--:-- Moscow +8° traffic1 SALE UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAREntry landing page 45 000 ₽ 22 500 ₽ −50%Services website 149 000 ₽ 74 500 ₽ −50%Website for a lawyer 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a beauty salon 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a sole trader 49 000 ₽ 24 500 ₽ −50%Website for a consultant 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Personal brand website 59 000 ₽ 29 500 ₽ −50%Website for an online course 119 000 ₽ 59 500 ₽ −50%Website for a private clinic 129 000 ₽ 64 500 ₽ −50%Website for a cafe 79 000 ₽ 39 500 ₽ −50%Website for a repair service 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Corporate website 199 000 ₽ 99 500 ₽ −50%Telegram lead bot 89 000 ₽ 44 500 ₽ −50%SALE UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAREntry landing page 45 000 ₽ 22 500 ₽ −50%Services website 149 000 ₽ 74 500 ₽ −50%Website for a lawyer 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a beauty salon 99 000 ₽ 49 500 ₽ −50%Website for a sole trader 49 000 ₽ 24 500 ₽ −50%Website for a consultant 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Personal brand website 59 000 ₽ 29 500 ₽ −50%Website for an online course 119 000 ₽ 59 500 ₽ −50%Website for a private clinic 129 000 ₽ 64 500 ₽ −50%Website for a cafe 79 000 ₽ 39 500 ₽ −50%Website for a repair service 69 000 ₽ 34 500 ₽ −50%Corporate website 199 000 ₽ 99 500 ₽ −50%Telegram lead bot 89 000 ₽ 44 500 ₽ −50% RU|EN
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Websites for small business — sale
Entry landing page22 500 ₽ Services website74 500 ₽ Website for a lawyer49 500 ₽ Website for a beauty salon49 500 ₽ Website for a sole trader24 500 ₽ Website for a consultant34 500 ₽ Personal brand website29 500 ₽ Website for an online course59 500 ₽ Website for a private clinic64 500 ₽ Website for a cafe39 500 ₽ Website for a repair service34 500 ₽ Corporate website99 500 ₽ Telegram lead bot44 500 ₽
Artificial intelligence
One hour with a specialist2 100 ₽ AI site consultant149 000 ₽ AI assistant for staff199 000 ₽ AI agent for incoming requests249 000 ₽ AI document processing229 000 ₽ AI inside one process349 000 ₽ Audit: where AI pays off29 000 ₽
Websites and ready products
Product catalogue249 000 ₽ Online shop449 000 ₽ Online booking199 000 ₽ Clients and deals199 000 ₽ Stock and inventory229 000 ₽ Custom software180 000 ₽ per sprint
Sales channels
One inbox for all messages199 000 ₽ WhatsApp for business99 000 ₽ Shop inside Telegram149 000 ₽ Bot for one job119 000 ₽ Listing on maps49 000 ₽ Showcase on Instagram and Facebook129 000 ₽ Auto-posting to four channels341 000 ₽ Where leads come from149 000 ₽
Applications
Business-card app99 000 ₽ Order taking249 000 ₽ Client portal299 000 ₽ Loyalty programme349 000 ₽ App with payment and delivery449 000 ₽ Bank-grade portal5 500 000 ₽
One hour with a specialist 1 hour
2 100 ₽ Buy
Website

Website chat: your own or a ready-made widget

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Drawing: how much ready-made chat widgets weigh on every page of a website

A website chat turns a question into an order while the visitor is still on the page. Ten solutions compared: what ready-made widgets weigh, where free ends and what your own chat gives you.

A chat on your website is the shortest path from a question to an order: the visitor asks about size, lead time or delivery right on the product page and stays, instead of leaving to look for the answer elsewhere. The question is which chat to put there. We went through ten solutions — five mass messengers that shape what people expect, and five systems you can install on your own server — and collected what is worth acting on.

How much a ready-made website chat weighs

A third-party widget arrives with its own font, its own icons and its own analytics. An independent measurement of eight popular widgets (DebugBear) gives this picture of the weight loaded for every visitor:

  • Tawk.to — 749 KB, Zendesk — 533, LiveChat — 385.
  • Intercom — 301 KB, Tidio — 208, Crisp — 155, LiveAgent — 79.
  • The chat itself appears on screen 2.5 to 9.3 seconds after the page opens.

Meanwhile three to ten visitors out of a hundred use the widget during a session — the other ninety pay for it in speed. One technique is worth copying word for word: keep only a small button on the page and load the chat itself on the first touch, scroll or mouse move. Whoever opens the page and leaves downloads nothing, and the effect on site speed is exactly zero.

