Comparisons / AI Agents & Chatbots
Chatbase vs Fin (formerly Intercom)
Chatbase bills flat rate and Fin (formerly Intercom) bills per resolution. Which one is cheaper changes as your volume grows, so the headline rates will not tell you.
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Which One to Pick
Pick Chatbase if
- Small businesses testing the idea. The free tier and $40 Hobby plan make this the lowest-cost way to establish whether an AI agent reduces your inbound volume at all.
- Sites needing FAQ deflection only. If your questions are genuinely answerable from your own documentation, Chatbase covers that case at a fraction of platform prices.
- Teams with a support stack they like. Add deflection in front of an existing setup without touching it.
Look elsewhere if: Chatbase is the wrong choice if you need a help desk, order lookups, or anything requiring a query into another system — it answers from content and nothing more. It is also the wrong choice if predictable billing matters, since message credits make cost a function of conversation length rather than outcomes. And do not build anything important on the free tier: agents are reportedly deleted after 14 days of inactivity.
Pick Fin (formerly Intercom) if
- Existing Intercom customers. If you already run Intercom, Fin is close to a default. The integration advantage is real and the deployment cost is genuinely low. You are mostly deciding whether the per-resolution economics work at your volume.
- Teams with low to moderate ticket volume. Under roughly 2,000 resolutions a month, per-resolution pricing is predictable and comfortably cheaper than headcount. This is where the model is genuinely well suited.
- Teams that need quality over cost. Where a wrong answer is expensive, Fin's confidence gating and maturity justify the premium. Paying more per resolution to resolve fewer things badly is a reasonable trade.
Look elsewhere if: Do not buy Fin if you have high ticket volume and a tight support budget. Above roughly 5,000 monthly resolutions the per-resolution model works against you, and the better you tune it the worse the economics get. Teams in that position should model the invoice at their actual volume before committing, and look seriously at flat-rate or per-seat alternatives.
Evidence Scores Compared
Five criteria verifiable from published material. Green at 3.0 and above, red below. Not a performance rating.
| Criterion | Chatbase | Fin (formerly Intercom) |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency | ||
| Capability | ||
| Independence | ||
| Independent evidence | ||
| Cost predictability | ||
| Overall | 3.8 | 4.2 |
Pricing Compared
Different billing models, so the only honest comparison is total cost at your own volume. The arithmetic at 500, 5,000 and 50,000 tickets.
| Chatbase | Fin (formerly Intercom) | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $40 /mo | $29 /seat/mo |
| Billing model | Flat rate | Per resolution |
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Buy without a sales call | Yes | Yes |
| Who owns it | Independent | Salesforce (pending) |
| Independent review evidence | Thin | G2 4.5/5 from 3,409 |
| HIPAA | No | Yes |
| Best for | Small sites wanting a competent FAQ bot with minimal setup | Teams already on Fin who can absorb variable per-resolution billing |
Chatbase pricing
- Free — $0. 50 message credits/mo. Agents reportedly deleted after 14 days inactivity
- Hobby — $40 /mo. 1 AI agent, 2,000 message credits ($32 billed annually)
- Standard — $150 /mo. 2 AI agents, 12,000 credits ($120 annually)
- Pro — $500 /mo. 40,000 credits ($400 annually)
- Enterprise — Custom. Custom
Chatbase publishes four tiers plus Enterprise. Free includes 50 message credits a month. Hobby is $40 monthly for one AI agent and 2,000 credits. Standard is $150 for two agents and 12,000 credits. Pro is $500 for 40,000 credits. Annual billing reduces these to roughly $32, $120 and $400.
Two additions matter. Credit auto-recharge is reported around $14 per 1,000 credits, and extra chatbots cost a few dollars each per month. Neither is large, but both mean the advertised tier is the starting point.
