Everyone is selling you a chatbot
Every competitor in this space has rushed the same feature to market in the last two years. Intercom sells AI chat at around $0.99 per “resolution” on top of $29 per seat per month. Drift, Zendesk, HubSpot, and every survey tool you’ve ever heard of has bolted an “AI assistant” onto their product. The pitch is always the same: your customers want instant answers, you can’t afford to miss enquiries, the bot handles the boring questions so you can focus on the important ones.
It’s a compelling pitch. It also describes a problem that small businesses do not have.
The problem AI chatbots actually solve
An AI chatbot is a deflection tool. It exists to take the volume of inbound support enquiries at a large company and answer them without a human. Thousands of repetitive “where’s my order”, “how do I reset my password”, “do you ship to Germany” questions. For a SaaS company with fifty thousand monthly active users and three support staff, this is an obvious win. The chatbot handles 60% of tickets so the humans can handle the 40% that need judgement.
That’s the business case. It only works if you have volume you need to deflect.
The problem small businesses actually have
A dog walker, a plumber, a piano teacher, a wedding photographer, a local cafe, a small design studio. None of these have volume they need to deflect. They have the opposite problem. They have enquiries they want to personally respond to, and the limiting factor is not their ability to type replies, it’s their ability to hear about enquiries in the first place.
What a small business owner needs is something that:
- Makes it easy for a visitor to send a message.
- Reliably gets that message to the owner’s inbox.
- Doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t.
An AI chatbot does the opposite of all three. It puts friction between the customer and the owner (the bot), it obscures whether the message actually reached anyone (the “AI is checking, please wait”), and it makes the experience feel corporate in a way that actively damages a small business’s competitive advantage, which is being a real person the customer can trust.
What customers actually think when they see a chatbot
Every year more people have tried AI chatbots and been disappointed. The novelty wore off around 2024. Today, a chatbot on a small local business’s website reads as a red flag: this business has outsourced its front-of-house. It’s the digital equivalent of a phone tree at the dentist’s surgery. Nobody likes it. Nobody wishes there was more of it.
For a service business whose selling point is personal attention, the AI chatbot is quietly working against you. The customer who would have sent “hi, do you have availability Saturday?” to a human now looks at the bot, decides it’ll be a waste of time, and closes the tab.
The honest maths on pricing
Before you sign up for any chatbot platform, run the numbers for your actual use case:
- Intercom starts at $29 per seat per month, and the AI agent adds roughly $0.99 per successful resolution on top of that. For a small business with a few enquiries a week, you’re paying enterprise pricing for enterprise features you don’t use.
- Drift and HubSpot Service Hub have similar per-seat models once you’re past their free tiers, which are deliberately crippled to push you into paying.
- Tidio, Crisp, and LiveChat are cheaper but still layer on AI features that add cost per month as you grow.
A simple feedback widget like Hi Widget is £9/month flat. One price, no per-seat bill, no per-conversation charge. You’re comparing a single-digit monthly fee against tens to hundreds, for a small business that needs the cheaper option to work better anyway.
When a chatbot does make sense
If you’re running a SaaS with thousands of users asking genuinely repetitive product questions, a chatbot can earn its keep. If you’re a large ecommerce operation drowning in “where’s my order”, automated replies against your order database are useful. If you have real support volume to deflect, and the company to justify the monthly cost, buy the tool.
That’s a genuinely different situation from what most small business websites are. Be honest about which one describes you. If the answer is “I’d like a handful of customers to find it easy to get in touch”, you don’t need AI. You need a button.
What to use instead
A feedback widget: a small “Say hi” button in the corner of every page, which opens a short form, sends you the submission by email, and gets out of your way. No personality, no scripts, no learning curve. Nothing pretends to be a person, so nobody is disappointed when they find out it isn’t.
That’s Hi Widget. You paste one line of code into your website, the button appears on every page, and when someone leaves a message you get it in your inbox. You reply from your normal email, in your own voice. Customers remember that. Bots are forgettable on purpose.
If you do want to ask more than “drop us a message”, the Pro plan (£19/month) lets you run single-question polls (“Which of these would you actually want?”) and build custom forms with dropdowns, checkboxes, and radio buttons for specific asks like booking details or quote requirements. None of it pretends to be a person. None of it answers customers on your behalf. It’s a way to ask better questions, not a way to avoid talking to your customers.