What people expect from a website chat

The specification for usability has already been written by WhatsApp and Telegram. A visitor arrives with a ready set of expectations, and stumbles when any of them is missing:

  • Messages appear on their own, with no page reload.
  • Delivery status. The two ticks are a WhatsApp invention that became a common language.
  • “Typing…” — the main sign that a real person is on the other end.
  • History stays in place after a reload and when moving to another page of the site.
  • Attachments with previews: a photo from the gallery, a camera shot, a document.
  • A queue when the connection drops: what was typed on the underground is sent once the network returns.

Other things are better left out: channels and roles as in Discord, threads as in Slack, a helper bot at the start of a conversation — the single biggest irritant in every widget review — and a form asking for name, phone and email before the first word.

How a chat keeps the connection: polling, event stream, websocket

This is the main technical decision, and it is what makes a chat feel alive or not.

  • Polling. The page asks the server every few seconds whether anything is new. Works everywhere, but costs up to five seconds of delay and 720 requests an hour per visitor.
  • Event stream (SSE). One open connection from server to page, so the message arrives at once. It takes about ten lines of code and needs nothing new on the server — the best effort-to-result ratio for a chat on ordinary hosting.
  • Websocket. A two-way channel for “typing…”, instant statuses and calls. It needs a separate always-running process and proxy configuration.

Notifications about a new message on your phone

The message reaches the server — then the phone has to ring, even with the app closed. Three facts here save weeks:

  • Nobody charges for the notifications themselves. The keys are generated once on your own server.
  • On iPhone, notifications arrive only after the person has added the site icon to the Home screen themselves. There is no way around it, so that step is explained right inside the interface.
  • An app from the stores requires a developer account: Apple — 99 dollars a year, Google — a one-off fee. A site on the Home screen requires neither.

Email on your own server is the sensible primary channel: it reaches everyone without a VPN, while messengers are not always available in every country.

Where “free” ends in ready-made solutions

Every system you can install on your own server calls itself free. That is true, but the limit sits in the counters, not in the features. Licences and vendor pricing pages as of October 2026:

  • Chatwoot — the fairest offer: unlimited agents on your own server and full API access. 22 features out of 77 are paid, including removal of the “Powered by Chatwoot” line.
  • Rocket.Chat — up to 50 users and 100 active contacts a month through the website chat. For all your sites together that is not much.
  • Mattermost — the free build covers up to 250 users without single sign-on; the second free option keeps only 10,000 messages of history.
  • Zulip — the only licence that does not split features by plan, but phone notifications are free for up to 10 people, and there is no built-in chat for a website visitor at all.
  • Matrix and Element — the code is open, while the ready-made build is marked by the vendor itself as not intended for commercial production use.

Of those five, only two — Chatwoot and Rocket.Chat — ship a chat for a guest without registration. The rest are built for employees, and the widget would have to be written separately.

A website chat through WhatsApp or Telegram

  • Telegram — free. The bot costs nothing, and the “Log in with Telegram” button returns a verified phone number without an SMS gateway.
  • WhatsApp Business — paid. It charges per delivered message, goes through a reseller, and since 1 October 2026 two more categories of messages became paid.

A messenger works well as a bridge, not as a replacement: your own chat knows which page the person is writing from — which product they were looking at, which article brought them, which ad they read. Neither WhatsApp nor Telegram passes that on, and this is the whole point of a chat on a website.

What your own website chat gives you

Your own chat looks like your site rather than a bolted-on plugin: your colours, your fonts, your rules, and no blue circle in the corner that reads as an advert. The conversation sits on your server, so it can be found, handed to a colleague and pulled up a year later. The weight stays within fifty kilobytes, and the chat can be placed inside the page text — on the contact page, at the end of an article, next to the product card, where the person is already looking for a way to get in touch. Engagement in those places is markedly higher than for a button in the corner.

Four decisions that are cheaper to make up front

  • End-to-end encryption. In a customer chat it takes away search across the history, handing a conversation to a colleague and pulling up a thread a year later. HTTPS and password access cover the real risks.
  • A separate address for the chat. Even if one site gets it first, tying it to that site means the second one has to be rewritten.
  • Who answers, and how fast. A chat answered a day later works worse than a plain contact form, because it promises more.
  • How many conversations a day. That decides whether you need an inbox with routing or a single thread is enough.

A conversation with a customer is personal data, so the retention period and the ability to export one person's full history are set up at the start. Adding them to a live chat later costs noticeably more.

Next stepA website that brings enquiries, not just existsA fast website on our own engine: loads in under a second, is understood by search engines and AI assistants, and feeds enquiries into your sales system. In English, Russian or both.
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