Forecasting is the real difficulty. Credits are consumed per message, so your cost depends on conversation length rather than outcomes, and conversation length is the thing you have least control over. A tool that answers well in one message is cheap; one that requires five exchanges to reach the same place costs five times as much for the same result. That is an odd incentive: a better agent is also a cheaper one, which is the inverse of per-resolution billing and arguably healthier.
Against alternatives, Chatbase's $40 Hobby tier undercuts Tidio's $49.17 Growth and sits well below Freshdesk's $59 per agent. It also does considerably less than either. The honest framing is that Chatbase is the cheapest way to add an agent, not the cheapest way to run support.
Fin (formerly Intercom) pricing
- Essential — $29 /seat/mo. Fin included at $0.99 per outcome
- Advanced — $85 /seat/mo. Multiple team inboxes, workflow automation
- Expert — $132 /seat/mo. SSO, identity management, HIPAA support
- Fin AI Agent standalone — $0.99 /outcome. No seats. 50-outcome monthly minimum. Works on Salesforce, HubSpot and others
- Fin sales qualification — $9.99 /qualification. Ten times the support rate for the same mechanical act
- Copilot add-on — $29 /agent/mo billed annually. $35 billed monthly. 10 conversations a month free per agent
- Pro add-on — $99 /mo. 1,000 conversations analysed, 2,000 Operator credits; extra credits $0.01
- Proactive Support Plus — $99 /mo. Includes 500 messages, then per unit
Fin costs $0.99 per resolution. That is the headline and it is genuinely published, unlike most enterprise competitors. Underneath it you also need Intercom seats, which one user reported at a $74 monthly seat fee before any AI usage.
The arithmetic is where this becomes contentious. At 10,000 resolutions a month, Fin costs $9,900 before seat costs. In many markets that exceeds the loaded cost of the support agents it replaces. The model works well at low volume and inverts at high volume, which is the opposite of how software pricing usually behaves.
The structural criticism is sharper than a simple cost complaint. Because you are charged per successful resolution, improving your help content, tuning your prompts, and getting Fin to work better all directly increase your bill. One support leader described it as being financially punished for making the product work. That is not a pricing tier problem; it is the model.
For context, Sierra prices on a similar outcome basis at roughly $1.50 per resolved interaction, negotiated rather than published. Fini publishes $0.69. Per-seat competitors like Zendesk and Freshdesk avoid the dynamic entirely but charge whether or not the AI does anything.
Both Tools in Depth
Chatbase
Chatbase is the fastest way to find out whether an AI agent helps your business. You point it at your website, it trains on that content, and you embed a widget. Teams reach a working agent in an afternoon, which is faster than anything else in this directory except Tidio.
The trade for that speed is scope. Chatbase is an agent, not a support platform — there is no ticketing, no shared inbox, no agent workspace. It deflects questions in front of whatever you already run, or in front of nothing at all. For a small business whose support currently arrives in a personal inbox, that may be enough.
Pricing is by message credits and the tiers are widely reported as Free with 50 credits a month, Hobby at $40 for one agent and 2,000 credits, Standard at $150 for two agents and 12,000 credits, and Pro at $500 for 40,000 credits, with Enterprise quoted. Annual billing brings those to roughly $32, $120 and $400. Chatbase reportedly deletes free-tier agents after 14 days of inactivity, which is worth knowing before you build something on the free plan and leave it.
Speed of deployment
This is the product's genuine strength. Training on website content requires no documentation project, no help desk integration and no engineering. A YouTube video ranking on the head term for this category is literally titled around automating 80% of support with one agent, and the appeal is precisely that low effort.
Message-credit billing
Credits are consumed by messages rather than resolutions, which means you pay for conversations that go nowhere as well as ones that succeed. That is arguably fairer than per-resolution billing — you are buying capacity, not outcomes, but it makes forecasting harder, because a chatty customer costs the same as ten satisfied ones.
