Best offer on record: Free-forever core plan (live chat, email ticketing, knowledge base, CRM, mobile-app push). 5 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Free-forever core plan (live chat, email ticketing, knowledge base, CRM, mobile-app push) high confidence
Core product is 'free for life' / 'Free Forever': unlimited live chat, hosted help center (knowledge base), ticketing, CRM/contacts and chat pages, with no published caps on agents, domains/properties, simultaneous chats, or conversation history; 50+ languages. Sign-up requires no credit card; widget is a code snippet. Monetization is via optional paid add-ons billed per property (website): remove 'Powered by tawk.to' branding $29/month; Video + Voice + Screensharing $29-49/month; hired human chat agents from $1/hour; virtual assistants from $7/hour. Push notifications to the tawk.to mobile app are part of the free account.
Eligibility
Anyone, any region; no .edu email, no startup age/funding caps, no credit card required. Note: limits are 'unlimited' per current marketing pages — tawk.to historically enforced fair-use limits, not published quotas.
How to claim
1) Sign up free at dashboard.tawk.to (email only, no card) 2) Create a property (site/app) 3) Install the widget snippet 4) Email ticketing, KB, CRM, and mobile-app push are enabled in the free plan 5) Add-on purchases optional, per property
Expiry
No expiry, no renewal, no trial period — the free tier is permanent, not a trial. Paid add-ons auto-renew per billing cycle.
Gotchas
Widget shows 'Powered by tawk.to' badge unless you pay $29/mo (stewie.io notes the add-on page has shown $29 or $39 depending on the page read, 3 Oct 2026 — likely annual vs monthly). Every add-on is billed per property: two sites = two bills. Data/egress: none published; privacy model: you host the service, tawk.to is provider. The 'free' value prop is the badge + add-on ecosystem, not volume caps.
AI Assist 'Hobby' free tier (free AI chatbot add-on) high confidence
AI Assist has a forever-free 'Hobby' plan: 100 monthly AI message credits (500,000 characters), 1 AI chat agent, persona customization, instruction training, document data source, and crawling of up to 100 web pages. No credit card required. Paid tiers: Growth $29/mo ($290 annual; 1,000 credits, 3 agents, 500 crawled pages, up to 1000 API calls), Business $99/mo ($990 annual; 5,000 credits), Enterprise $399/mo ($3,990 annual; 20,000 credits). Purchased extra credits cost $30 per 1,000.
Eligibility
Any tawk.to user; no student/startup/region conditions. No CC for Hobby. Paid AI tiers need credit card or PayPal and have no free trial period.
How to claim
Inside the free tawk.to dashboard, enable AI Assist and choose the Hobby plan; it activates immediately at $0. Upgrade to Growth+ requires adding a payment method.
Expiry
Permanent free tier (100 credits/month, resets monthly), not a trial. Paid plans auto-renew at the billing cycle.
Gotchas
Credits are AI messages, not conversations — a multi-turn chat burns multiple credits (1 credit/AI reply; Auto model = 3 credits/reply; AI Transcription 1 credit/started minute, up to 5 per voice message). Third-party (stewie.io) claims the free Hobby plan CANNOT escalate to a human agent ('Escalation requires... a paid plan'), while the official help-center plan list includes 'Escalations to human agents' under Hobby — verify in the product, as settings may gate it. Hobby crawl cap of 100 pages is tiny; overages on paid plans cost extra. Per-property billing: each website has its own AI Assist bill.
Free developer front: Tawk JS API, Webhooks, and Zapier connections medium confidence
tawk.to's developer portal (developer.tawk.to) exposes a JavaScript API to manipulate the chat widget, webhooks for real-time event push to external services, and Zapier integration to 1,500+ services — all attached to the free platform account. The portal makes no statement of paid API tiers, quotas, or rate limits, and access rides on a free tawk.to account (API key per account). The REST/JS API is the chat API front; no separate free-credits or trial API product exists.
Eligibility
Anyone with a tawk.to account (free, no CC); no student/startup gating. No documented per-call quotas on the public portal — treat rate limits as unpublished/fair-use.
How to claim
1) Create a free account 2) Generate an API key from the account 3) Use JS API / webhooks / Zapier from your site or services at $0, as long as the underlying tawk.to usage stays in the free core plan.
Expiry
No expiry — valid as long as the account exists. If AI Assist or other add-ons are involved, the paid-tier terms apply instead.
Gotchas
Webhooks only push out; inbound chat via API still depends on the (free) chat service. No published SLA or egress fees, but the API's value is capped by whatever the free core allows. A third-party (AgentDeals) record of a 2026-09-12 pricing 'restructure' was retracted by the tracker itself; no API pricing change verified.
Free email + Twilio SMS fronts into the shared inbox low confidence
tawk.to's free plan includes Email ticketing (connect your email and manage email conversations from the tawk.to inbox — free). For SMS, tawk.to's help center has a 'Twilio SMS' category (5 articles) describing how to connect SMS services such as Twilio to tawk.to; the tawk.to side is free, but you pay Twilio directly for the number and per-message rates (US messaging is commonly ~$0.0075-0.020/message plus monthly number fee). No tawk.to-owned free SMS or free push-SMS credits exist.
Eligibility
Anyone with a free tawk.to account + a Twilio account/credential to connect. No CC required for tawk.to itself; Twilio billing is separate and region-dependent (carrier fees outside US/Canada).
How to claim
1) Free tawk.to account 2) Create a Twilio number (paid, Twilio side) 3) Follow help.tawk.to 'Twilio SMS' articles to link credentials 4) SMS threads appear in the free shared inbox.
Expiry
No tawk.to-side expiry; Twilio number/usage is billed continuously on your Twilio account.
Gotchas
The SMS front is not free end-to-end: Twilio's number fee and per-message rates pass through, and international carrier surcharges can be substantial. tawk.to has no native 'push notification' product distinct from its mobile-app push, which is free with the account.
No tawk.to education (.edu) license, student program, or startup program high confidence
No tawk.to-specific free offer for students, educators, or startups exists as of 2026-10-22. tawk.to's StartCamp page (www.tawk.to/partner/startcamp/) is a third-party partner directory listing: the 'free credits / $1,000,000 in savings' language belongs to StartCamp (startcamp.com), not to tawk.to, and tawk.to offers no discount or free-tier upgrade on that page. tawk.to's own partner program is commission-based ('up to 20% commission', 'lifetime payouts') — revenue sharing, not a free-usage benefit. Aggregator pages (costbench, StudentPerks, TryTrick) list generic/boilerplate 'education discount' and 'startup program' sections that explicitly state 'we don't have tawk.to-specific terms verified yet' or simply don't include tawk.to. Coupon-site codes (e.g. 10% off 'FEB10' on coupon sites, Oct 2026) are unverified, auto-generated, and contradict the 'free forever' core.
Eligibility
N/A — no program to qualify for. Effectively, students and startups get the same free-forever core plan and free AI Hobby tier as everyone else, with no CC required.
How to claim
Nothing to claim. Students/startups use the standard free sign-up (email, no card) at dashboard.tawk.to; optionally join StartCamp separately for its curated third-party deals.
Expiry
N/A.
Gotchas
Do not trust templated 'tawk.to education discount' pages on costbench-style sites or 'verified' 10% coupon codes on coupon aggregators — none of them present tawk.to-offered terms. No sunset: the absence of programs is stable; the 2025-2026 changes were add-on pricing (AI Assist tiers, branding removal), not removal of any student/startup offer.