Crisp's team plan is $95/month — $1,140 a year. Intercom bills per seat, plus usage. Chatlet is the same chat bubble in the corner of your site, except you host it: one tiny Node server, one SQLite file, unlimited sites, unlimited agents, unlimited conversations, and no branding-removal fee because there's no branding.
This is the full pricing breakdown: what Crisp actually costs over one, two and three years, what Chatlet gives you for $129 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.
What Crisp actually costs you
At $95/mo (Plus), one Crisp subscription adds up to $1,140 every year — $3,420 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Chatlet is $129 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.
| Chatlet | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Sticker price | $129 once | $95/mo (Plus) |
| Cost after 1 year | $129 | $1,140 |
| Cost after 2 years | $129 | $2,280 |
| Cost after 3 years | $129 | $3,420 |
Three years in, the gap is $3,291 — and every year after that adds another $1,140 to the subscription side of the ledger.
Chatlet vs Crisp, feature by feature
Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:
| Chatlet | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $129 once | $95/month Plus plan ($1,140/yr) |
| Cost over 3 years | $129 | ~$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 |
What you get for $129, once
Self-hosted live chat — real-time widget, agent dashboard, canned replies, offline messages. The highlights:
- ⚡ One-line embed — A single script tag. Shadow-DOM widget (~9 KB of dependency-free JS), so your site's CSS can't break it.
- 🔌 Real-time over WebSockets — Automatic reconnect, an outgoing message queue, and a transparent HTTP-polling fallback when corporate firewalls block WS.
- 🎛️ Agent dashboard — Live-updating inbox with open/closed states and unread badges, typing indicators both ways, sound + browser notifications.
- 🪪 Visitor context sidebar — Current page, referrer, browser and full past-conversation history beside every chat.
Chatlet pays for itself in under 6 weeks vs Crisp's team plan — then live chat is free for as long as you run a website.
Switching is 3 steps
- Buy once on Whop. One-time $129 for the packaged version — Windows desktop app plus one-command VPS deploy.
- Deploy where visitors can reach it. docker compose up -d on a $5 VPS behind your reverse proxy (WebSocket upgrade passed through). Desktop mode is perfect as the always-on agent console.
- Paste the snippet, start chatting. Copy the embed from Sites, paste it before