What to check before you sign a chatbot contract

The questions that matter more than the demo

A demo shows you the best case. A contract shows you what happens in every other case. Most people spend an hour testing the chatbot and five minutes reading the terms, when it should be closer to the other way around.

You're evaluating a tool that will live on your site or in your support workflow. That means you're making a decision about data, cost, how hard it is to leave, and what happens when the vendor changes their terms next year. Those details live in the fine print, not in the pitch deck.

A good chatbot can save you hours every month. A chatbot locked behind a bad contract can cost you money and headaches for years. The difference between the two often comes down to questions you never think to ask until it's too late.

This checklist is for anyone who's about to sign up for a chatbot vendor, whether you're adding it to your website, routing support tickets through it, or embedding it in your internal tools. Ask these questions before you commit.

What to check on pricing

Start with a simple question: Is the advertised price the real price?

Many vendors quote a base tier, but the features you actually need often live in an add-on. Removing their branding. Raising your conversation cap. Unlocking a real-time refresh of your knowledge base instead of waiting for a weekly update. Check whether those extras are optional or whether most customers end up needing them to run the thing day-to-day. If the base plan looks like one price but the tier most customers actually buy costs two or three times that, you need to know that upfront.

Next, ask what happens if you go over your plan's usage limit. Some vendors cap you hard, meaning the chatbot stops responding once you hit the limit. Others charge per message for overages, which can turn a modest monthly bill into a much larger one if you get unexpected traffic or a product launch drives more visitors than you anticipated. Ask them to walk you through a concrete example: "What would it cost if we hit 50,000 conversations in a month on the Professional plan?" Make them give you a dollar amount, not a vague "you'd need to upgrade."

Ask about billing frequency too. Some vendors lock you into annual billing to get their best price, which means you're paying for twelve months upfront. Others offer monthly billing. If cash flow matters to you, that's worth knowing before you sign.

Finally, check setup. Is there a setup fee? If it doesn't work out after 30 days, is it refundable? Some vendors absorb setup costs; others make it non-refundable, which shifts risk entirely to you. A vendor confident in their product usually offers a refund if you change your mind within the first month.

What to check on getting out

Every vendor says they want to keep you happy. But what does the contract actually say about leaving?

Get a clear answer on notice period. How many days do you need to give to cancel, and is there a minimum term you're locked into? A 12-month contract with 30-day notice means you could be paying for seven months after you've decided to leave. Some vendors offer month-to-month from day one. That's a good sign.

Then ask about removal. Does deletion really just mean removing a script tag from your site, or is there a formal offboarding process, a waiting period before the chatbot actually goes offline, or a support ticket you need to file? Test this by asking a vendor: "Walk me through exactly how the chatbot disappears from my site after I cancel." If they can't give you a one-sentence answer, dig deeper.

Finally, ask about your data. If you leave, where do your chat logs live, and how long does the vendor keep them? Do you need to formally request your data back, or request deletion, or does it happen automatically? Don't let them say "it's our standard practice." Ask for the specific timeline and any action required from you.

What to check on your own data

Every conversation your visitors have with the chatbot is data. You should know what happens to it.

Ask directly: Are conversations stored? If yes, for how long, and who can see them? Can your support team access them? Can the vendor's staff see them for support or debugging purposes? Can the vendor's AI systems learn from them to improve the product for other customers?

This one matters because it touches both privacy and your competitive edge. Some vendors treat your account data as confidential to you only. Your conversations stay on your account, visible only to you and your team. Others use aggregated patterns from your conversations to train their model, which means your visitor questions are part of their training dataset. Your customers' questions become raw material for a product that serves your competitors. Neither approach is automatically wrong, but you should know which one you're signing up for before you commit.

If a vendor does use your data for training, ask whether you can opt out of that data sharing, even if it costs more per month. Some will offer that; some won't. If data privacy is a hard requirement for your business (maybe you handle sensitive customer information), that's a deal-breaker question, not an afterthought.

Also ask about the retention policy. If you cancel tomorrow, does the vendor delete your data immediately or does it sit in their systems for 90 days? Do you need to file a formal deletion request, or does it happen automatically? And can you export your conversation history before you leave, or are you locked out once you cancel?

A short list to bring to any sales call

Don't wait for the vendor to volunteer information. Ask these directly:

• What features are required to make this work for us, and what's the real monthly cost including them?
• What happens to our bill if we exceed our plan's usage limit, and can you show me a concrete example?
• Is there a setup fee, and is it refundable if we cancel within 30 days?
• Are we locked into a minimum term, or can we cancel month-to-month with how many days notice?
• After we cancel, who can still access our chat logs, and for how long does the vendor keep them?
• Are our conversations used to train your product for other customers, or kept separate to our account only?

How we handle this, for what it's worth

We built our pricing to be straightforward. $99 a month, flat rate. No setup fee. No branding-removal fee. No overage fee. No per-message fee.

If you go over your conversation limit, we cap you. We don't charge per message overage. You don't wake up to a surprise bill.

You can cancel any time with no minimum term. Removal is genuinely just deleting the script tag, the same way adding it was just pasting one in. Your data stays yours. Each customer's content and any logged questions are scoped to their own account, never pooled with anyone else's.

If you ever want your data removed, just email us and we'll take care of it, no formal process, no runaround.

That's the business we want to run. If another vendor offers something different, make sure you understand what it costs and what it means for your data before you sign.