How to create a chatbot for your website: free, DIY, or built

You've seen chat bubbles on every other website, and you're wondering how to put one on yours. Maybe customers keep emailing the same five questions. Maybe the contact form fills up overnight and you spend every morning catching up.

There are four ways to create a chatbot for your website: switch on a free app, set up a DIY chatbot builder, code one yourself, or get one built. Each one suits a different business, and the cheapest start isn't always the cheapest finish.

Matey does custom chatbot development for Australian businesses: online stores, retailers, tradies, and service businesses. We've built demo mateys for nearly 300 Australian businesses, so this guide is written by people who build these every day. It covers the steps for each way, what they really cost, what goes wrong, and how to tell which one is right for you.

How do you create a chatbot for your website?

You create a chatbot for your website in five steps, whichever way you build it:

1. Pick its jobs. Write down the ten questions customers ask most, from your inbox, your phone, and your staff. Those are the chatbot's job description.
2. Pick a way to build it. A free app, a DIY chatbot builder, your own code, or a custom build.
3. Give it your content. Products, prices, stock, shipping, returns, opening hours, and FAQs. A chatbot only knows what you give it.
4. Test it with hard questions. The odd ones, the angry ones, and the ones it shouldn't answer.
5. Add it to your site and keep it fresh. Install the app or paste the code, then update its content whenever your products or policies change.

Step 3 decides whether the chatbot is any good. An AI chatbot that can't see your real catalogue will either say "I don't know" or, worse, make something up. Our guide to what a chatbot is explains the difference between scripted and AI chatbots if you're not sure which one you're after.

What are the ways to create a chatbot for a website?

The four ways to create a chatbot for a website are a free app, a DIY chatbot builder, coding it yourself, and getting it built. Here's what each one costs, using each vendor's own pricing page:

How do you create a chatbot for your website with a free app?

On Shopify, you create a free chatbot for your website by installing Shopify Inbox from the Shopify App Store. Its AI agent reads your catalogue, inventory, and policies, you set its tone and rules, and you answer the chats it can't.

Shopify Inbox is the best free place for a Shopify store to start, and we tell stores that. It's made by Shopify, it costs nothing, and it knows your products from day one. Where it runs out is anything outside Shopify's own data: buying guides on your blog, a hire calendar, the rule your staff all know but nobody wrote down, or a question that needs two products compared.

Tidio's free plan and Botpress's free plan work on most other websites. Tidio gives you 50 AI conversations once, then you're on a paid plan. Botpress gives you 100 conversations a month. Both are fine for trying the idea, and too small for a busy store.

How do you create an AI chatbot for your website with a chatbot builder?

You create an AI chatbot with a chatbot builder like Tidio, Chatbase, or Botpress by signing up, pointing it at your website so it reads your pages, adding your FAQs and documents, then pasting its one line of code into your site. Most builders walk you through it step by step.

The steps look much the same in each one:

1. Sign up and create a new chatbot (Chatbase calls it an agent, Tidio calls its AI agent Lyro).
2. Train it on your content. Give it your website address so it can read your pages, then upload FAQs, policies, and product files.
3. Set its rules. Its name, tone, what it must never say, and when to hand over to a person.
4. Test it in the builder's preview window.
5. Install it. Copy the script and paste it into your site's code before the closing body tag, or use the builder's app or plugin for Shopify, WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace.

Two things catch people out with DIY chatbot builders. The first is the meter: most charge per conversation or per message, so a good month costs more. Chatbase's Hobby plan includes 700 message credits a month, and extra credits are US$40 per 1,000. The second is staleness. Chatbase only resyncs your content automatically from its Basic plan up, so on Hobby a chatbot trained in March still thinks last season's stock is on the shelf until someone retrains it. Removing the "Powered by Chatbase" badge is another US$99 a month.

Can you create a chatbot for your website with ChatGPT?

You can't put a custom GPT on your website. Custom GPTs live inside ChatGPT: making one needs a paid ChatGPT plan, and anyone using it needs a ChatGPT account. There's no way to drop one into the chat bubble on your homepage.

What you can do is use the same kind of AI on your website another way. Chatbot builders like Chatbase run on AI models from OpenAI and others, so you get ChatGPT-style answers in your own chat window. Or a developer connects an AI model's API to a chat window on your site, which is the code-it-yourself route.

How do you build a chatbot for a website from scratch?