Fin (formerly Intercom)
Two things changed in mid-2026 and both matter more than any feature on this page. Intercom renamed itself Fin in May, folding the company identity into the product. A month later, on 15 June 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire it for approximately $3.6 billion, with closing expected in the fourth quarter of Salesforce's fiscal 2027. The deal has not closed, so Fin is still buyable on its own terms today — but anyone signing a multi-year term should ask directly how Fin and Salesforce's own Agentforce will coexist, because Salesforce now owns both.
Fin is the autonomous support agent formerly sold as Intercom's, and by most accounts the most polished product in this category. Intercom itself has been around since 2011, which matters here: Fin arrives attached to a mature help desk, an established content model, and an inbox that support teams already know. Where newer entrants have to solve both the agent problem and the workflow problem, Fin only had to solve one.
That maturity shows in deployment. Because Fin trains on help-centre content and past conversations already inside Intercom, teams that are Intercom customers can have it answering real tickets in hours rather than weeks. This is the single most consistent piece of praise it receives, including from people who are otherwise critical of it.
The controversy is entirely about price. Fin is billed at $0.99 per resolution on top of Intercom seat costs that start around $74 per seat per month. The rate is published, which is more than most competitors manage, but the model itself is what generates the complaints, and the complaints are loud, numerous, and unusually specific.
Resolution quality and confidence gating
Fin answers from your existing content and declines when confidence is low, passing the conversation to a human rather than guessing. This is the correct behaviour and it is implemented better here than in most cheaper tools, which tend to answer confidently regardless. The trade-off is that a conservatively-gated agent resolves fewer tickets, and since you pay per resolution, a well-tuned Fin is also a more expensive Fin.
Custom actions
Fin can call your APIs mid-conversation to look up an order, check a subscription state, or trigger a workflow. This is what separates an agent that answers questions from one that resolves them. Setting this up is engineering work, not configuration, and teams routinely underestimate it during evaluation.
Where Each One Breaks
Strengths and weaknesses on both sides, stated plainly.
Chatbase
What works
- Genuinely fast to deploy — hours, not weeks
- Free tier for evaluation
- $40 Hobby tier is among the cheapest paid entry points here
- Annual billing cuts prices roughly 20%
- No help desk migration required
- Simple enough for non-technical owners
Speed and cost are the whole proposition and Chatbase delivers both. Deployment measured in hours with no code, no migration and no documentation project means the cost of trying it is near zero, and for a business unsure whether AI support will help at all, that matters more than capability. The free tier allows genuine evaluation, the $40 Hobby plan is among the cheapest paid entry points in this directory, and annual billing cuts roughly 20% off. Message-credit billing, whatever its forecasting difficulties, has one attractive property: an agent that answers efficiently costs less than one that rambles, which aligns your interests with quality rather than against it.
What does not
- Message-credit billing is hard to forecast
- Free-tier agents reportedly deleted after 14 days of inactivity
- Credit top-ups at around $14 per 1,000 add up quickly
- Additional chatbots charged separately
- Not a help desk — no ticketing, no shared inbox
Forecasting cost is genuinely hard. Credits are consumed per message, so spend depends on conversation length rather than outcomes, and top-ups at around $14 per 1,000 credits plus a few dollars per additional chatbot mean the tier price is a floor. The reported deletion of free-tier agents after 14 days of inactivity is a real trap for anyone evaluating slowly. Most fundamentally, Chatbase is not a support platform: no ticketing, no shared inbox, no ability to look anything up in another system. It answers questions from content, and the moment your support requires an order status or an account state it is the wrong tool. Independent evidence is also thin compared with the established help desks here.
Fin (formerly Intercom)
What works
- Product quality conceded even by the reviewers complaining about the price
- Fastest deployment in the category on content already in Intercom
- Confidence gating is well implemented
- Handoff preserves context because it is the same product, not an integration
- Publishes its rate, which most enterprise competitors here do not
The product quality is not seriously disputed, including by its critics. Reddit threads complaining about the price routinely open by conceding that Fin works — one described it as probably the most polished AI agent available, immediately before objecting to the cost. Deployment speed on existing Intercom content is the fastest in the category. Confidence gating is well implemented, and the handoff into the human inbox preserves context because it is not an integration but the same product. Intercom also publishes its rate, which sounds like a low bar until you notice that most enterprise competitors in this directory publish nothing at all.
