The tawk.to alternative where AI is not a paid add-on

miniDesk is a tawk.to alternative where the AI is part of the plan rather than a paid add-on. tawk.to's chat is free, but its AI agent and badge removal are each billed monthly, per property. miniDesk includes AI on the free plan (75 conversations a month) and removes the badge on every paid plan, from $39.

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  • Free plan, no card
  • AI on every plan
  • One flat price per workspace

tawk.to's platform truly is free: live chat, unlimited agents, knowledge base, no card, provided you retain their badge. The AI is largely not. A free Hobby tier offers 100 message completions that cannot escalate a conversation to a human, and then AI Assist begins at $29 a month for 1,000 message completions, where a completion is every response the AI produces in a live channel, including the Smart Reply suggestions your own agents glance at and discard. Removing the badge costs another $39 a month, and every add-on is billed per website. miniDesk bundles AI replies on the free tier and strips the badge on every paid tier. If your team is primarily humans responding, tawk.to is the lower bill and you should accept it.

For a room full of human agents, tawk.to prevails on price, and by a wide margin

They charge nothing per seat and we price seats by tier, so the math favors them. Fifty human agents on tawk.to with AI Assist Growth and white-label runs roughly $68 a month. The same fifty on miniDesk Scale is $349. That is the factual shape of it. The comparison only flips when the AI is doing the responding, because tawk.to meters the AI by completion, tallying every response it produces, while we count the conversation once regardless of how many times the AI speaks within it.

The full comparison

Arranged in four groups, following the sequence a buyer follows. Capabilities come before costs, because cheaper than what is the first question a pricing comparison must settle.

Channels

  • Live chat widget on your site

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Shared email inbox

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Web form, separate from the chat widget

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Not available

AI

  • AI that answers customers on its own

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Answers drawn from your own documents

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Agent-assist copilot in the inbox

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included, then billed by usebilled by use

Developer

  • REST API

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • MCP server, published and supported

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Not available

What the price covers

  • The AI costs nothing beyond the plan price

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included, then billed by usebilled by use

  • A free plan with the AI on it

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Unlimited free conversations

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included

  • Adding a teammate costs nothing

    miniDesk
    Included
    tawk.to
    Included
  • included
  • costs more than the plan
  • not available

Checked against each vendor's own published documentation, September 2026.

What you actually pay at scale

Three actual teams, priced from each vendor's own published pages, with one caveat worth flagging: tawk.to's AI Assist tiers live in their help centre rather than on their pricing page, which shows only the entry price. Their figures are monthly, since we sell no annual plan to compare against, and they include the $39 a month their help centre charges for badge removal, though their own marketing pages display $29 for the identical add-on. Each scenario counts a conversation as three message completions, which is an assumption rather than a published rate: nobody in this category publishes turns per conversation, so three is derived from the vendors who bill on that unit and from the largest measured conversation corpora. It deliberately omits the AI Commands and the discarded Smart Reply suggestions that consume the same allowance, so it reads their bill conservatively rather than aggressively. All of it is per website, not per account.

Your numbers

$39miniDesk$0.104 each$138tawk.to$0.368 each

miniDesk Starter, one flat price per workspace, sized by the 375 AI conversations you set above. tawk.to is priced on the cheapest tier that fits these seats and has an AI agent answering customers, at their month-to-month rate wherever they publish one, because we sell no annual plan to hold an annual rate against. tawk.to is cheaper on a yearly commitment, so this is the dearer of their two rates and the only one comparable to ours.

Three real teams

Startup

5 seats, 375 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Starter, all in
$39
tawk.to
~$138
+255%

Growing team

8 seats, 2,250 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Growth, all in
$99
tawk.to
~$438
+340%

Large support team

25 seats, 12,000 AI conversations a month

miniDesk Scale, all in
$349
tawk.to
~$758
+115%

Each vendor's own list prices, September 2026, in USD, on the cheapest plan that fits the seats and includes an AI agent. Monthly rates where published, so no annual discount. Volumes count the conversations the AI handles. tawk.to's tiers and its $39 badge removal come from their help centre, not their pricing page. Credits are counted at three a conversation, our assumption. Check their pricing pages before you decide.

Checked against: tawk.to pricing

Which one should you actually buy?