You build a chatbot for a website from scratch by collecting your content, making it searchable, sending each question and the right pieces of content to an AI model's API, and showing the answer in a chat window you code yourself. Python and JavaScript are the usual languages.

The pieces a from-scratch chatbot needs:

1. Your content, in a form a computer can search. Every product, page, and policy, split into small pieces and indexed, so the chatbot can find the three that answer a question.
2. A server that talks to the AI model. Your API key lives here, never in the browser, or anyone can find it and run up your bill.
3. The instructions. What the chatbot is, what it may say, what it must never say, and how it should answer.
4. A chat window. The bubble, the conversation, and the code that puts it on every page.
5. The boring bits. A hand-over to a person, a record of every chat, limits so nobody can spam it, and a refresh that pulls in your new products and prices every day.

The first four are a weekend project for a confident developer. Number 5 is where the weeks go, and it's what decides whether customers trust it. Coding it yourself makes sense if you're a developer who enjoys this, or your business needs something no builder offers.

What does it take to build a custom chatbot for a website?

A custom chatbot for a website takes a full read of the business: every product, every policy, and every guide, kept fresh every day, plus a hand-over to a person and a round of trying to break it before customers ever see it. That's how Matey builds custom chatbots for Australian businesses.

Here's what that looked like on two real builds (stores unnamed):

• An outdoor gear store with 7,300 products. The matey reads every product with its sizes and stock, plus the store's buying guides and staff gear lists. It rereads the whole catalogue every night, so it never recommends a tent that sold out yesterday. It checks live stock before it answers, reads the hire calendar so it can say what's free on the weekend, and adds products to the customer's cart.
• A Shopify boutique with strict refund rules. The owner spelled out the store's refund line word for word, and the matey sticks to it. Anything it can't finish goes to the team's existing Shopify chat, so customers only ever see one chat. Then the store's team tried to break it, and we fixed what they found the same day.

None of that is clever AI. It's the unglamorous work around it: reading everything, keeping it fresh, knowing when to hand over, and testing before launch. That work is what a DIY chatbot builder leaves to you.

What goes wrong when you create a chatbot for your website yourself?

The four things that go wrong most when you create a chatbot for your website yourself are stale answers, made-up answers, no way to reach a person, and a bill that grows with every chat.

• Stale answers. The chatbot was trained once and never again, so it quotes old prices and recommends sold-out stock.
• Made-up answers. An AI chatbot that can't find the answer guesses, and its guess sounds just as confident as the truth. In Canada, Air Canada had to honour a refund policy its own website chatbot invented, after a tribunal rejected its argument that the chatbot was responsible for its own words (Law Society Journal). Your chatbot speaks for your business.
• No way out. A customer stuck in a loop with a bot that can't help is angrier than one who just waited for an email.
• The meter. Per-conversation pricing looks cheap until your busy season.

Chats also hold personal information: names, emails, phone numbers, and order details. If your business is covered by the Privacy Act, handle it under the Australian Privacy Principles: add the chatbot to your privacy policy and know where the chats are stored.

How much does it cost to add a chatbot to your website in Australia?

Adding a chatbot to your website in Australia costs nothing with Shopify Inbox, around US$30 to US$150 a month with a DIY AI chatbot builder, or a flat $149 AUD a month for a custom chatbot from Matey, built and installed free. DIY builders usually charge more as your chats grow. Matey's price includes unlimited conversations.

Our pricing page compares what AI chatbots cost in Australia in more detail, side by side.

Should you create a chatbot yourself or get one built?

Run the Matey DIY-or-built test. Answer these seven questions about your business:

1. Are your answers all on your website already? Yes points to DIY.
2. Do you have fewer than a few hundred products? Yes points to DIY.
3. Do your prices, stock, or dates change every week? Yes points to built.
4. Do customers ask which product suits them, not just "do you have it"? Yes points to built.
5. Do you have someone who'll read the chats and fix wrong answers every week? Yes points to DIY.
6. Would a wrong answer about refunds, prices, or safety cost you money? Yes points to built.
7. Is your website on Shopify with simple questions? Yes points to Shopify Inbox first.

Mostly DIY answers: start with Shopify Inbox or a chatbot builder, and come back if it outgrows them. Mostly built answers: you'll spend more fixing a DIY chatbot than you'd pay to have it done properly.

Want to see what a custom-built one does on a real website? Try a matey on the homepage.