Free AI Chatbot With No Branding: What a Watermark Costs You
Almost every free chat widget pays for itself the same way. It puts a small badge on your website with someone else's name on it. Here is what that badge actually costs you, what vendors charge to take it off, and when it is worth caring about.
The short version
- The badge is the price. Free widgets buy advertising with your website.
- Removal is priced wildly differently. Crisp starts at $295/mo; Tidio charges around $16.67/mo on lower tiers.
- Agencies feel it worst. A logo your client did not approve on a site they paid you to finish.
- It is not always worth paying for. If nobody is judging your stack, spend the money elsewhere.
What the badge is really doing
A free chat widget is not charity. It is a distribution deal you agreed to without reading it. The vendor gives you a working tool, and in return you put a line of their branding on your website, in front of every visitor, forever.
That is a fair trade, and the good vendors are open about it. A widget on a few thousand websites is cheap advertising aimed at the audience most likely to buy chat software. The only question is whether you want your site working as part of someone else's marketing budget.
Disclosure up front: EzyConn is our product, and it sits in the table below with everyone else, so weigh our row with that in mind.
What removing it costs, vendor by vendor
The prices here are not close to each other. We only quote figures the vendor publishes, and where one is not published we describe the billing model and leave the number alone.
| Tool | How branding removal is billed | Published figure |
|---|---|---|
| Crisp | Watermark removal starts on a higher tier | Plus plan, $295/mo |
| Tidio | Separate branding-removal add-on on top of the plan fee | Roughly $16.67/mo on lower tiers |
| Intercom | Per seat, plus a fee for every AI resolution. No free tier to brand. | $39/seat/mo, Fin $0.99 per resolution |
| Tawk.to | Free with unlimited agents; badge removal sold as a paid extra | We do not quote unpublished figures |
| Most other free widgets | Badge removal bundled into a mid or upper tier rather than sold on its own | We do not quote unpublished figures |
| EzyConn | Included in the Professional plan rather than sold as an add-on | Professional plan, $95/mo |
The Crisp figure is the one people find hardest to believe. Watermark removal starts on the Plus plan at $295 a month, so a small business that just wants a clean chat box faces an enterprise-sized bill. The Crisp free tier also has no AI at all.
Tidio takes the opposite approach. Branding removal is roughly $16.67 a month on lower tiers, which is affordable, but it is one more meter on top of the plan fee and the AI allowance. The Tidio free tier includes 50 Lyro AI conversations, and those are a one-off allowance rather than a monthly reset, so free AI stops for good once it is spent. Intercom sits outside this comparison entirely: there is no free tier, seats start at $39 a month each, and Fin is billed at $0.99 per resolution on top.
The agency problem
If you build websites for other people, the badge is not a small annoyance. It is the one visible seam in work the client paid you to finish. In the corner of every page sits a company name they have never heard of, promoting a product they did not buy. It reads as a shortcut even when it is not one.
It also creates a conversation you cannot win. Either you explain that the chat tool is free and this is the cost, which makes the build sound cheap, or you quietly pay and absorb the fee across every client site. At a few dollars a month that is survivable. At the top end the sums stop working by your second client.
When it matters, and when it does not
Not every business should care. A watermark is a trust cost, so it scales with how much trust you are asking a visitor for.
| Type of business | How much trust you are asking for | What the badge signals |
|---|---|---|
| Law firm | High. The visitor is about to share something private. | A third-party name on the chat box raises a question you did not want raised |
| Clinic or dental practice | High. Health questions, plus patients who worry about records. | Looks like an outside call centre rather than your front desk |
| Agency handing over a client site | Very high. You are being paid for the finish. | The client sees a logo they did not approve and did not pay for |
| B2B software | Medium. Buyers notice tooling and quietly judge it. | Reads as early-stage, which can cost you on price |
| Local cafe or salon | Low. Nobody is inspecting your stack. | Almost nothing. Save your money. |
There is a second effect that is easier to measure. A branded chat box is a link out of your website, and a small share of visitors click it. It is not a big number, but it is a strange thing to build into a page whose job is keeping people on it.
Being fair to Tawk.to
Tawk.to is the honest version of this trade, and it deserves credit. It is free with unlimited agents, which no paid competitor comes near. In our scan of 4,278 small business websites it showed up on 9.9% of the sites that had chat at all, which is remarkable for a tool nobody pays for. That reach exists because of the badge, and the badge is what people pay to remove.
There is a fuller comparison in our Tawk.to alternatives piece.
What we do instead
We put the AI on every plan, including the free one, and removing the EzyConn badge comes with the Professional plan rather than as a separate add-on. The free plan is $0 forever with no credit card and no expiry, and it covers 2 people, 1 chatbot, 500 messages and 1,000 AI credits a month that reset, with AI running on GPT-4o and Claude trained on your own website.
Starter at $25 a month adds Workflows, AI Actions, Voice and Outbound for 4 people. Professional at $95 a month removes the EzyConn badge and adds AI Email and AI Insights for 11 people. Enterprise is by agreement, and annual billing takes 20% off. It is all on the pricing page.
If you want to weigh the free tiers against each other properly, start with our best free AI chatbot comparison, and if you need to answer messages after hours, read the companion piece on picking a free AI chatbot with a mobile app.
Common questions
Why do free chat widgets put a badge on your site?
Because the badge is the payment. A free widget on a few thousand websites is cheap, permanent advertising in front of exactly the people who might buy a chat tool. That is a fair trade and the vendors are open about it. The question is only whether you want your site to be part of someone else's marketing budget.
How much does it cost to remove chat widget branding?
It depends entirely on the vendor, and the range is wide. On Crisp, watermark removal starts on the Plus plan at $295 a month. On Tidio, branding removal is a separate add-on of roughly $16.67 a month on lower tiers. Several other vendors bundle it into a mid or upper tier without publishing a standalone price, and we do not quote figures a vendor has not published.
Does removing branding mean the same thing as white label?
No, and mixing them up leads to disappointment. Removing branding means no vendor logo or name on the chat widget your visitors see. White label usually means your own branding across the wider product, including things like the customer-facing portal and emails. On EzyConn, removing the EzyConn badge from the widget comes with the Professional plan at $95 a month.
Is a badge on the widget really a problem for a small business?
It matters most where trust is expensive. A law firm, a clinic or an agency handing over a client site all lose something when a visitor sees a name that is not theirs on the chat box. A local cafe taking booking questions loses almost nothing. Be honest about which one you are before you pay to remove it.
Start free, remove the badge on Professional
The free plan covers 2 people and 500 messages a month, with the AI included and no credit card. It does not expire, and when you want the badge gone, Professional at $95 a month removes it with no separate add-on fee.
Start freeCompetitor figures are limited to prices those vendors publish, checked August 19, 2026. Where no standalone branding-removal price is published we describe the billing model only. Adoption figures come from our own August 2026 scan.