An AI chatbot for a small business is usually sold as a monthly subscription somewhere between the price of a phone contract and the price of a part-time contractor. What varies far more than the headline figure is what you are being charged for: a seat, a conversation, a resolved ticket, or a flat allowance. That choice decides whether your bill is predictable or a surprise in your busiest month.
Serochat costs £49 a month for the Starter plan and £149 a month for Team, in pounds, with a seven-day trial that needs no card. The rest of this piece is the arithmetic behind those numbers and the things they do not cover, because a price page that hides its edge cases is a bill waiting to happen.
The four ways chatbots are priced
- Per seat: you pay for each agent with a login. Sensible for a helpdesk, odd for a bot, since the bot’s work has nothing to do with how many staff you have.
- Per resolution: you pay each time the bot closes a conversation without a human. Aligns the vendor with volume, and gives them a reason to make the bot answer rather than hand off.
- Per conversation or per message: you pay for traffic, answered or not. Predictable until a busy week or a bot-driven spam wave.
- Flat plan with an allowance: a fixed monthly fee covering a stated number of conversations, with a defined behaviour when you exceed it. Predictable, provided the vendor tells you what that behaviour is.
We use the last of these, and the sentence that matters is the one about exceeding the allowance. Ask any vendor to tell you exactly what happens on the conversation after your last included one.
What the plans include
Starter is £49 a month, or £490 a year, which is ten months for twelve. It covers one chatbot, one connected knowledge source, and 500 conversations a month on a fair-use basis. The widget carries a small “Powered by Serochat” line.
Team is £149 a month, or £1,490 a year, and covers up to three chatbots, unlimited connected sources, 5,000 conversations a month, priority email support, and the option to remove our branding.
Business is a custom arrangement through sales rather than a number on a page, because the things that make it custom, such as volumes and contract terms, are not the kind of thing a price card should guess at.
We are not registered for VAT, so the prices shown are the total payable. There is no free tier: every plan starts with a seven-day trial that takes no payment details, and if you add no card the subscription simply ends.
What counts as a conversation
One visitor chat session in a calendar month. If someone opens the widget, asks four questions and gets four answers, that is one conversation, not four. The counter resets on the first of the month.
This matters when comparing prices. A vendor quoting a per-message rate and a vendor quoting a per-conversation allowance are describing different units, and the ratio between them is however chatty your customers are.
What happens when you go over
Nothing dramatic, and nothing silent. Past your monthly allowance, any credit packs on your account draw down first. When those are gone, the bot keeps answering and we email you to say what is happening. Your customers do not meet a switched-off widget because your marketing had a good week.
There is a limit to that generosity, and we would rather state it than imply it is infinite: at roughly fifteen per cent over your allowance, which is 575 conversations on Starter and 5,750 on Team, the widget pauses. Buying a credit pack or waiting for the monthly reset lifts it immediately.
Credit packs are one-time purchases that stack and do not auto-renew: 1,000 conversations for £30, 5,000 for £125, or 25,000 for £500. Priced per conversation, that is 3p, 2.5p and 2p, so the larger packs are cheaper per answer than the smaller ones.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
Your time is the big one. Choosing the documents that answer real questions, testing the bot against the questions you actually get, and writing answers for the gaps is an afternoon at the start and perhaps twenty minutes a week after that. Budget it honestly; a bot connected in ten minutes and never reviewed is where most disappointment starts.
Then there is the cost of a wrong answer, which is the reason we build the way we do. A refund honoured because a bot promised one, or a customer who repeats an invented policy to their friends, is more expensive than any plan on this page. It is also the cost no vendor puts in a comparison table.
Common questions
Is there a free plan?
No. There is a seven-day free trial on every paid plan with no card required, which we think is the honest version of the same thing: you can evaluate it properly, and nothing is charged unless you decide to continue.
Can I cancel?
At any time, from the billing portal. Access runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and we do not refund partial periods unless the law requires it. If we change prices, you get at least 30 days’ notice and the change applies from your next renewal.
Which plan does a small shop need?
Starter, in almost every case. One website source and 500 conversations a month covers a shop with steady traffic and one place its answers live. Team is for teams running more than one bot, or pulling from several systems at once — a help centre, a Drive folder and a wiki.
Is annual billing worth it?
It saves two months on either plan. It is also a twelve-month commitment to a tool you have used for a week, so unless you already know the shape of your support volume, monthly for a quarter is the safer read.
The honest summary is that the subscription is the smaller half of the cost. The larger half is the hour you spend deciding which of your documents are worth answering from — and that hour improves your support whether or not you ever pay us anything.