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Free plan terms and the 30-chat limit

What the Panelbot Free plan's 30 conversations a month cover, what happens when the allowance runs out, and how billing starts when you upgrade.

What the Free plan includes

The Panelbot Free plan is 30 AI conversations a month, with no card required and no time limit. You get the real product, connected to your own portal and your own servers, not a sandbox or a demo account.

Servers are unlimited and every server type is included: shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated, on cPanel or DirectAdmin. There is no time limit and nothing to cancel. The allowance resets every month, on the day of the month you signed up, for as long as you keep the account.

The live Chat Dashboard is included, with unlimited team seats, so your staff can take over a conversation while it is happening. When nobody on your team is online, the escalation files as a ticket in your billing portal instead. That is how it works on every plan.

Other than volume, three things differ from a paid plan. The widget carries a “Powered by PanelBot” badge, as it does on Lite; white-label starts at Starter. Extra chat bundles are not sold on Free. And the Free plan has two fairness checks, described next.

Free plan checks

  • The widget takes chats only once the account is set up. The account owner’s email has to be verified, and at least one server has to be connected with a working panel credential that Panelbot has checked. Until both are true, the widget does not start new AI conversations.
  • One Free account per server. A server hostname already connected to another Free account cannot be connected to a second Free account. Within your own account you can connect as many of your own servers as you like, and paid accounts are not affected.

The 30 conversations are a hard limit

This is the one number worth reading carefully. The monthly allowance is 30 conversations, and it is a hard limit rather than a soft warning. When it runs out, the assistant stops taking new conversations until your month resets or you upgrade. Existing conversations are not cut off mid-sentence.

The allowance is deliberately smaller than any paid plan’s monthly volume, because 30 real conversations a month is enough to judge whether the answers are good, not enough to run your support desk for free. If you burn through it in the first three days, that is useful information: it means your customers generate more volume than Lite would comfortably carry.

How to make 30 conversations count

Point it at the questions you already know the answers to. The fastest way to judge quality is to take the thirty most repetitive tickets from last month, the password resets, the email setup problems, the “my site is slow” reports, and see how the assistant handles that exact traffic. You will know within a day whether it is answering the way you would want your own team to answer.

When the allowance runs out

If you do nothing, the assistant waits. It stops taking new conversations, then starts again when your month resets. Nothing is charged, because there is no card on file.

If you upgrade, you add a card, pick a paid plan, and billing starts that day at the price shown at checkout. The conversation limit lifts to your plan’s monthly volume immediately.

If you need a little more but not a whole plan, top-up bundles are a paid-plan feature. On Free, the two options are waiting for the reset or upgrading.

Upgrading is not a migration

The servers you enrolled, the widget you configured, your knowledge base articles, and your conversation history all carry straight over when you upgrade. Nothing is reset when billing starts.

Paid plans do not move back down to Free. If a paid plan stops being right, cancel it under Refunds and cancellation rather than expecting a downgrade into the free tier.

If you decide Panelbot is not for you, revoking the panel credential on your server ends Panelbot’s access completely, removing Panelbot from your portal is a matter of taking its one hook file or plugin back out, and if you installed the optional agent, uninstalling it removes everything it installed except one outbound firewall rule on CSF servers, which What the installer puts on your server shows how to delete.

If you started a trial before the Free plan launched

Paid plans used to begin with a 14 day trial. Trials are no longer offered, but any trial already running keeps its original terms and runs to its original end date: your card is charged when it converts, unless you cancel first, and we email you before that happens with the date and the amount. Nothing about the Free plan changes a trial that is already under way.