Live Chat Alternative pricing 2026: what each Wix plan really costs

How much does Live Chat Alternative cost?

Live Chat Alternative is a click-to-call app by Free Call, Inc. It puts a "Free Call" button on your Wix site that rings your mobile or landline from the visitor's browser, plus a "Send us a message" form. Despite the name, it has no typed chat and none of the AI live chat features the name suggests. Billing runs through your Wix account in US dollars, monthly only.

Here is every plan with what its card lists:

Freelancer and Small Office cost exactly the same per minute. Doubling your minutes doubles your bill until Growing Business, which is the only plan with a volume discount: 250 minutes for $14.99, or 6 cents a minute.

What does the billing unit actually mean?

The billable thing is a talk minute, and a few details on the plan cards are worth reading slowly before you pick one.

"Unlimited Talk Time" is not unlimited

Every plan carries a feature called "Unlimited Talk Time". Its description, on every plan, reads "Chat for free with your customers for up to 3 minutes per call. Want more time? Upgrade to Premium and get all the time you need." So the name says unlimited and the text says 3 minutes. My reading: the 3-minute cap is the Free plan's limit, the paid plans run on their monthly allowance, and "Premium" in the app's wording means its own paid plans, not a Wix Premium site plan. I'd still ask the vendor to confirm it in writing, because the listing never says it plainly.

The free plan has a per-call cap, not a monthly one

Free is the only plan priced per call. Each call stops at 3 minutes, and reviewers on the listing say a recorded voice tells the caller about the limit. The Free card also lists "Free Monthly Minutes" without a number, so the monthly total isn't stated. One Wix reviewer in December 2023 put the practical limit like this:

"app is advertised as free but to be usable for any business that wants to talk for more than 60 minutes a month you must pay. Misleading advertising"

finestlineservice, Wix App Market

Call recording skips the middle plans

Call recording shows on Free and Growing Business, but not on Freelancer or Small Office. That could be a gap in how the listing was filled in. If you need recordings, assume Growing Business until the vendor tells you otherwise, which makes the real entry price for recordings $14.99, not $4.99.

There's nothing above 250 minutes

The listing shows no fifth plan and no overage rate. If your calls add up to more than 250 minutes a month, the pricing page has no answer for what happens next. For a busy shop, that's the ceiling that matters most, and it's a big part of why I'd rather count live chat features like concurrent chats than minutes.

How many calls do the minutes buy?

Minutes are an awkward unit because nobody thinks in them. You think in calls. So here's each paid plan turned into calls a month, at three typical call lengths.

The circled cell is the one that surprises people: the $4.99 plan covers about 12 five-minute calls a month, or three a week. Quick questions about opening hours fit in 3 minutes. A quote for a kitchen remodel or a question about a dog's medication usually doesn't.

Here's the same math as cost per call, using the cheapest plan that covers each volume:

Plug in your own numbers below. Type how many calls you expect a month and how long a typical one runs.

What are the hidden costs?

The plan price is the smallest number in this whole setup. These are the costs that don't appear on the pricing cards.

Your time on every call

A call button routes every conversation to you. 250 minutes a month is over four hours on the phone, and you can only take one call at a time. That's the real trade against live chat software, where one person can keep several chats going at once. If you want to put a dollar figure on that time, my guide to chatbot ROI walks through the math.

The visitors who reach you when you can't pick up

Outside your set hours, the call button hides and the message form takes its place. Inside your hours, a call you can't answer is a visitor who leaves. Neither path gets the question answered on the spot, which is the gap after-hours AI support is meant to close. An AI chatbot for your website cuts the wait from hours to seconds, which is what first response automation is really about.

Paying to test

There's no free trial on a paid plan. The free plan lets you test the button, but every call stops at 3 minutes, so you can't test a real five-minute sales call without paying the first month.

Country limits

The listing's country settings exclude Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador and Argentina. Older developer replies on the listing also say some countries' phone numbers only work on paid plans, and reviewers from Russia, Ukraine and the Philippines said their numbers didn't connect. Check your number before you count on the free plan.

The vendor risk

This is the cost I'd weigh most. On 21 October 2026, both livechatalternative.com and freecallinc.com failed to resolve, so the privacy policy linked from the listing doesn't load either. Trustpilot says reviews are closed because the company's website has closed, and the most recent review there is from a paying customer:

"The service we paid for is not working and we have contacted the company in the last 9 weeks many times but they are not able or willing to fix the issue."

Wayra, Trustpilot

That review is from April 2023, and the listing is still live and "Verified by Wix". But a $4.99 plan is only cheap if it connects. Email the support address on the listing and wait for a human reply before you pay.

Wix Premium, which you may not need

The listing doesn't list a Wix Premium site plan as a requirement, and the app's own "upgrade to Premium" wording refers to its paid plans. Wix Premium only becomes a cost if you want something else: a custom domain, or Custom Code, which Wix says needs a connected domain. Wix's own help center says connecting a custom domain requires a Premium plan, and Premium prices vary by country, so check the plans page for yours. If you sell through Wix Stores too, my breakdown of Wix ecommerce pricing covers that side of the bill.

