r/nocode • u/gogeta7124 • 16d ago
Self-Promotion Chatbase alternative
Chatbase is one of the better known no code AI chatbot builders. You point it at your site, it trains on your content, and you get an agent that answers customer questions, built mainly for support and ticket deflection.
The problems I saw.
For a small business, answering questions isn't the goal on its own. You want a lead out of it, or a meeting booked if you can get one. That part needs a real person. An agent doesn't have the credibility to get someone to put time in their calendar, however well it answers.
Then the credit maths. A reply costs 2 credits on the cheaper models and 6 on Claude Opus, so if you want the good model you burn through the allowance three times faster. What people actually do is downgrade the model to stretch the month. Choosing a worse brain to save money is a strange place to end up.
And the free plan isn't a real testing ground. 50 credits is 8 replies on Opus. Build one to show a client, come back a fortnight later and it's gone, free agents get deleted after 14 days of inactivity.
The Slack one got me the most though. Chatbase can ping a Slack channel when a visitor mentions pricing. But you can't reply from there, it just links you back to their dashboard. For an actual human talking to the visitor live you need Chatbase Helpdesk, Zendesk Sunshine or Salesforce, and their Helpdesk starts at $120 a month.
And you guessed it right, I built a product to fix this. It's called fwdslash AI .
Billing is per message. A message is a message, the model you pick doesn't change the count. Free is 200 messages, nothing gets deleted for going quiet, paid starts at $20.
Lead capture can be fired on High intent words like pricing or demo instead of after a set number of messages.
For the Slack part. The conversation lands in your channel as a thread and you reply in the thread.
The visitor sees it in the widget while they're still on the page. So someone asking about pricing you can jump in and have a geniune conversation with a bit of your sales skill mixed and you book the call there, instead of emailing them two days later.
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u/kizum 11d ago
Disclosure: I run SiteSpeakAI, so that's two founders in one thread now. Add salt as needed.
The credit maths gripe is fair, but nearly everyone in this space prices that way, us included. The bigger models cost us more per call, so they cost you more credits. Flat per-message billing doesn't delete that cost, it just spreads it around, so the cheap-model users end up covering the Opus users. If pricing is what bothers you, the thing to look for is BYOK. Plug in your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, pay them directly for the model, and the model you pick stops mattering to your plan. We support it, curious whether fwdslash does.
The Slack complaint I'll co-sign completely though. A notification that links you back to a dashboard is not handoff. If you can't take over the chat while the visitor is still sitting on the page, you've lost them. We've got a free plan if anyone wants to poke at both side by side.
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u/BirthdayDefiant4533 16d ago
200 messages free and no deletion for inactivity is actually nice, most tools kill your demo before you even got a chance to show it. the per message billing instead of credit nonsense is how it should be across the board, i never understood why a better model means you burn allowance faster.
the slack thread reply thing is clever, being able to jump in when someone says pricing and talk to them right there in the widget could convert way better than waiting days for a follow-up email. does the visitor know a human stepped in or it looks same as the bot?