The world's most-used live chat software gives itself away for free. Hundreds of thousands of businesses - and billions of customer conversations a month - run on top of it.

Six tools - Tidio, Chaport, Rocket.Chat, ProProfs, Provide Support and GoDaddy - give away the little chat bubble that turns idle browsers into buyers. Here is how their free tiers actually stack up.
Dr Howard Oakley is the one-man newsroom and software workshop behind The Eclectic Light Company, a blog that pairs deep-dive macOS internals with the history of painting. A retired Royal Navy Surgeon Commander and cold-injury researcher turned indie Mac developer, he writes daily about how macOS actually works and ships more than 40 free utilities such as SilentKnight, Consolation and T2M2 - all without a single line of AI-generated content.
Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Henry Poole is the co-founder and CEO of CivicActions, a professional services firm that has spent over two decades modernizing government digital services through open source software, agile methodologies, and human-centered design. A serial entrepreneur and open source visionary, Poole co-founded one of the first digital agencies (Vivid Studios) in 1993, published the landmark Affero General Public License (AGPLv1) in 2002 to close the 'ASP loophole' in open source licensing, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation. Under his leadership, CivicActions has become a trusted partner to major federal agencies including CMS, NSF, VA, and HHS, championing the principle that software built with public funds should be publicly owned.