Crisp costs $95/mo (Plus) — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $3,420 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$95/month Plus plan ($1,140/yr) is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Chatlet: the pay-once alternative
Chatlet does the same core job for $49, once. Self-hosted live chat — real-time widget, agent dashboard, canned replies, offline messages.
| Chatlet | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $95/month Plus plan ($1,140/yr) |
| Cost over 3 years | $49 | ~$3,420 |
| Agents | Unlimited | Per-plan limits |
| Sites | Unlimited | Per-plan limits |
| Remove branding | There is none | Paid |
| Canned responses | Included | Paid tier |
| Your data | Your server, one SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Source code | MIT, yours | Closed |
Chatlet pays for itself in under 3 weeks vs Crisp's team plan — then live chat is free for as long as you run a website.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Crisp's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Chatlet is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Chatlet — $49, once
Self-hosted live chat — real-time widget, agent dashboard, canned replies, offline messages.