SealReplyIs Free Live Chat Good Enough for a Small Business?
For a one-person site with a handful of chats a day, free live chat software is enough. What decides it is not the feature list but three limits: seats, monthly chats and how long history is kept.
For most small websites, free live chat software is good enough: one person answering, one site, a handful of chats a day. What decides it is not the feature list but three allowances — agent seats, chats per month, and how long chat history is kept. Check those three first, then look at features.
Key takeaways
- Free live chat means a free plan with no time limit, not a 7 or 14-day trial. Tell them apart before you install anything.
- Free plans cap what costs the vendor money: seats (usually 1 to 2), chats a month, history kept for 7 to 30 days, and a "Powered by" badge on the widget.
- One person, one website, up to about 30 chats a day: a free plan is fine. Two people on shifts, several sites, or chats piped into your own systems: upgrade.
- What matters more than missing features is what happens when the allowance runs out. Some tools hide the widget entirely, so you do not even get a message.
- Install a free plan on your own site and run it for two weeks. Real numbers beat any comparison table.
Below: what the word "free" actually covers, what free plans limit, whether yours is big enough to outgrow one, and the signals that say it is time to pay. Each section ends with how the SealReply Free plan handles it, so you can line it up against the other tools on your list.
Is free live chat the same as a free trial?
No. Free live chat software means a plan with no time limit that keeps working after the allowance runs out. A free trial is the full paid product with a countdown: when it ends you pay or you drop down. Both are advertised as "start for free", and a month later they leave you in very different places.
| What it is called | What it actually is | A month later | How to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan (freemium) | A cut-down version of the product you can keep using | Still running, with limits on what you exceeded | The pricing page says $0 or "free forever" in that column, not "14 days" |
| Free trial | The full paid product on a countdown | Stops or downgrades, sometimes after an automatic charge | Whether sign-up asks for a card, and whether the welcome email says "your trial ends on…" |
| Free, with the part you need sold separately | Chat is free; removing branding, adding a teammate or seeing reports each cost extra | The one thing you wanted turns out to be a paid add-on | Find each feature you actually need on the pricing page, one by one |
The quick test: sign up without entering payment details. If it will not let you install the widget until you add a card, that is a trial, not a free plan.
The SealReply Free plan has no time limit and needs no credit card. Workspace owners who want to see the paid features can start a one-off 14-day trial of the top plan from the plan card in the sidebar or the Billing page ("Try the top plan free for 14 days"). It ends by itself, nothing is charged, and the workspace goes back to the Free plan.
What do free live chat plans limit?
Free plans limit what costs the vendor money: people, storage and compute. What earns the vendor exposure — the widget itself, the badge at the bottom of it — is rarely limited. That is why almost every free plan lets you talk to visitors properly, and charges once you add people, volume or long-term storage.
| Limit | Typical free allowance | When it starts to hurt |
|---|---|---|
| Agent seats | 1 to 2 | Two people want to answer at the same time, or cover different shifts |
| Chats per month | 100 to 500 | One promotion, one viral page, and the month's volume doubles |
| Chat history | 7 to 30 days | A customer comes back in month three asking about "the price you quoted"; the thread is gone |
| Branding | A "Powered by" badge in the chat window | High-ticket or brand-led sites, where it reads as less professional |
| Reports | Overview only, no per-agent or per-site numbers, no older data | You want to know which page brings the most chats, or who replies slowest |
| Routing and automation | No departments, no per-site assignment, no routing rules | Visitors should pick "sales" or "support", or each site needs a different owner |
| Open API and webhooks | Usually not included | You want chats pushed into Slack, a CRM or your own back office |
| Websites | 1 | You launch a second domain or a landing page site |
Two more that people miss: file size and total storage (visitors cannot send a large photo or a video), and support response times — on a free plan you usually get documentation, not a human.
The one question to ask support
Not "what is in the free plan" but "what happens when the monthly allowance runs out". Some tools simply hide the chat widget for the rest of the month, so you do not even collect an email address. The safe behaviour is to switch to an offline form and keep capturing the lead. Ask before you install.
The SealReply Free plan gives you 1 agent seat, 1 website, 300 chats a month, 30 days of history, 2 MB per file and 100 MB of storage, with no API keys or webhooks. We email you at 80% and 100% of the monthly allowance, then give you 10% more; after that the widget switches to an offline form so visitors can still leave an email address and a question, and nobody sees an error. The allowance resets next month.
Is a free plan enough for your website?
