Crisp is one of the best-liked live chat products for small businesses: a slick widget, a genuinely pleasant agent inbox, and a platform that has grown into a shared inbox, a CRM, campaigns and a knowledge base. The free tier gets you two seats and the basics.
The growth path is where it bites: the plans small teams actually settle on run $45–95/month — Crisp Plus at $95/month is $1,140 a year — for what is at its core a WebSocket, a widget and an inbox. Chatlet is that core, self-hosted, with unlimited agents and unlimited sites, for $49 once. Here is the honest comparison.
What Crisp does well
Crisp earns its popularity:
- A polished all-in-one: shared inbox, CRM, email campaigns, knowledge base and chatbots on higher plans.
- Excellent native mobile apps — answer chats from anywhere.
- MagicBrowse co-browsing and video calls on the Unlimited tier.
- A genuinely usable free tier for two agents.
If you want chat plus CRM plus campaigns in one hosted suite with mobile apps, Crisp is very good at being that suite.
Where the subscription model hurts
The pricing is a ratchet by design: the free tier hooks you, the features you soon want (triggers, canned responses depth, integrations, more seats) live up the ladder, and by the time chat matters to your business you are at $95/month per workspace. Three years of Plus is roughly $3,420 — for infrastructure that idles at a few kilobytes per conversation.
Every conversation also flows through Crisp's servers — your customers' emails, their questions, your answers — governed by a vendor agreement rather than your own disk. And per-workspace pricing punishes exactly the people this suite targets: agencies and builders running chat on several sites pay the toll per property.
Chatlet: the pay-once alternative
Chatlet is a $49, one-time purchase. The live-chat bubble you own — unlimited agents, unlimited sites, no per-seat pricing. Chatlet covers the live-chat core properly: a ~9 KB shadow-DOM widget that one script tag installs, real-time WebSocket delivery with auto-reconnect and an HTTP-polling fallback for corporate firewalls, an agent dashboard with unread badges and typing indicators both ways, a visitor sidebar showing current page and full history, /shortcut canned responses, offline "leave a message" mode with BYO-SMTP email alerts, per-site embed snippets and downloadable transcripts.
The source code is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/live-chat — free to build and run yourself, forever. Buying the packaged version on Whop gets you the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates. Either way, there is no account, no telemetry and no renewal date.
Head to head
| Chatlet | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $95/mo (Plus, per workspace) |
| Cost over 3 years | $49 | ~$3,420 |
| Where your data lives | Your machine / your server | Their cloud |
| Usage limits | None — unlimited use | Seats & features by plan; per-workspace pricing |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Who should stay with Crisp
Stay with Crisp if you need native mobile agent apps, chatbots, co-browsing, or the integrated CRM-and-campaigns suite — Chatlet does none of those. If your support team lives on their phones, Crisp's apps alone may settle it.
Switch if what you actually need is the chat bubble, a solid agent dashboard and your data on your own box — especially if you run multiple sites. One Chatlet install powers all of them, with as many agents as you like, and the bill never repeats.
Making the switch
Step 1 — Buy once on Whop. One-time $49 for the packaged version — Windows desktop app plus one-command VPS deploy.
Step 2 — 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.
Step 3 — Paste the snippet, start chatting. Copy the embed from Sites, paste it before