Trying to pick the right customer service platform can feel like navigating a maze, and confusing pricing models are no help. Tidio is a popular name in the game, mixing live chat, AI, and automation. But its pricing? It can be a real head-scratcher. With separate costs for its AI agent, chatbot flows, and limits tied to "billable conversations," it’s easy to get lost and wonder what your final bill will actually look like.
This guide is here to untangle the Tidio pricing model for you. We’ll walk through each plan, break down the terms you need to know, and point out some of the potential hidden costs. By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of how Tidio’s pricing works and whether it’s the right fit for your team.
So, what is Tidio and how does Tidio pricing work?
Tidio is a customer service platform aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses handle all their customer chats and emails. To really get a grip on its pricing, you first need to understand its three main parts:
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Live Chat & Help Desk: This is your standard live chat tool for talking to customers in real time. It’s paired with a ticketing system that pulls in support requests from chat, email, and social media.
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Lyro AI Agent: This is Tidio’s conversational AI. The idea is that it learns from your knowledge base to answer customer questions on its own.
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Flows: This is a visual builder for creating rule-based chatbots. You can use these for specific jobs like capturing leads, reminding people about abandoned carts, or answering simple, repetitive questions.
Here’s the thing about Tidio’s pricing: it’s not just one flat fee. It’s a mix-and-match system. You pick a base plan and then tack on add-ons or higher tiers for the Lyro AI and Flows depending on how much you use them. This can be flexible, but it also makes things a bit complicated.
Before we get into the plans, let’s clear up a few terms that will directly affect your monthly bill:
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Billable Conversation: Tidio counts any conversation (whether it’s live chat, a ticket, or an email) as "billable" if a human agent sends at least one reply. This is the main metric for their customer service plans.
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Lyro Conversation: This is any chat that gets at least one reply from the Lyro AI agent. This is billed completely separately from the human-led conversations.
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Visitors Reached with Flows: This is the count of unique website visitors who interact with one of your automated chatbots each month. You guessed it, this is also billed as a separate add-on.
This "à la carte" style means your final cost is a cocktail of human agent chats, AI interactions, and chatbot usage.
A breakdown of Tidio pricing plans
Tidio structures its pricing with a free plan and a few paid tiers. The Lyro AI and Flows are treated as optional, scalable add-ons. Here’s a quick look at what you get with each plan.
| Feature | Free Plan | Starter Plan | Growth Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0/month | Starts at $24.17/month | Starts at $49.17/month |
| Billable Conversations | 50 per month | 100 per month | Starts at 250 per month |
| Lyro AI Conversations | 50 (one-time) | 50 (one-time) | Add-on required for monthly quota |
| Visitors Reached (Flows) | 100 per month | 100 per month | Add-on required for monthly quota |
| Key Features | Live chat, Ticketing, Social media integrations, 10 seats | Basic analytics, Live visitors list | Advanced analytics, Viewed pages history, Canned responses |
| Best For | Solo entrepreneurs or businesses just dipping their toes in live chat. | Small businesses with a low and steady stream of support questions. | Growing teams that need better agent tools and analytics. |
The free Tidio pricing plan
Tidio’s free plan is actually pretty decent and works as a great starting point. It gives you live chat for up to 50 conversations, a simple ticketing system, and integrations with Messenger and Instagram. You also get a one-time bonus of 50 Lyro AI conversations and can engage 100 visitors with Flows. It’s a solid choice for a new business that wants to offer real-time support without spending a dime. Just be aware that you’ll probably hit those limits fast if your site gets any regular traffic.
The Starter Tidio pricing plan ($24.17/month)
Moving up to the Starter plan gets you 100 billable conversations and adds a few new tools like basic analytics and a live visitors list. However, it still uses the same one-time, limited quotas for Lyro and Flows that you get on the free plan. This plan is really for businesses that need more chat capacity for their human agents but aren’t quite ready to go all-in on automation.
The Growth Tidio pricing plan ($49.17/month)
The Growth plan is where Tidio starts to feel like a more serious tool for support teams. It kicks off with 250 billable conversations and includes helpful features like seeing a customer’s page history, live typing previews, and canned responses. This is the first tier where you’d really start thinking about buying the Lyro or Flows add-ons to handle more automated chats, as the plan itself is built for scaling up your human support.
Plus and Premium Tidio pricing plans (custom pricing)
For bigger companies, Tidio has Plus (starting at $749/mo) and Premium plans. These get you a dedicated success manager, custom branding, multi-language support, and even a guaranteed AI resolution rate for Premium users. These are enterprise-level plans for businesses that need a fully managed service and a lot of customization.
The hidden costs and limitations of the Tidio pricing model
While Tidio’s modular setup gives you options, it can also lead to your costs creeping up without you realizing it. If you’re looking at Tidio for a growing team, you need to know about these potential snags.
The headache of usage-based billing in Tidio pricing
The biggest challenge with Tidio’s pricing is juggling multiple usage-based numbers. Your bill isn’t just one simple figure; it’s a moving target based on:
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How many chats your human agents handle.
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How many chats your AI agent handles.
