Chatfuel

Of all the things Chatfuel brings to the table the one I consider my favorite one is its Drag-and-Drop builder for creating chatbots.

No coding or any special skill required, simply click on a button, select the options that you prefer and set that up. Then, repeat the same process to add additional steps to your chatbot... it doesn't get much easier than that!

Chatfuel focuses on Facebook Messenger only but it would be great to be able to leverage some of its chatbot features somewhere else, like on my website, for example.

It's clear that the company decided to focus on a specific platform, and that's ok, but the idea of potentially rely only on one tool for all things chatbots...

The simplicity of building a chatbot is impressive even if you have zero skills

Free version too limited ... before it was much more performing

I run a very small business that sells used baby strollers and relies on customers placing orders via Facebook Messenger. We set up Chatfuel to automate the initial part of the conversation (what model, what colors, what budget, what time constraints and so on) and it has worked well - it was well worth the $15 we initially paid per month.

The Chatfuel pricing structure. The reason I am writing this review is to make it visible that Chatfuel will automatically increase your plan each month by default as your amount of "subscribers" increases. What I didn't understand was that ALL conversations are saved as "reachable" inside of Chatfuel and thus will contribute to your monthly price. Looking over my bills over the last 3 years that I have been a customer and it has been increased 5 times in that time due to increased "usage" - here's the thing, we see the same active usage every month. It's just the pool of finished conversations, marked as "done" on Facebook that are inflating the bill.

My subscription went from $15 to $66 and I feel like it happened without my approval. I contacted the support team about this and the agent I connected with, Larisa, told me there's nothing she can do - so, reading between the lines, it is my own fault that I didn't disable this autoscaling feature in their settings.

I am an Account Manager with another SaaS company. If one of my clients reached out to me with this type of issue, I would try to do something to ease the friction.
These guys? They do not care.

We signed up for the paid program because we had very good results with the free trial. It is a fairly cheap plan and the chat is quite decisive. It allows us to serve our customers quickly and effectively.

Sometimes some customers are not satisfied with the answers but it happens with all chatbots.