How much does Chatwoot cost?

Chatwoot Cloud has four tiers, priced per agent per month on annual billing: Hacker at $0 (capped at 2 agents and 500 conversations a month), Startups at $19, Business at $39, and Enterprise at $99. The self-hosted Community Edition is free with no agent limit — you pay only for the server, which for a mid-sized install is a 4 GB VPS. The figure most people miss is that each Cloud tier also caps how long your conversation history is kept: 30 days on Hacker, 6 months on Startups, 1 year on Business, 2 years on Enterprise.

Does Chatwoot delete old conversations?

On Cloud, yes — each tier has a data retention limit, and history older than that limit is removed. Hacker keeps 30 days, Startups 6 months, Business 1 year, Enterprise 2 years. This matters more than it sounds: a support inbox that has been running for a year is already past the Startups limit, so a team that picked the $19 tier for price will find that the oldest third of its conversations is gone. Self-hosted Chatwoot has no retention limit at all — your history lasts as long as your disk does.

What server do I need to self-host Chatwoot?

Less than most people expect. On a production install running 8 client accounts, 20 inboxes and 348,703 messages, the four Chatwoot containers use about 1.8 GB of RAM in steady state — roughly 827 MB for Rails, 595 MB for Postgres, 368 MB for Sidekiq and 7 MB for Redis. The database itself is 997 MB on disk. A 4 GB VPS runs that comfortably. The important property is that this footprint is driven by message volume, not by how many agents you add, so the cost does not scale per seat the way Cloud does.

Is Chatwoot Cloud worth it compared to self-hosting?

It depends on whether you already have someone who can run a server. Cloud costs per seat and never asks you to think about Postgres; self-hosting costs one small server and asks you to think about it several times a year. For a 5-person team, Cloud on the Business tier is about $195 a month against roughly $20-40 for a VPS — but that gap only pays for itself if the ops work costs you less than $155 a month of attention. For a 30-seat install the Cloud bill passes $1,000 a month and self-hosting wins decisively. Below about 5 seats, or with no ops capacity at all, Cloud is genuinely the better buy.

How many agents can I have on self-hosted Chatwoot?

As many as you want. The Community Edition has no seat licence and no per-agent charge — the limit is what your server can handle, and agents are cheap in resource terms compared to message volume. This is the single biggest structural difference from Cloud, where every seat you add is another $19 to $99 a month, forever.

Is there a Chatwoot discount code?

Yes, and the honest number is small. According to the [Chatwoot Affiliate Program](https://www.chatwoot.com/affiliate-program), referrals receive 5% off and the partner is paid a share of the subscription for the first 12 months. My code is ACHIYAVS — it follows that published offer at 5% off, on monthly or yearly billing and on every paid tier, and I earn a commission when you use it. Codes advertised elsewhere as 70% off or $100 off are not consistent with those published terms. One exception exists outside the programme: the [fazer.ai partnership in Brazil](https://fazer.ai/parceria-chatwoot) advertises 15% off an Enterprise licence for eligible businesses in Brazil, which is a negotiated regional partnership rather than a coupon. Chatwoot may run separate promotions, so verify the order summary before paying.

Chatwoot Pricing 2026: What It Actually Costs to Run

Chatwoot Cloud costs $19, $39 or $99 per agent per month depending on tier, with a free 2-agent Hacker plan. Self-hosting the Community Edition costs nothing in licence fees and has no agent limit — you pay only for a server, and a real production install with 348,703 messages fits in about 1.8 GB of RAM. The number that decides it for most teams is not the monthly price but the data retention cap: Cloud deletes conversation history older than 30 days, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years depending on tier, and self-hosted keeps everything.

Most articles about Chatwoot pricing copy the four numbers off the pricing page and stop. That is not useful, because the sticker price is not the cost. I run Chatwoot in production for eight client accounts, so this page is the version I wish had existed: the published prices, the limits underneath them, and what the free option actually consumes when you measure it.

Disclosure before we start: ACHIYAVS is my affiliate code under the Chatwoot Affiliate Program, which publishes the terms: referrals get 5% off, and the partner is paid a share of the subscription for the first 12 months. Self-hosting, which takes up most of this page, earns me nothing, and for a lot of readers it is still the right answer.

Chatwoot Cloud: the published prices

Per agent, per month, on annual billing:

Tier	Price	Agents	Data retention	Captain AI credits
Hacker	$0	up to 2	30 days	—
Startups	$19	unlimited	6 months	300 / month
Business	$39	unlimited	1 year	500 / month
Enterprise	$99	unlimited	2 years	800 / month

Startups unlocks unlimited conversations and the messaging channels — email, WhatsApp, SMS, social DMs. Business adds teams, routing rules, the full reporting suite and SLA management. Enterprise adds SSO/SAML, audit logs and custom branding removal.

