Tidio Buyer's Checklist: What to Check Before You Pay

Before you buy Tidio, check one number: how many conversations a month a person on your team actually answers. Tidio prices each project, its word for one website or widget setup, by billable conversations, and 10 seats come included on Free, Starter and Growth. Starter costs $29 a month billed monthly, or $24.17 a month billed annually, for 100 billable conversations; Growth starts at $59 a month billed monthly, or $49.17 billed annually, for 250 ^[1]. Our verdict: Tidio is a sound buy for a team of up to 10 with a predictable chat volume. AI is the part that surprises buyers. It runs on its own meter.

Volume first: three meters, not one price

A conversation becomes billable once a human agent replies or starts it, and it counts once however many messages follow. Unanswered visitor messages do not count, and neither do conversations that Lyro (the AI agent) or Flows (the rule-based chatbot builder) handle alone. That rule cuts both ways. Automation shrinks the conversation tier you need, but Lyro and Flows are priced and capped separately, so the plan price never covers AI or chatbots beyond the free amounts. Run the counts below before you compare plans.

• Count last month's human-answered conversations. Free covers 50 a month, Starter 100, and Growth tiers run from 250 to 2,000; the 2,000-conversation tier is $349 a month billed monthly.
• Estimate how many conversations Lyro will join. Every project gets 50 free Lyro conversations once, never refreshed, and a paid Lyro quota starts at $39 a month billed monthly, or $32.50 a month billed annually, for 50 Lyro conversations a month.
• Count the unique visitors your Flows will reach. Free includes 100 a month; paid Flows start at $29 a month billed monthly, or $24.17 billed annually, for 2,000 visitors.
• Plan for the ceiling. At 100% of the conversation quota, agents cannot see or answer new conversations until the monthly reset or an upgrade.

The arithmetic matters more than the plan names. By our arithmetic, 100 human conversations plus 100 AI conversations come to $104 a month billed monthly, and raising the AI side to 500 conversations lifts the total to $379 a month. Next to Starter, even the smallest Lyro quota, $39 a month billed monthly for 50 conversations, costs more than the conversation plan itself. Lyro bills per conversation it joins, not per resolution; a thread closes after 15 minutes of inactivity, and a later message from the same visitor opens a new, newly counted one. Pay-per-resolution billing exists only on Premium.

Seats and the plan gates that decide your tier

Seats are rarely the problem below 10 people, because Free, Starter and Growth each include 10 and adding operators up to that cap costs nothing. The eleventh seat is the hard wall: more than 10 needs Plus, which Tidio lists from $300 a month plus monthly usage, sold through sales. Volume is not the only reason to move up, either. Several features that small teams assume are basic sit behind Growth, while the developer and admin tools sit behind Plus. Match each must-have to its lowest plan.

• Need a live visitors list, operating hours or a hosted Chat Page? Those start on Starter.
• Need macros (canned responses), user permissions with custom roles, automatic chat assignment or advanced analytics? Those start on Growth, and automatic assignment covers live chat and social while emails stay unassigned.
• Run a Shopify store? Cancelling unfulfilled orders, refunds and shipping-address edits from the inbox are Growth features.
• Need departments, several projects in one inbox, your own logo, or ticketing automations? Plus includes them.
• Need SSO, a super admin role or the Mobile SDK? Those are Premium only, at custom pricing.

When volume is your only reason to leave the entry plan, the break-even is simple. The cost per human-answered conversation is $0.29 on the 100-conversation tier and $0.236 on the 250-conversation tier, both billed monthly, by our arithmetic. That means any month with 101 to 250 answered conversations belongs on Growth, which also brings macros, permissions and assignment into the same price. Below 100 conversations, the extra Growth features are the only reason to pay for it.

Automatic upgrades, billing terms and refunds

This is the area buyers skip and later regret. Automatic upgrades are on by default for new projects on monthly self-serve Customer Service, Lyro and Flows packages: an alert arrives at 80% of a quota, and at 95% the package moves up a level, from Growth 250 to Growth 400 in Tidio's own example ^[2]. It never happens on Free, during the trial, on annual plans or on Plus. You can switch it off at checkout or later, and the alerts continue. Separately, the Terms let Tidio upgrade an over-limit account to the plan matching its use and suspend service if you refuse and keep exceeding it.

