Disclosure: I run a small automation shop, I set Chatwoot up for clients, and ACHIYAVS is my affiliate code — if you use it on Chatwoot Cloud you pay 5% less and I earn a commission. Self-hosting, which is most of this post, earns me nothing.
Every "Chatwoot pricing" article copies the same four numbers off the pricing page. None of them say what the free option actually consumes, because none of them are running it.
I am. So here is what it takes.
The install
One box. Not a cluster, not a managed database, no autoscaling group.
What it uses
A self-hosted install is four containers: Rails, Postgres, Sidekiq and Redis.
A typical small-business install fits comfortably on a 4 GB VPS.
The structural point: that footprint tracks message volume, not seat count. Adding an agent to a self-hosted install costs nothing. On Cloud, every seat is another line on the bill, every month, for as long as you have it.
The line item nobody quotes
I went looking for what my install would cost on Cloud, and found the thing that actually decides the tier — and it is not the price.
Each Cloud tier caps how long your conversation history is kept. Thirty days on the free tier, six months on the cheapest paid one, longer above that.
If your history goes back further than six months, on the entry paid tier the older conversations would already be gone — not archived, gone.
A support inbox is a record. "You told me in March that this was included" is a question someone has to be able to answer. That constraint, not the sticker price, is what pushes most teams up a tier.
I put the full tier-by-tier breakdown, with the retention caps and the crossover math at different team sizes, on my own site: what Chatwoot actually costs. It is the version I wish I had found.
The cost that is not in anyone's table
Self-hosting is not free. It costs the thing hardest to price: your attention, at inconvenient hours.
In the months I have run this I have handled Postgres connection-pool exhaustion, a Redis eviction policy that quietly dropped background jobs, a log rotation config that corrupted an access log badly enough to break my own monitoring, and an upgrade that reverted files I had mounted into the container.
None of that was Chatwoot's fault. All of it was the price of the $0 licence.
If your team does not already have someone comfortable in a terminal at 11pm, the honest answer is that Cloud is cheaper for you than self-hosting — because the alternative is not "a server," it is "a server plus a person."
So which one
Self-host if you have ops capacity, more than a handful of seats, and you want history you control. The economics improve with every seat and never get worse.
Take Cloud if support is not your engineering problem and you would rather pay for that boundary. That is a legitimate purchase, not a defeat.
And if you take Cloud, the code is ACHIYAVS for 5% off — which is the disclosure at the top of this post, and the real number. Search for a Chatwoot code and you will find "70% off" and "$100 off" on half a dozen coupon sites. The published affiliate terms give the customer 5%. Anything larger is expired or was never real.
On a bigger team that discount adds up. It is not a reason to choose Cloud. It is just the correct number, which turns out to be surprisingly hard to find.
If you self-host Chatwoot — what does your install actually use, and did the retention cap ever catch you out?
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