It depends on how many conversations you handle, not how much traffic you get. A site with 10,000 visits a day and five chats is comfortably inside a free plan.
| Your situation | Is a free plan enough? | Watch this limit first |
|---|---|---|
| A new business site, personal site or portfolio; 0 to 5 chats a day | Yes, and that will not change soon | None. Set business hours and offline messages and move on |
| A one-person store or online shop; 5 to 30 chats a day | Yes, but keep an eye on volume | Chats per month, history retention |
| Two or three people on shifts, or customers in other time zones; 30+ chats a day | No | Agent seats, reports, routing |
| More than one website, or you run sites for clients | No | Number of websites |
| You want chats pushed into your own systems | No | Open API and webhooks |
| High-ticket or brand-led site | Features are fine, but the badge shows | Whether branding can be removed, and what that costs |
A shortcut: take last month's chat count and double it. Double, because installing live chat raises the number of questions you get — people who would have left without asking now ask. If that number is above the free allowance, plan to upgrade.
It is easy to lose a day comparing feature lists. The handful of things that genuinely differ are the six rows above.
Which limits actually cost you customers?
Of the eight limits, three cost you business. The rest are inconvenient.
The hours when nobody is online
This matters more than every feature combined, and it has little to do with price — what matters is whether the free plan includes business hours, a waiting prompt and offline messages. Time zones make it sharper: your buyer asks a pre-sales question in their afternoon, which is the middle of your night. A visitor who writes and gets nothing back usually does not come back.
The minimum: outside business hours the widget shows a message form instead of claiming someone is online; a visitor who waits too long is asked for an email address; and a missed chat becomes something you can answer by email. All of that is on every SealReply plan, including Free — how to never miss a customer when you're offline walks through the settings.
History kept for 7 to 30 days
Retention is the limit people notice last, because it only bites in month three: a returning customer asks about the quote you gave them, and the thread has been deleted. Short retention is good for privacy — the storage limitation principle in Article 5 of the EU GDPR says personal data should not be kept longer than necessary — but it is bad for follow-up on deals that take months.
The workaround: stay on the free plan and export your history every month. Check that the free plan lets you export at all; on some tools export is a paid feature, which is also how you end up locked in. Every SealReply plan can export chats as CSV or JSON, up to 31 days per export. Free keeps 30 days of history; paid plans keep 180 to 365.
A single agent seat
One seat means one person logged into the inbox at a time. Two people covering different hours have to share an account — do not do that. With a shared login you cannot tell who answered a customer or who changed a setting, and someone who leaves the company leaves with the password. If two people need to answer, that is the moment to pay for seats.
A faster way to decide
Do not build a spreadsheet of pricing pages. Install one free plan on your own site and run it for two weeks, then look at two numbers: how much of the monthly allowance you used, and how often two people wanted to reply at once. Two weeks of your own data beats any comparison table, and a free plan costs nothing to test. How to add live chat to your website covers the install on each platform.
Seven things a free plan should not cut
Features can be thin. These cannot. Tick them off before you install — missing any one of them causes a problem within a month or two:
- Business hours, so the widget stops saying "online" when you have gone home
- Offline messages you can answer by email, so your reply reaches someone who closed the tab
- Mobile alerts, so a new chat reaches you with the inbox closed
- Export on the free plan, so you can leave or keep an archive
- Delete a single visitor's data, for a customer in the EU or UK who asks
- Encrypted storage, or at least a privacy policy that says how messages are stored and who can read them
- An offline form when the allowance runs out, rather than a hidden widget
All seven are in the SealReply Free plan. Live visitors, proactive greetings, lead status and follow-up reminders, blocking visitors and IPs, and two-factor authentication are also on every plan. One platform limit worth knowing about mobile alerts: on iPhone, a web app has to be added to the Home Screen and the device has to run iOS 16.4 or later before it can receive web push, which is Apple's rule — see the WebKit announcement. Whichever tool you pick, test one alert on your own phone before you rely on it.
When should you upgrade from a free plan?
Any one of these signals means it is time. They have something in common: none of them is "I want more features" — each one is already affecting how you answer customers.
| Signal | Why a free plan cannot carry it |
|---|---|
| Two months in a row above 80% of the monthly chats | The next promotion or busy season goes over, and overflow becomes a form |
| Two people have wanted to answer the same chat | One seat means one person in the inbox at a time |
| You are launching a second site or landing page | Free plans normally cover one website |
| Someone asks about a chat from last month and you cannot find it | Retention deleted it |
| Visitors keep reaching the wrong person | Departments and per-site assignment are paid features |
| You want to know which page or source brings the most chats | Full reports are a paid feature |
| You want chats pushed into a team channel or your CRM | Open API and webhooks are usually paid |
| A customer asks whether the badge on your chat means it is outsourced | Removing branding is a paid feature |
The reverse is also true: if the only reason is that the paid plan looks more complete, do not upgrade. Seats and automation you do not use are money leaving every month.
Which SealReply features are paid
Starter and above: extra agent seats and websites, departments, per-site assignment, the announcement and FAQ cards on the widget home, the open API and webhooks. Pro and above: message translation, full per-agent and per-site reports, and hiding "Powered by SealReply". Seats, sites and chat allowances per plan are on the pricing page.
