Is Tidio Free? Free Plan Limits, 7-Day Trial and When to Pay

Yes. Tidio has a permanent Free plan that costs $0, asks for no card and has no time limit.^[1] Each project (Tidio's word for one website or widget setup) gets 50 billable conversations a month, 10 seats, 100 Flows visitors a month and 50 Lyro AI conversations once, for the life of the project. That covers a small shop answering one or two human chats on most days, up to 50 a month; chats that Flows or Lyro handle alone do not count. It does not cover steady AI support, because the Lyro allowance never refills. The 7-day trial is a separate thing: it unlocks the paid features without a card, then drops you back to Free with no charge.

What the Free plan actually gives you

The 50-conversation cap counts only conversations a human touches. A conversation becomes billable once an agent replies or starts it, and it counts once however many messages follow.^[1] Unanswered visitor messages do not count, and neither do replies from Flows or Lyro, so a chat the bot handles alone uses nothing from the quota. Live chat, email tickets, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp all draw from the same pool, counted per project rather than per agent. Ten teammates can share the inbox, and adding operators costs nothing up to that cap. More than 10 seats means Plus, sold through sales.

The feature list is wider than the numbers suggest. Free includes live chat, ticketing, email management, live video calls in the widget, the Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email channels, every native integration including Zapier, the Flows builder with templates and no cap on the number of Flows, basic and Lyro analytics, Copilot, the AI reply assistant, widget customization, the contacts list, and the desktop and mobile apps. Support from Tidio comes over email. In short, Free is the real product with low meters, not a cut-down preview.

What happens when you hit each limit

The conversation cap is the one that hurts. A banner appears at 80%, and at 100% your agents can no longer see or answer new incoming conversations until the quota resets monthly or you upgrade. New chats then go unseen by your team. That is a real risk for a store with a sudden spike in traffic. Free never upgrades itself automatically, so the stop is hard rather than a surprise bill. Watch the banner closely.

The other two meters fail more gently. When 100 Flows visitors are reached, Flows stop for new visitors until the 30-day refresh, but live chat with agents keeps working. One unique visitor who triggers any Flow uses one unit, however many Flows run for them. Lyro is different: when the 50 free conversations are gone, Lyro stops answering and the quota never resets.^[2] Lyro counts a conversation the first time it replies, and a thread closes after 15 minutes of inactivity, so a visitor who returns later starts a new, newly counted thread.

WhatsApp has its own ceiling. Each number gets 1,000 free outgoing messages a month, and agent, Lyro and Flows replies all count toward it. Paid plans can go past that at Meta's local rates, billed by Tidio at the end of the month; Free and trial projects simply cannot send more. Free-form replies also work only within 24 hours of the customer's last message. After that window you need Meta-approved templates, and templates start on Growth.

What the Free plan leaves out

Starter is the first plan with the live visitors list, operating hours and the Chat Page. Those matter if you want to see who is on the site right now or publish an offline schedule. Growth adds the tools a busier team leans on: macros, user permissions and custom roles, automatic chat assignment, advanced analytics with per-agent performance, and native Shopify actions such as refunds, order cancellations and shipping-address edits from the inbox. Plus adds departments, the full OpenAPI, webhooks and live-chat support from Tidio's own team.

AI has its own gate. Lyro product recommendations and the full set of Lyro Actions need a paid Lyro quota, which you can add on any plan, including Free. Lyro starts at $39 a month billed monthly, or $32.50 a month billed annually, for 50 Lyro conversations a month. That quota is billed per conversation Lyro joins, not per resolution. Our Tidio AI playbook covers how Lyro learns from your content and when it hands a chat to a human.

The 7-day trial: no card, then back to Free

Every new account starts with a 7-day trial of the paid plans, and no credit card is required.^[3] It opens the full feature set of any Customer Service, Lyro or Flows plan, plus three Lyro Actions, five pieces of Guidance and Lyro product recommendations for Shopify and WooCommerce stores. Trial projects draw on the same one-time 50 Lyro conversations. Heavy AI testing during that week therefore spends the allowance Free would otherwise keep. Test with care.

When the seven days end, the account moves to Free automatically, with no charge, unless you subscribe. You can also end the trial early and drop to Free at once, and support can grant extra trial time on request. Paid features switch off at that point, among them the visitors list, operating hours, macros, agent permissions, automated chat assignment, satisfaction surveys, native Shopify actions and product recommendations. Automatic upgrades never run during a trial. Nothing gets billed by accident.

When a small team should pay: Starter or Growth

Price follows human-answered volume, not headcount. Up to 50 human conversations a month, Free costs $0. Up to 100, Starter costs $29 a month billed monthly, or $24.17 a month billed annually ($290 a year). From 101 to 250, Growth 250 costs $59 a month billed monthly, or $49.17 a month billed annually ($590 a year). Per conversation, by our arithmetic, Starter works out at $0.29 and Growth 250 at $0.236 on monthly billing. On volume alone, Starter fits between 51 and 100 human conversations a month.

Volume is not the only trigger. A team that needs operating hours or the live visitors list but stays under 50 conversations still pays for Starter. A team that wants macros, permissions or Shopify refunds from the inbox needs Growth regardless of volume. Ten seats come with each of these plans, so adding a fifth or tenth agent never changes the bill. Monthly billing suits a seasonal shop: you can cancel any time, keep paid features to the end of the period, and the project then returns to Free.

By our arithmetic, annual billing saves two of twelve months, about 16.7%, and breaks even with monthly billing at 10 months of use. Starter costs $290 a year billed annually against $348 a year billed monthly. Commit to a year only if you are sure, because the Terms owe no refunds for unused time; the full billing rules sit in our Tidio pricing guide. On monthly Starter and Growth, automatic upgrades are on by default for new projects: at 95% of a quota the package moves up a level unless you switch the option off.

If AI is the reason to upgrade, budget for it separately. A hundred billable conversations on Starter plus a 100-conversation Lyro quota come to $104 a month billed monthly by our arithmetic ($29 plus $75). Next to Starter, even the smallest Lyro quota, $39 a month billed monthly for 50 conversations, costs more than the plan itself. Flows works the same way: past 100 visitors a month, reaching more visitors is a separate paid package on top of the plan.

How Tidio's free tier compares

Free tiers in this category differ mostly in what they meter. Tidio caps the conversations a human answers and lets 10 seats share them. Zoho Desk Free costs $0 for 3 users with email ticketing. Help Scout Free costs $0 for up to 5 users, one inbox and 100 contacts a month, without live chat. Crisp Free gives 2 seats and 100 customer profiles but no AI credits. tawk.to keeps its core live chat free and charges $29 a month to remove its Powered by tawk.to branding.

Among the catalog rivals, Zendesk, Gorgias and LiveChat (now sold to new customers as Text plans) have no free plan, and Freshdesk has no self-serve free plan. Zendesk and Text offer 14-day trials without a card, Gorgias a 7-day trial without a card, and Freshdesk a 14-day trial. For a team that wants live chat, a shared inbox and a taste of AI for nothing, Tidio's mix is unusually complete. A three-person team that mainly needs email ticketing is covered by Zoho Desk Free. Our Tidio alternatives guide compares the paid plans.

The bottom line

Tidio Free is a working help desk with no expiry: 50 human conversations a month, 10 seats and every channel, at no cost. Stay on it while your team answers fewer than 50 conversations a month and does not need the visitors list, macros or permissions. Treat the 50 Lyro conversations as a test, not a service, because they never come back. Once human volume passes 50, Starter is the cheapest step up to 100 a month. Past 100, go straight to Growth 250.