Why we don't compete with the $39 chatbot category

The first question we get from a careful buyer is some version of: "Why are you €200 when Tidio is €29?" It's a fair question. It's also the wrong frame. We don't compete in the $39 chatbot category, and most of the time when we explain why, the buyer agrees and we keep talking. When they don't, we lose the deal honestly, which is fine.

This post is for the buyer in the middle of that comparison. What Tidio, Crisp, Intercom Fin, and the DIY OpenAI widget are good for. What changes when you're paying for an employee instead of a tool. A concrete after-hours scenario where the difference shows up. And the cases where we'd tell you to start with the cheap tier.

What the cheap tier is for

There is a real, useful product at the $29 to $49 per month tier. As of writing, Tidio, Crisp, Olark, Userlike, and the long tail of self-serve widgets sit there. They give you:

• A chat bubble on your site within 15 minutes of signup
• A canned-response builder that handles your top FAQ
• Sometimes an AI add-on you toggle on, usually metered per message
• A shared inbox for your team to triage what the bot didn't catch
• Per-seat pricing that scales linearly with how many people are answering

This is genuinely good for a specific shape of business. If you have 5 to 50 chats a month, a clean FAQ, a team that's already in a Slack channel watching for pings, and you mostly want to deflect questions like "do you ship to Slovenia" and "what's your return policy", the cheap tier is the right answer. You do not need us.

Intercom Fin is a different shape. It charges per resolution (around $0.99 as of writing), which makes it act more like a usage-billed AI agent than a flat-fee chatbot. The economics get interesting at scale. The setup model is still "you tune the prompts and intent rules yourself," which is closer to a toolkit than a hire.

The DIY GPT widget category, finally, is the cheapest of all. You paste your API key into a widget builder, point it at your docs, and ship it. It works. It costs whatever your token bill costs. We've used these ourselves.

What changes at the managed tier

The thing you're buying at €200+ per month isn't a better chat widget. It's that someone is doing work on your behalf, every month, that the cheap tier expects you to do yourself.

Concretely, what we do that the chatbot tier does not:

• A real setup pass. We crawl your site, ingest your catalog or service docs, write the system prompt against the brief, and run a 30 to 50 question quality test before go-live. You don't paste anything into a builder.
• Voice tuning. The agent talks the way you want it to. We adjust based on sample exchanges with the founder or the team lead before it touches a real visitor.
• Monthly review cycles. Someone reads the transcripts. Every month, you get a report: what visitors asked, what the agent answered well, what it missed, what it escalated, what we changed. On Growth and Managed plans, we walk through it on a call.
• Honest escalation behavior. The agent has an explicit "I don't know, but I'll get a human" path. It doesn't invent. The escalation rules are written, not implicit.
• Catalog sync that survives reality. WooCommerce variations, Shopify inventory pings, custom CSVs. We deal with the edge cases instead of telling you the integration "should just work."

None of this is a feature in the screenshot-tour sense. It's labor. The €200+ pays for the labor.

A concrete after-hours scenario

The cleanest contrast we can offer is one scenario, walked through twice.

A visitor lands on your B2B site at 11pm on a Tuesday. They need a quote for a custom job that doesn't fit your standard pricing tiers. They have a deadline. They want to talk now.

On the $39 chatbot. The bot reads the FAQ. The visitor's question isn't in the FAQ. The bot says some version of "I'm not sure about that, please leave your email and we'll get back to you." The visitor leaves the email. The form goes to a shared inbox. Someone on your team sees it at 9am Wednesday. They reply. The visitor has spent the night looking at three competitors and is no longer the same prospect.

On a Co-lega agent set up for this kind of work. The agent recognizes the question is outside the standard catalog. It captures the brief in five turns: what they're building, scope, deadline, what they've already tried. It pulls in the contact details. It tells the visitor honestly: "This is custom, my team handles those personally, and they'll respond first thing in the morning. Here's exactly what I've passed them so they can come back to you with a real answer." It writes the brief into your CRM (or escalation inbox) with a structured handoff: scope summary, contact, urgency, what to confirm. The team opens the inbox at 9am to a triaged brief, not a stranger's one-line email.

The difference is not "smarter AI." The difference is that the second agent has been set up to handle this exact shape of conversation, because someone read last month's transcripts and noticed it. The first agent could do the same thing, eventually, if you wrote the rules yourself. Most teams don't.

When the cheap tier is the right answer

We disqualify ourselves regularly. The cases:

• You have fewer than ~30 chats a month. You'll see every conversation anyway. You don't need a monitoring layer.
• Your FAQ deflects 80%+ of inbound already. A canned-response chatbot is enough. The marginal lift from a managed agent is small.
• You don't have content for the agent to be useful from. No catalog, no service pages, no policies in writing. Garbage in, garbage out. Fix the content first.
• You're not willing to make changes month over month. The value of the managed tier comes from the iteration. If you want set-it-and-forget-it, you're paying for monitoring you'll ignore.
• Your business is regulated to a degree that any AI answer is a liability. Specialist legal or medical advice. The agent should screen and route in those cases, but the manual labor of doing so well at €200+ is probably better spent on a real intake person.

If three of those are true for you, start with Tidio or Crisp. Come back when you've outgrown them.

When you're paying for an employee, not a tool

The frame that resolves the price objection isn't "compare us to Tidio." It's "compare us to the part of a human's job we're replacing."

A junior support hire in most EU SMB markets, fully loaded, costs €1,800 to €3,500 per month for one shift. They cover business hours. They take sick days. They turn over every 18 months. They handle 60 to 120 conversations a day at the upper end.

A Co-lega agent at €349 per month (Growth tier, as of writing) covers all 24 hours. It handles whatever volume arrives, doesn't churn, and gets a tuning pass next month. It only escalates the conversations a human should see. The right comparison isn't a $39 widget. It's a fraction of a salary.

This is also why we don't sell metered or per-conversation pricing. "Pay for what your visitors use" pulls the conversation back into the chatbot frame. We sell roles and months. That's the category.

For the full pricing breakdown, see the pricing page. For the role-by-role detail on what an AI employee does on a real site, the previous post covers it.

Talk to us

If you've read this far and you're still not sure which side of the disqualification line you're on, that's the conversation to have. Request a 15-minute demo and we'll tell you honestly. If you're closer to the cheap tier, we'll say so. If you're not, we'll show you what month two looks like.

You can also click through a live agent on a real customer site before you talk to anyone.