The column nobody quotes

Look again at data retention. It is the row that decides which tier you actually need, and it is almost never mentioned in pricing round-ups.

A support inbox is a record. When a customer writes “you told me in March that this was included,” someone has to go and look. On the Startups tier, anything older than six months is not there to look at.

My own install has been collecting messages since 25 November 2025. That is 282 days. On the $19 tier, roughly three months of that history would already have been deleted — not archived, deleted. To keep 282 days you need the $39 tier.

So the real question is not “can I live on $19” but “how far back do I need to see.” For most support teams the answer is longer than six months, and that quietly doubles the price.

Self-hosting: what it actually consumes

The Community Edition is free, unlimited agents, and you run it on your own server. Everyone knows that part. What nobody publishes is what “your own server” needs to be.

Here is my production install, measured today.

The workload:


Client accounts	8
Inboxes	20
Seats	34
Conversations, all time	10,321
Messages, all time	348,703
Messages, last 30 days	125,521
Collecting since	25 Nov 2025

What it uses, steady state:

chatwoot-rails-1       827 MiB
chatwoot-postgres-1    595 MiB
chatwoot-sidekiq-1     368 MiB
chatwoot-redis-1         7 MiB
                     ---------
                      1.80 GiB

The Postgres database is 997 MB on disk. The whole box sits at 20 GB of 38 GB used, and that disk is shared with other services.

348,703 messages across 20 inboxes fit inside about 1.8 GB of RAM. A 4 GB VPS runs this without strain, and you can price one of those at any provider for a small fixed monthly sum.

The structural point matters more than the number: this footprint is driven by message volume, not by seat count. Adding an agent to a self-hosted install costs nothing. Adding an agent to Cloud costs $19 to $99 a month, every month, forever.

Where the two lines cross

Team size	Cloud (Business, $39)	Self-hosted
2 agents	$78 / mo	one small server
5 agents	$195 / mo	one small server
10 agents	$390 / mo	one small server
34 agents	$1,326 / mo	one small server

The right-hand column does not change. That is the whole argument.

But the left-hand column buys something real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

The cost that is not in either column

Self-hosting is not free. It costs the thing hardest to put in a table: your attention, at inconvenient times.

In the months I have run this install I have dealt with Postgres connection-pool exhaustion, a Redis eviction policy that silently dropped background jobs, a log rotation config that corrupted an access log badly enough to break my own monitoring, and an upgrade that reverted files I had mounted into the container. Each of those was a real evening.

None of it was Chatwoot’s fault. All of it was the price of the $0 licence.

Cloud has a hidden cost too, and it is the retention cap above — you are renting your own history, and it expires.

So which one

Take Cloud if support is not your engineering problem, your team is small, and you would rather pay for that boundary than own it. That is a legitimate purchase, not a defeat. Pick the tier by how far back you need to see, not by headcount alone.

Self-host if you already have someone comfortable on a server, you have more than a handful of seats, or you need history you control. The economics improve with every seat you add and never get worse.

A third option exists and is worth naming: managed self-hosting, where someone else runs the server for you and the data stays yours. That is what my own shop does for clients, so treat this paragraph as the interested party it is.

The discount, since you will look for it

If you do go with Cloud: the code is ACHIYAVS. Per the Chatwoot Affiliate Program it takes 5% off, on monthly or yearly billing and on every paid tier, and I earn a commission on it.

I am specific about the number because the coupon sites are not. Search for a Chatwoot code and you will find “70% off,” “$100 off,” START, PINTU, KUMAR, SAVE55. According to the Chatwoot Affiliate Program, the customer receives 5% off and the partner is paid a share of the subscription for the first twelve months. Codes advertising more than that are not consistent with the published terms.

One exception sits outside that programme: the fazer.ai partnership in Brazil advertises 15% off an Enterprise licence for eligible businesses in Brazil. That is a negotiated regional partnership, not a coupon you can type at checkout.

On 34 seats the Chatwoot Affiliate Program discount works out to roughly $33 a month. It is not a reason to choose Cloud. If you are choosing Cloud, choose it because you decided your evenings are worth more than the difference.

Workload and resource figures measured on a production install, 2 September 2026. Tier prices, retention limits and Captain AI credit allowances from Chatwoot’s published pricing. For a feature-by-feature comparison against Intercom, see Chatwoot vs Intercom 2026.