s published entry price, in its own currency, as checked in August 2026.
- Intercom: from $29 per seat per month on annual billing, for live chat, an AI agent and a help desk. The AI agent charges per resolved conversation on top. See Hi Widget vs Intercom.
- tawk.to: live chat is free. Paid add-ons cover things like removing its branding. The catch is time, not money: live chat only works if someone is watching it. See Hi Widget vs tawk.to.
- A contact widget: Hi Widget has a free plan with the contact button. Paid plans are a flat monthly price, from £9/month, with no seats and no per-conversation charges.
The money is only half of it. A chatbot needs setting up: answers written, handovers configured, the bot checked when your prices or opening hours change. A contact form needs an inbox.
What your customers actually expect
People contacting a small business know they’re writing to a small business. They don’t expect a reply in four seconds. They expect a reply they can rely on, from someone who knows the answer.
A bot that answers instantly and wrongly, or answers every question with “Can I take your email?”, costs more goodwill than a thoughtful reply that afternoon. What customers really don’t forgive is silence: a message that vanished because the form’s notifications went to spam, or a chat window that said “We’ll be right with you” at 11pm on a Sunday.
That’s the real job, whichever tool you choose. Every message has to reach you, and you have to be able to answer it properly.
When a chatbot is the right call
Be honest about which business you are. A chatbot, or live chat with a bot in front, is worth it when:
- you get dozens of near-identical questions a day;
- the answers already live in a help centre or FAQ;
- someone is available to take over the conversations the bot can’t finish.
A busy online shop answering “Where’s my order?” all day fits. So does a software company with a help centre. For why most smaller sites are better off without one, see Do You Need an AI Chatbot on Your Website?
When a contact form is the right call
A contact form, or better, a contact button on every page, is the right call when:
- enquiries are few and each one is different;
- the answer depends on you: your diary, your quote, your judgement;
- nobody is watching a chat window all day.
That describes most trades, studios, consultants, clubs and small shops. They don’t need a conversation engine. They need every message to reach them.
What to use instead of a chatbot
A contact form’s weak points are that it sits on one page nobody finds, and that its notification emails get lost. A feedback widget fixes both. It’s a small button in the corner of every page that opens a short form and emails the message to you through a delivery service built for exactly that.
That’s Hi Widget. You paste one line of code into your site, the button appears on every page, and each message lands in your inbox. You reply from your normal email, in your own voice. There’s more on how it fits a small business on the Hi Widget for small business page.
If you want to ask your visitors something yourself, the Starter plan (£9/month) adds polls (“Would you like us to open on Sundays?”) and a custom form with dropdowns, checkboxes and radio buttons, so a booking or quote request arrives with the details already filled in. None of it pretends to be a person.