# Chatbase

Custom AI support agents trained on your content, embedded on your site

## About Chatbase

Chatbase lets you point an AI agent at your website, documents and help content and embed it as a support widget. Bootstrapped by a single founder to roughly $8M ARR with about 18 people, it has since expanded into voice agents, telephony, outbound WhatsApp campaigns and a helpdesk module. Sistava competes on a different axis: employees with roles, layered memory, real tool access and schedules, working across every function rather than answering on one surface.

## Platform details

- Pricing: Tiered plans with message credits that vary by model, so one reply can consume 1 to 6 credits. Extra agents cost $300 per agent per year and removing the Powered by Chatbase badge costs $1,188 per year. Auto-recharge runs $40 per 1,000 credits, and agents stop replying when credits run out.
- Founded: 2023, by Yasser Elsaid
- Funding: Bootstrapped, no venture funding. Around $8M ARR by late 2025 with a team of roughly 18
- Last reviewed: 2026-08-17

## Official website

- [Visit Chatbase](https://chatbase.co)

## Why Chatbase got popular

It nailed time to value. Paste a URL, upload some docs, get an embeddable agent that answers questions about your business. For thousands of small companies that was the first AI thing that worked without a project plan. The business story is remarkable: bootstrapped by one founder, Yasser Elsaid, to roughly $8M ARR by late 2025 with about 18 people and no venture money. That is a rare outcome and it came from picking one job and making it trivially easy. In 2026 it broadened well past the widget, adding voice agents, telephony, outbound WhatsApp campaigns and a helpdesk module, which pushes it toward being a support platform rather than a bot builder.

## Read the credit maths before you commit

Chatbase bills in message credits, and credits are not uniform: a single reply can consume between 1 and 6 depending on which model answers. That makes forecasting harder than a flat per-ticket price. When credits run out, agents stop replying unless auto-recharge is on at $40 per 1,000 credits. That is a real operational risk: your support silently stops during a spike unless you have configured for it. Then there are the surcharges. Extra agents are $300 per agent per year, and removing the Powered by Chatbase badge is $1,188 per year, which is a meaningful line item for a small business that does not want vendor branding on its storefront.

## A bot that answers versus an employee that works

Chatbase is excellent at the retrieval job: someone asks a question, the agent finds the answer in your content and replies well. If that is the problem, it is hard to beat on setup speed. The gap opens when the answer requires doing something across systems, or when nobody has asked and the work still needs doing. Chasing the customer who went quiet, updating the CRM, writing next week content, reconciling payouts. Sistava is built for that second category, which is why the comparison is less about answer quality and more about what happens when there is no question on the screen.

## Comparison

- [Compare Chatbase with Sistava](/en/compare/ai-support/chatbase) — See the two platforms side by side when you are ready to evaluate them.