How does it compare with Wix's own options?

This is the comparison most coverage skips, and it changes the answer. Wix has added its own contact tools, and some of them are free.

A few details from the Wix help center are worth knowing:

• The clickable phone number is free and needs no app. Visitors call from their own phone, on their own plan.
• Wix Smart Chat combines AI chat and manual chat in one app. Wix says manual chat is free to use, and the older Wix Chat is no longer available to install from the App Market.
• From 10 June, Smart Chat moved from its own subscription to the AI credits included in your Wix plan. On free plans, credits reset each day, up to 120 a month.
• The AI Phone Agent needs a Premium plan. Wix estimates about 75 calls a month on Light, 100 on Core, 150 on Business and 500 on Business Elite, though call length changes the total.

So if all you want is "let mobile visitors call me", the free phone link does it. If you want typed chat you answer yourself, Smart Chat's manual mode does it for free, and my guide on adding live chat covers the setup on any site. The case for paying Live Chat Alternative is narrow: you specifically want desktop visitors to call from the browser, and you want the call log and hours that come with it. For a wider look at how AI can answer support calls, I've covered that separately, along with the best AI for phone support.

Call minutes vs an AI chat agent: the per-contact math

The fairest way to compare a call plan with an AI agent is per contact, and per contact the call button looks cheaper. On Growing Business, a five-minute call works out to about 30 cents. On eesel's smallest plan, $299 a month for 500 credits per the eesel pricing page, where one chat is one credit, a chat costs about 60 cents.

The difference is who does the work. The 30 cents buys a line to your phone, and you still spend the five minutes. The 60 cents buys an answer: the agent replies from your own pages and policies, and only the questions that need a person reach you. That's why I'd compare the AI side with cost per resolution, not cost per minute.

Volume is the other half, and it's the honest answer to whether AI pays off for small businesses. A Wix shop taking 15 calls a month should not pay $299 for an AI agent; the free phone link or a $4.99 plan is the right tool. The math flips once you have hundreds of questions a month, many of them the same few things, coming in at hours you can't cover. That's the point where AI for small businesses starts paying for itself, and where a 250-minute ceiling stops being enough.

For a wider view of what chat tools cost, my Tidio pricing and Chatty pricing breakdowns cover two other small-business chat apps, and HubSpot chatbot pricing covers the CRM route.

If calls are most of your volume and you want them handled properly, my Dialpad pricing post covers a VoIP option with real routing.

Is Live Chat Alternative worth the price?

Worth it if you run a small Wix site where a phone conversation is the sale, your calls fit inside 250 minutes a month, you can pick up during set hours, and the vendor replies to you before you pay. At $4.99 to $14.99, a browser call button with a log is fairly priced.

Not worth it if a free phone link would do the same job for your mostly-mobile visitors, you need more than 250 minutes, you want recordings on a cheap plan, your number is in a country with reported trouble, or you can't reach the vendor. If calls are the bulk of your volume, read how to automate phone support first. And if the thing you really want to buy is fewer unanswered visitors, a call plan can't buy that, because every call still needs you. My guide to 24/7 support with AI covers that route, and my AI live chat roundup has the shortlist.

If several people will answer, start with a small business helpdesk instead.

Try eesel when minutes aren't the real problem

Live Chat Alternative charges you to route visitors to your own phone. eesel's AI helpdesk teammate charges for something different: answered questions. Its chat bubble sits in the corner of your Wix site, learns from your own pages and help articles, answers visitors at any hour, and hands anything it can't handle to you with a note on what the visitor wanted.

Question Beauty, a direct-to-consumer cosmetics brand, shows what that looks like at volume. Its website chat, Facebook Messenger and email all land in Gorgias, where eesel tags each ticket, checks Shopify before answering an order question, and replies in the customer's language. Between 8 August and 8 September 2026 it handled about 990 tickets, sent about 960 replies and closed about 280 without a person, while refunds and complaints went to the team with a note attached. At one credit per ticket, that volume sits around eesel's 1,000-credit plan, $499 a month.

For a smaller setup, Original Bootcamp, an outdoor fitness business in Cologne, has eesel answer general questions about camps and prices from about 1,700 pages of its own website, and leaves bookings and accounts to the team.

Two practical notes for Wix. The chat bubble is one script tag, and on Wix it goes in Custom Code, which needs a connected domain and so a Premium plan. eesel also has a phone channel that answers calls and transfers to your number when it can't help, but it's set up with the eesel team rather than self-serve. There's a 7-day free trial with 100 credits, and my walkthrough on building an AI live chat covers the setup.

If the minute meter is really a proxy for "I can't answer everyone", put an agent on your site that can. Try eesel