The hidden costs of a free plan
The real price of free is usually not in the feature table. It is in these three things.
One: what removing the badge costs. Branding removal is the main revenue line for a lot of free live chat software, and some vendors charge per website — with three sites that can cost more than a whole plan elsewhere. Check whether it is priced per workspace or per site.
Two: price increases and the cost of moving. After a year on a free plan, your chat history, canned replies and visitor notes all live there, and switching gets expensive. So look at the paid tiers while you are still choosing: what the price is tied to (people, chats, websites) and what the first step up costs. With per-seat pricing, going from one person to three triples the bill.
Three: metered billing. Tools that charge per conversation or per AI reply produce a bill that moves with your traffic; good months cost more, which is hard to budget for. SealReply charges a fixed price per workspace, with seats and websites included in the plan, and warns you before an allowance runs out instead of cutting you off.
Is free live chat secure?
Security should be identical on free and paid plans, and it is a red flag when it is not. If a vendor withholds encryption, export or per-visitor deletion from the free plan, that is a bigger problem than a missing feature.
Four things to look for in the privacy policy: whether messages are encrypted at rest, in what circumstances the vendor's staff can read them, which country the data sits in, and whether you can export and delete data for one visitor. Export matters most on a free plan — without it you are locked in.
On SealReply, the Free plan is treated exactly like the paid ones: every message is encrypted before it is stored, each customer has its own key, and everything travels over HTTPS. Platform staff access needs two-person approval and you are notified. Every plan can export and delete data per visitor. The details are in is your live chat private.
What is in the SealReply Free plan?
The Free plan includes the full set of privacy features and everything you need to answer customers. What is limited is the allowances:
| Free plan | Paid plans | |
|---|---|---|
| Time limit | None, and no card needed | — |
| Agent seats / websites | 1 / 1 | From 3 / 2 up to 30 / 20 |
| Chats per month | 300, plus a 10% buffer | From 2,000 up to 50,000 |
| Chat history | 30 days | 180 to 365 days |
| Live visitors and proactive greetings | Yes | Yes |
| Business hours, waiting prompt, offline messages | Yes | Yes |
| Push notifications on phone and browser | Yes | Yes |
| Lead status and follow-up reminders | Yes | Yes |
| Encrypted storage, own key, export and delete | Yes | Yes |
| Departments and per-site assignment | — | Starter and above |
| Open API and webhooks | — | Starter and above |
| Full reports, message translation | — | Pro and above |
| Hide "Powered by SealReply" | — | Pro and above |
The full list and the sign-up form are on the free live chat page. Installing is one embed snippet plus a one-time domain verification, which takes a few minutes.
FAQ
Is free live chat software really free forever?
It is, as long as it is a free plan and not a free trial. A free plan has no time limit and keeps your account open after the allowance runs out; a trial has a countdown and then charges or downgrades you. Check whether sign-up asks for a card, and whether the pricing page says $0 or "14 days" in that column. The SealReply Free plan has no time limit and needs no credit card.
Can two people share one agent seat?
Technically you can share a login, but do not. With a shared account you cannot tell who answered a customer or who changed a setting, a departing colleague keeps the password, and only one person can be in the inbox at a time anyway. Once two people need to answer, pay for seats.
What happens when the monthly chat limit runs out?
That depends on the tool. The safe behaviour is to switch the widget to an offline form so visitors still leave an email address and a question. The damaging behaviour is hiding the widget, which means you collect nothing for the rest of the month. SealReply emails you at 80% and 100%, adds a 10% buffer, then shows the offline form until the allowance resets.
Is a free plan enough for an online store?
Usually yes, up to roughly 30 chats a day on one storefront, as long as the free plan covers business hours and offline messages. Stores get most of their questions before checkout — sizing, shipping, returns — and those arrive around the clock. Check what happens outside your hours before you check anything else.
Will I lose my chat history when I upgrade?
No. Upgrading inside the same tool keeps everything and extends retention to the new plan's limit. The direction to watch is downgrading: history older than the free plan's retention is cleared afterwards. SealReply keeps your data at the old plan's retention for 30 days after a downgrade, so renewing in that window loses nothing. For anything you need long-term, export monthly.
Can I remove the "Powered by" badge on a free plan?
Almost never — it is the most common paid upgrade in free live chat software. Check how it is priced: per website gets expensive once you run more than one site. SealReply shows "Powered by SealReply" on the Free and Starter plans; Pro and Business can hide it, and it is priced per workspace, not per site.
Next steps
Two weeks on a free plan will answer this better than any article. If you would rather narrow the shortlist first, work through the nine questions in how to choose live chat software. If you want the whole picture — answering, following up and turning chats into sales — read live chat for small business.