Chatwoot

Chatwoot suits teams who want a support suite they can host themselves. It is open source, and much of what its pricing page advertises sits behind a commercial licence.

Two prices, two products. Chatwoot Cloud runs $19, $39 and $99 per agent per month, all billed annually, above a free Hacker tier capped at two agents. Captain, the AI, is metered in credits: 300, 500 or 800 a month by plan, then $20 per 1,000, one credit per message. Self-hosted, Community Edition is $0 for unlimited agents; a $19 or $99 per-agent licence buys back the missing features. Captain there runs on your own OpenAI key, so self-hosting moves the AI bill rather than removing it.

The free build is not the paid build. Community Edition drops Captain, voice, SSO, roles, SLA policies and branding. On cloud, email, social and the Help Center start at $19, automation rules and voice at $39, SSO and audit logs at $99. One price set is published, labelled billed annually, with no monthly rate, minimum term or notice period. Cloud data sits on AWS in the United States, with no region choice, and there is no bulk export, only the API. Self-host and the Postgres database is already yours.

FreeScout and Zammad also self-host for nothing and do not gate SSO behind a licence, but neither ships an AI agent. Intercom sells the same omnichannel shape at $0.99 a resolution and keeps the data. All four are live chat software.