Panelbotdocs
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Start free on WHMCS or Blesta

Set up Panelbot free: sign up with no card, connect a cPanel or DirectAdmin server over the panel API, embed the widget, and use your 30 chats a month.

You can put Panelbot in front of real customers without paying anything and without a card on file. The Free plan is 30 AI conversations a month, on unlimited servers of every type, for as long as you keep the account. This page is the shortest path from signing up to a working chat widget on your billing portal, and what to do when the 30 conversations run out.

What the Free plan gives you

The Free plan is the whole product at a lower volume, not a stripped-down demo:

  • 30 AI conversations a month, resetting each month on the day of the month you signed up. It is a hard limit, not a soft warning.
  • Unlimited servers, shared, reseller, VPS, or dedicated, on cPanel/WHM or DirectAdmin.
  • The full diagnostic engine, the same range of hosting problems the paid plans handle.
  • The live Chat Dashboard, with unlimited team seats, so your staff can take over a chat while it is happening.
  • No card and nothing to cancel. There is no time limit and no conversion date.

Next to a paid plan, you give up branding: on Free and Lite the widget carries a small “Powered by PanelBot” line, and white-label starts at Starter. Next to Lite, Free also has fewer conversations (30 a month instead of 100) and no extra chat bundles. Full detail is in Free plan terms.

Two checks apply before the widget takes chats on Free, to keep the free tier fair:

  • A verified owner email. The account owner’s email address has to be verified.
  • A connected, checked server. 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.

And one Free account per server: a server hostname that is already connected to another Free account cannot be connected to a second one. Your own account can connect as many of its own servers as you like.

Step 1: Create the account, no card

Pick the Free plan on the Panelbot site and fill in the short sign-up form: your name, your company name, a work email, and a password. Verify your email and you land straight in the dashboard, with no checkout step in between. Turn on two-factor authentication before you go further, because this account can reach your billing portal and your servers. The full walkthrough is in Create your account and sign in.

Step 2: Connect your billing portal

Panelbot needs to know who a customer is and what they own before it can help them, and your WHMCS or Blesta portal is the source of truth for that. Create an API credential scoped to reading clients, products, and invoices and to creating tickets, paste it into the Billing page, and run the connection test. This also sets where escalated tickets are routed. See Connect your billing portal.

Step 3: Connect a server, with no agent

Panelbot talks to your server over the cPanel/WHM or DirectAdmin API with a scoped credential you grant. Nothing is installed on the machine, no inbound port is opened, and you do not need root; a reseller credential is enough to start. The usual path is the pre-configured PanelBot integration from the connect page (Servers, then Connect server): one hook file for WHMCS or one plugin for Blesta, the same one that adds the widget in Step 4, which registers the server and mints a restricted panelbot token for you. You can also connect by hand with a WHM API token or a DirectAdmin login key.

Once it connects, Panelbot shows you a live list of what that credential can and cannot reach, generated from your server rather than promised by us. See Connect your first server. The server agent is optional and only covers the narrow set of jobs a panel credential cannot reach.

Step 4: Turn the widget on and embed it

Set the widget’s name, greeting, accent color, and position on the Widget page, then flip the header switch to Widget live and save. See Configure and enable the chat widget.

Then install the ready-made integration from the Install tab. For WHMCS that is one hook file uploaded into includes/hooks/. For Blesta it is a plugin you install from the plugin manager. Both issue the secure token that identifies a signed-in customer, so chats arrive with real account context. See Embed the widget on your portal.

Step 5: Spend the 30 conversations on real tickets

Thirty is enough to judge quality if you point it at traffic you already understand. Take the most repetitive tickets from last month, the password resets, the “my email stopped working” reports, the expired certificates, and let the assistant handle that exact traffic. What you are checking is whether the answers match what your team would have said, and whether it stops when it should.

Escalation works the same on Free as on every paid plan. When a teammate is signed in to the Chat Dashboard, an escalation arrives as a live chat they can take over mid-conversation. When nobody is online, it files as a ticket in your billing portal with the transcript and the diagnostic context attached. See What your plan includes for escalations.

When the 30 conversations run out

The assistant stops taking new conversations until your month resets or you upgrade. Conversations already under way are not cut off mid-sentence, and nothing is charged, because there is no card on file.

Top-up bundles are a paid-plan feature, so on Free your two options are waiting for the reset or moving to a paid plan. If you burn through the allowance in the first few days, that is useful information about your real support volume.

Upgrading is not a migration

To upgrade you add a card and pick a plan, and billing starts that day at the price shown at checkout. There is no trial period to wait through. Your conversation limit lifts to the new plan’s monthly volume immediately, and everything you already set up carries straight over: the servers you connected, the widget you configured, your knowledge base articles, and your conversation history. Nothing is reset when billing starts.

One thing to know before you move: a paid plan cannot be downgraded back to Free. If a paid plan stops being right, you cancel it rather than dropping into the free tier. See Upgrades, downgrades, and the Free plan and Pricing and what each plan costs.