The AI handles most of your conversations

We count a conversation once, regardless of how many turns the AI takes within it. tawk.to tallies every response the AI produces, so a four-turn thread is four completions and a discarded Smart Reply is a fifth. The more work the AI does, the wider the gap between those two counting methods grows.

Pick miniDesk

You want your own branding without paying extra

Removing the badge costs $39 a month on tawk.to, per property. On miniDesk the badge comes off on every paid tier, beginning at $39 for the entire workspace with AI already bundled.

Pick miniDesk

You have a large team of human agents and minimal AI volume

tawk.to charges nothing per agent, period. Fifty people responding to chats costs the same as one. We price seats by tier, so at that profile tawk.to is several times cheaper and no feature comparison changes that.

Pick tawk.to

Your budget is zero and must remain zero

tawk.to's free platform is genuinely free and genuinely unlimited on team members, provided you retain their badge on the widget. Our free tier is one seat. If you need five people in a shared inbox at no cost, accept tawk.to and treat the AI as a future purchase.

Pick tawk.to

Questions, answered honestly

The platform is, and it is a legitimate offer: live chat, unlimited team members, and a knowledge base at no cost. Their sole condition is the badge: "Don't remove it, and it is free for life." The two elements that make it feel like a product rather than a widget are paid add-ons billed per property, so ten sites means ten subscriptions. AI Assist from $29 a month, and badge removal at $39 a month or $348 a year, which works out to $29 a month if you commit. Their pricing page displays the $29 with no annual condition attached, so expect the two figures to conflict.

Every response AI Assist produces in a live channel. That covers the replies your customer reads, AI Commands, and the Smart Reply suggestions generated for your own agents. One question requiring four turns to resolve is four completions, and a Smart Reply an agent discards is a fifth. Only previews and tests within the settings screen are free. The pool is shared across every bot on the subscription, so enabling agent-assist consumes the budget the customer-facing bot relies on.

Their help centre publishes the full ladder, though their pricing page does not. Hobby is free with 100 credits and one AI agent. Growth is $29 a month or $290 a year for 1,000 completions and three agents. Business is $99 a month or $990 a year for 5,000. Enterprise is $399 a month or $3,990 a year for 20,000. The sole overage rate tawk.to publishes is $30 per 1,000 credits, which is $0.03 apiece; the tiered rates of $0.025 and $0.02 originate from the plan picker in their dashboard and are not on any page you can link to, so we use them here because they are the lower of the two.

Roughly 6,700, not 20,000. The allowance is counted in AI messages rather than conversations, so divide it by however many times the AI speaks in a thread. At three responses per conversation their $399 Enterprise tier covers about 6,700, Business covers about 1,700, and the $29 Growth tier covers about 330. Nobody in this category publishes a turns-per-conversation figure, so three is an estimate, and a generous one toward them: AI Commands and the Smart Reply suggestions generated for your own agents draw from the same 20,000 and are excluded from that count.

Count how much of the responding the AI does. If it is nearly none and you have many agents, tawk.to, comfortably. If the AI is handling most conversations, we are, because their meter counts turns and ours counts threads. A five-person team where the AI handles 375 conversations monthly is $39 here, and on tawk.to it is 375 multiplied by however many times the AI speaks. Their $29 Growth tier caps at 1,000 completions, so 2.7 responses per conversation exhausts the entire allowance and the next tier is $99.

Both provide live chat at no cost. The distinction is the AI. tawk.to's free Hobby tier is 100 message credits monthly, which is 100 things the AI says rather than 100 conversations, top-up credits are not sold on it, and it cannot escalate a conversation to a human: handover to a human agent begins on the paid Growth tier. Ours is 75 conversations monthly handled by AI, counted once each regardless of thread length, and handover to a human is included. Theirs permits unlimited agents and ours permits one, so choose by which limit you would hit first.

Not one that exposes tawk.to. Their developer portal lists a JavaScript API, webhooks, and Zapier, and AI Assist can be aimed at an MCP server you host yourself, which is the reverse direction. Their REST API exists but is a beta requiring an application: you complete an access request form, wait for approval, and the reference is not public. miniDesk publishes both on every plan including the free one, so an AI client such as Claude or Cursor can triage and draft directly against your inbox with no integration layer.

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