• Decide at checkout whether automatic upgrades stay on.
• Use the 7-day trial first, which needs no card, unlocks every paid feature, and drops to Free with no charge.
• Price annual billing honestly. Starter costs $290 a year billed annually against $348 a year billed monthly, so annual pays off only if you stay at least 10 months.
• Read the refund rule before prepaying. Tidio owes no refunds, including for unused time, and a discretionary refund is capped at three months of service ^[3].
• Note the timing. Plan changes take effect at the next billing cycle, and cancelling keeps paid features until the period ends.

Channels, platforms and installation

Live chat, email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are native on every plan, with no per-channel or per-agent fee. WhatsApp is the one channel with usage costs. Each number gets 1,000 free outgoing messages a month, counting agent, Lyro and Flows replies; above that, paid plans are billed by Tidio at month end at Meta's local rate with no markup, and you can set a spending cap or block paid usage ^[4]. Free and trial projects stop at 1,000, and Instagram needs a Business account linked to a Facebook Page.

• Need SMS or phone calls? Tidio has no native SMS or voice channel; only third-party or custom integrations exist.
• Message WhatsApp customers after 24 hours? That requires Meta-approved templates, which need Growth or higher, and Tidio cannot start a WhatsApp conversation with a new contact.
• Confirm your install path: one JavaScript snippet, the WordPress plugin, the Shopify app (switch on its App embed again after every theme change), or custom code on Wix, which needs a paid Wix plan and a connected domain. Run one method at a time.
• Check devices. Agents get desktop apps for Windows and macOS plus iOS and Android apps.

Integrations and the API gate

Most native integrations work on every plan, Free included: HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Shopify, WooCommerce and Google Analytics 4 among them. Two limits catch buyers. Zapier runs one way only, from Tidio to another app, and passes only data a Flow collected. And the developer platform starts on Plus, since OpenAPI, webhooks and the Analytics API need Plus or Premium. The one exception is the product endpoints for Lyro recommendations, which work with any paid Lyro quota at 10 requests a minute. The full map is in our Tidio integrations guide.

• List every system that must receive Tidio data, and mark which ones need an API or webhook.
• Need Slack alerts or Stripe data in the inbox? Both integrations are Plus and Premium only.
• Connecting Zendesk? Tidio's integration asks for a Zendesk API token, while Zendesk has not let accounts create new API tokens since October 2026. Confirm the connection method with Tidio.

Security, support and the exit

Tidio says it completed a SOC 2 Type II examination, with the report available on request, and its Terms include a GDPR data processing agreement. Data is mainly processed in the EEA, but the privacy policy says customer information may be transferred to and processed in the United States. Tidio is not a HIPAA business associate. Its AI Terms forbid medical, legal or investment advice without qualified human oversight, require consent for high-risk uses such as credit decisions, and oblige you to tell end users they are talking to AI.

• Need an audit log, SCIM provisioning, IP restrictions or a choice of data region? Tidio does not publish any of them.
• Need an uptime commitment? The Terms state none, though a public status page exists and ticket SLA policies work as internal reply targets.
• Check support by plan. Email support comes with every plan, live chat with Tidio starts on Plus (weekdays), Slack support is Premium, and there is no phone support.

Leaving is easy to start and slow to finish. Cancel paid plans under Settings > Billing before you remove the widget, because uninstalling does not stop billing. On WordPress, deactivating the plugin only hides the chat, so delete it; on Shopify, switch off the App embed before removing the app. Deleting a project removes its agents and collected data, so export first. If this checklist turns up a gate you cannot accept, compare the per-agent and per-ticket options in our Tidio alternatives guide.

• Export contacts as CSV, knowing that only the properties currently shown in the list are exported.
• Budget time for transcripts, which export one at a time as CSV with no batch download.
• Remember that Flows, Workflows and Actions export as JSON, but only for import into another Tidio project.

The bottom line

Tidio rewards buyers who measure first. Count human-answered conversations, estimate AI and Flows volume separately, and decide on automatic upgrades before checkout. Keep the refund rule in view before paying annually. If your team stays at 10 seats or fewer and needs no API access, Starter or Growth covers live chat, email and social channels at a price set by volume, not headcount. If you need SSO, webhooks, departments or more seats, budget for Plus or Premium through sales. Full tier tables are in our Tidio pricing breakdown.