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How many visitors bump into your chatbots.
A busy month could send your costs soaring, which makes budgeting a real pain. This kind of "pay-per-resolution" pricing can feel like you’re being penalized for having more customers talk to you.
Automation has its own, separate price tag in Tidio pricing
Lyro AI and Flows are presented as key features, but they’re really separate products with their own pricing. The Starter and Growth plans don’t include a monthly allowance for them at all.
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Lyro AI Add-on: This starts at $32.50/month for a tiny pool of 50 conversations.
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Flows Add-on: This starts at $24.17/month for 2,000 visitors.
So, if you want to automate a good chunk of your support, you’ll be paying for a customer service plan plus one or both of these automation add-ons. It can add up fast.
Key features locked away or cost extra within Tidio pricing
Some features you might assume are standard are stuck behind higher plans or cost extra. For instance, if you want to remove the "Powered by Tidio" branding from your chat widget, you have to pay for an add-on with the Growth plan. It only comes standard on the pricey Plus plan. This means even as a paying customer, your chat widget will be advertising their service unless you pay more.
A simpler, more predictable alternative to Tidio pricing
If the complicated and unpredictable nature of Tidio’s pricing sounds like a potential issue, you’re not the only one who thinks so. Many businesses are looking for a powerful AI solution with straightforward, scalable costs. That’s where a unified platform like eesel AI offers a refreshing change of pace.
Unlike Tidio, which splits up its products and bills you differently for each, eesel AI bundles all its main tools, AI Agent, AI Copilot, AI Triage, and more, into a single subscription. The pricing is based on a simple monthly AI interaction limit, with no surprise fees per resolution or chatbot type.
| Feature | Tidio | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing Model | Complicated; based on billable conversations plus separate add-ons for AI & flows. | Simple & predictable; based on a flat monthly interaction limit. No per-resolution fees. |
| Core Products | Sold separately (Live Chat, Lyro, Flows). | All-in-one platform (Agent, Copilot, Triage, Chatbot) included in every plan. |
| Setup | Easy for basic chat, but getting full automation running can be a project. | Super self-serve. Go live in minutes with one-click helpdesk integrations. |
| Knowledge Sources | Mostly relies on a knowledge base you have to build out manually. | Instantly connects to all your knowledge: past tickets, help centers, Confluence, Google Docs, and more. |
| Testing & Confidence | Hard to test your automation before you unleash it on customers. | A powerful simulation mode lets you test on historical tickets to see how it will perform before launch. |
With eesel AI, you don’t have to agonize over whether to use a chatbot or an AI agent, or worry about which type of interaction will cost you more. It’s all one system. For example, eesel AI can train on your past Zendesk or Freshdesk tickets to learn your brand’s voice and common fixes right from the start. Tidio’s Lyro, on the other hand, needs you to manually feed it a knowledge base.
On top of that, eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test your AI on thousands of past tickets before you flip the switch for customers. This gives you a clear, data-backed preview of your resolution rate and cost savings, which is a level of confidence that’s tough to get with Tidio’s model.
This detailed review breaks down Tidio’s features, including a specific look at the Tidio pricing model.
So, is Tidio pricing right for you?
Tidio is a perfectly good tool for small businesses that just need a straightforward live chat solution with a bit of light, rule-based automation. The free plan is a great way to start, and the lower-tier paid plans are affordable if your support volume is low and doesn’t change much.
However, for teams that are growing and want to lean heavily on AI automation, the complexity and unpredictable costs of the Tidio pricing model can become a real problem. Having to pay for separate add-ons and keep an eye on different usage limits doesn’t make it the best choice for businesses that want a powerful, unified, and cost-effective AI platform.
For those teams, a solution like eesel AI offers a much clearer path forward. Its all-in-one platform, transparent pricing, and advanced, self-serve tools let you embrace automation without the guesswork.
See how eesel AI can help your team do their best work, start a free trial or book a demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Lyro AI agent and automated Flows are not included in the standard plans and must be purchased as separate add-ons. Your base plan mainly covers the "billable conversations" handled by your human agents, while automation features have their own usage-based costs.
Each plan comes with a set number of conversations your human agents can handle per month. If you exceed this limit, you’ll likely need to upgrade to a higher-tier plan to accommodate the volume, which directly increases your monthly cost.
The free plan is genuinely free to use but comes with very strict limits, like only 50 human-led conversations per month. It’s a great starting point, but most businesses with steady website traffic will outgrow these limits quickly and need to upgrade.
It’s difficult to predict accurately because your total cost depends on three different metrics: human-led chats, AI chats, and visitors reached by Flows. A month with high customer engagement can cause your costs to unexpectedly increase, making budgeting a challenge.
Yes, on the Growth plan, removing the Tidio branding from your chat widget requires paying for an extra add-on. The branding is only removed for free on the much more expensive Plus and Premium enterprise plans.
The Growth plan is built for scaling teams and includes important features that the Starter plan lacks, such as advanced analytics, viewing a customer’s page history, and using canned responses. It’s a better fit for businesses that need more robust tools for their support agents.
