In this second lesson, I’m going to explore the different options of Xenioo pricing. But why do have a dedicated lesson about this topic?

When it comes to costs, the pricing models used by chatbot platforms can change significantly based on several factors. Moreover, depending on your needs and job, you may need multiple chatbots, not just one. In this case, you should think about multiple projects within your main account.

By the way, I have a question for you: if “Platform A” allows you to publish 25 chatbots for 30€/month and platform B gives you 1 chatbot for 10€/month, which one is cheaper?

Well, the calculation is simple: platform A costs less than € 1.5 per month for the single chatbot (30€/25 chatbots), while platform B will cost 10€. It’s almost 7 times as much!

The first evaluation to do, therefore, is: how many chatbots, how many projects, are you going to develop? If you are a professional and you are looking for a solution that allows you to sell your services while containing costs, you should think about chatbot quantity in perspective.

Let’s make a comparison with a web agency that creates and sells websites. Typically, a business like this looks for a scalable solution, which allows to create and manage many websites within a single account. If one of your services, therefore, includes chatbots developing, you must consider the quantity factor.

Xenioo offers you a free plan to get started and publish up to 2 chatbots. As soon as you start investing in the Starter plan with a subscription of just € 30 per month, you will have 25 chatbots available, which you can double in the Professional plan. Crazy, isn’t it?

How chatbot platform pricing usually works?

After thinking about the relevance in terms of the chatbot quantity we pay for, we can evaluate the most common pricing models.

There are basically two. While both models use a monthly subscription, they greatly differ in how limits are calculated.

1) Number of users

Some platforms charge based on the number of users subscribed to the chatbot: as the number of contacts increases, the price increases, with predefined intervals (for example we could spend $ 15 for 1000 contacts, $ 45 for 5000 contacts … and so on).

The problem with this pricing model is that it forces you to pay for all users who have accessed the chatbot, including those we can call “idling”: users who may have come to chat to take a peek or maybe ask just one question and then no longer interact.

While this approach may seem convenient in some very specific cases, it may turn out quite expensive (and wrongfully so), especially if you spend a sizeable part of your advertising budget to acquire users.

2) Number of messages

The second pricing model takes into consideration the number of messages that are handled by the chatbot. This means that, unlike the previous model, the price depends on the real “traffic” or “consumption” generate by user conversations.

In my opinion, this model is more convenient and fairer: if the chatbot was an office, for example, I wouldn’t want to pay to add a room every time someone walks in to take a peek and then disappear. If, on the other hand, who’s walking in is really interested in my business, I guess it would be a nice move to invest in a meeting room to better accommodate my potential customer.

How to choose the right chatbot platform?

There is another important factor that determines the price of a chatbot platform, namely the features it makes available.

What can I build and achieve for what I’m spending?
How simple and intuitive is the design platform?
How many channels can I publish on?
Can I use advanced features such as language recognition and integrations with external services?
Can I have a team of collaborators to manage chatbots and conversations?
Why paying for features that I will never use? Or even worse, why pay for missing features?

These are some of the questions you should give a true answer to while evaluating a chatbot platform.

If you have faced questions like these at least once, you will undoubtedly appreciate the Xenioo approach. Xenioo provides a modular scheme that allows you to spend your budget for the features that are most relevant to you.

Thanks to a set of additional packages, you can decide which resource of your account to upgrade, without spending money unnecessarily.

Let’s make an example right away: do you need to increase the number of monthly messages because your lead generation campaigns are having a huge success? No problem: you can add the “CHAT +” package which for less than 10 € per month adds 10,000 monthly messages to your account.

Here is another: your client has finally understood the importance of NLP, but you have already used the 5 intents provided by the “Starter” plan? That’s a no-brainer: you don’t have to upgrade your plan, but only increase the number of intents just by adding 30 of them for less than € 10.

In addition to monthly messages and NLP intents, you can buy other resources or even features like chatbots, backups, team members, and so on. Obviously, you’ll be able to remove any additional package as long as you don’t need it.

Not bad, right?

Finally, it’s time to talk about Xenioo’s plans, looking at their costs and features.

Message counting in Xenioo Pricing

Xenioo pricing model is based on the number of messages that are monthly exchanged between chatbots and users.

First of all, there are Standard Messages: quite simply, every time your chatbot replies to one of your users, Xenioo counts the consumption of one message.

In addition to Standard messages, Action Messages will be counted and summed up to the global messages counter. Any action that requires integration with external platforms (to read or write data, for example) will increase this action message counter by one. So this will happen for any external Web service or API call, integration with Firebase, DialogFlow, IBM Watson, and so on.

A chatbot that retrieves data from a REST API and shows the result to the user will then consume at least 2 messages from the account quota.

Just keep note that messages are still counted during the execution of any action, even if it produces no result. For example, a broadcast that sends news to multiple users based on the results of an API call or RSS feed might not send any messages until there is actual news, but still, be run by Xenioo multiple times a day! All these executions will be counted in the message counter.

The message counter is reset on the first day of each month. If available messages are depleted before the end of the current month, your chatbot will stop interacting with users. In that case, you will be warned and you’ll still have the option to add some specific additional packages to add a bunch of messages to your plan.

You can find more details in our official online guide.

Xenioo Pricing Plans

Basic Plan

Let’s start with the first Xenioo Pricing Plan: the Basic Plan, which despite being completely free already provides you with a rich set of features.

As already mentioned, you can publish up to 2 chatbots for free. Furthermore, this plan allows full multichannel capabilities, letting you publish your free chatbot on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Web Site, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Phone.

There are no limits in the use of the flow designer, the environment in which you will design your conversational flows. You can take full advantage of tags and variables, perform A/B tests, define conditional logics, make or restore manual backups of your projects.

Last but not least, you have access to a dashboard for your full analytics data, such as the number of chatbots, message consumptions, and much more.

Being free would be having the lowest threshold of monthly messages, which is 500. What would this “monthly message threshold” be?

Starter plan

This is the entry paid plan and costs just under € 30 per month. In this case, the monthly messages are 7,500, while the number of available chatbots is 25.

In addition to what is already included with the Basic plan, you have access to several additional features, such as natural language processing (NLP), native integrations with external services, API calls as well as an advanced chatbot debug.
You are allowed to use your own brand and can add up to 2 collaborators per bot. You also have 1GB of storage in the Xenioo cloud to upload your multimedia elements (such as audio, files, images, and videos).

The Starter plan enables you to send broadcasts and execute standard Javascript code on the Xenioo cloud.

Furthermore, specific actions for the management of users’ personal data and privacy are also available. For example, “Privacy Opt-In”, which allows the user to express explicit consent regarding the processing of his data. And “Forget User Conversation”, which fully removes any user data and conversation from Xenioo.

Finally, thanks to the Starter plan, you can benefit from automated data export and email support from the Xenioo team.

Professional plan

It costs just under € 100 per month and further extends what is already included in the previous plan. The professional plan includes 100,000 monthly messages, 50 chatbots, 85 NLP intents, 5 collaborators, and 3 GB of cloud storage.

Additional features include advanced management of teams and conversations, on-demand broadcast, integrations with third-party NLP engines such as with Google Dialogflow and IBM Watson. It also includes Xenioo Forms, the revolutionary new feature that can help you build complex and interactive forms that can be integrated into any channel to quickly and effectively collect your user’s information.

Business plan

This plan is best suited for those who have specific needs and need a tailor-made solution.

Every Xenioo resource, such as a number of chatbots, monthly massages, NLP, and so on, can be customized to best accommodate even the most demanding requests.

Please visit our pricing page to find out more about Xenioo pricing and all the features available with each subscription plan.p