What does not
- Every successful resolution is billable, so improving the system raises the bill
- An r/SaaS thread of 70+ comments reported billing rising 120% after enabling AI
- An analysis of 215 Intercom reviews repeatedly calls the per-resolution charge a trap
- Cannot be bought standalone; it needs Intercom seats underneath, reported around $74
- The resolution definition that decides your invoice is easy to miss during a trial
The pricing model is the defining problem and it is structural rather than a matter of tiers. Because every successful resolution is billable, every improvement you make to the system increases your costs — a support leader on r/CustomerSuccess described being financially punished for making Fin work well. Public reports of bill shock are numerous and specific: one r/SaaS thread with 70+ comments described billing rising 120% after enabling AI, and an analysis of 215 Intercom reviews found the per-resolution charge repeatedly characterised as a trap. You also cannot buy Fin standalone; it requires Intercom seats underneath, reported around $74 each. Finally, the resolution definition that determines your invoice is not something most buyers examine closely during a trial, and it should be the first thing they check.
Where Each One Lands
Our reading of each, unchanged from its own review page.
Chatbase
Chatbase is the cheapest and fastest way to establish whether an AI agent reduces your support volume, and for that specific purpose it is the right tool. Free tier, $40 paid entry, running the same afternoon. Understand its limits before committing: it answers from content and cannot query another system, message-credit billing makes cost a function of conversation length, and free-tier agents are reportedly deleted after two weeks of inactivity. Use it to answer the question, then buy something else if the answer is yes.
Fin (formerly Intercom)
Fin is the best autonomous support agent most teams can buy today, and whether you should buy it is almost entirely a maths question rather than a product question. Under roughly 2,000 resolutions a month it is excellent and the pricing is fair. Above 5,000 the model turns against you, and it turns against you faster the better you make it work. Model your actual volume before signing, and read the resolution definition carefully.
Frequently Asked
Questions people search about Chatbase and Fin (formerly Intercom).
Is Chatbase free to use?
There is a free tier, then paid plans from around $40 a month. Free-tier agents are deleted after 14 days of inactivity, which catches people who build one and leave it.
Is Intercom the same as Fin?
They are now the same company. Intercom renamed itself Fin in May 2026, folding the company name into its AI agent product. Comparisons that still treat them as two things are out of date.
What does Chatbase do?
Builds a chat agent from your website, documents or docs site, then gives you a widget or an API. It answers from content and cannot query your order or billing systems.
Who owns Fin?
Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, formerly Intercom, for approximately $3.6B on 15 June 2026. The deal is expected to close in Q4 of Salesforce FY2027 and has not closed, so Fin still operates independently today.
Is Chatbase good for customer service?
For documented, informational questions, yes, and it deploys in under an hour. For anything needing a lookup — order status, account state — it is the wrong category of tool.
Is Fin worth it for a small team?
Under roughly 2,000 monthly resolutions, usually — it is the most capable agent available and the seat cost is modest at five or six agents. Above that the per-resolution model compounds against you faster than headcount would.
How much does Chatbase cost?
Free with 50 credits a month, Hobby $40, Standard $150 and Pro $500 monthly, with roughly 20% off on annual billing. Credit top-ups run around $14 per 1,000.
How much does Fin actually cost?
$0.99 per resolution, plus Intercom seats underneath at a reported ~$74 per seat per month. At 10,000 monthly resolutions that is $9,900 in usage before seat costs.
What is a message credit?
Credits are consumed per message rather than per resolution, so your cost depends on how long conversations run rather than whether they succeed.
What counts as a resolution?
This is the question that determines your invoice, and vendors define it differently. We are documenting each vendor's definition from their own materials; until that is published we will not summarise Intercom's for you second-hand.
Sources
Every external fact above traces to one of these.