The plugin itself is a paid one-time license, not free in the freeware sense. What is free is the ongoing operation: there is no recurring SleekAI fee after purchase. The marketing phrasing 'free chatbot' refers to the absence of a monthly subscription, not a zero-cost initial download.

Correct. The license fee is paid once. Updates and support are bundled for the license duration. The only recurring cost from anywhere in the chatbot stack is the token usage you pay to the model provider whose key you configured, billed by that provider directly to you.

OpenAI offers a small starter credit balance for new accounts (around 5 USD at the time of writing). Anthropic offers similar starter credit for early API users. OpenRouter rotates a list of fully free model tiers. Together these typically cover one to three months of small-site traffic before you ever spend anything out of pocket.

Practically, yes if you self-host a free LLM. Connect SleekAI through OpenRouter to a free-tier model like a hosted Mistral 7B variant, or run a local LLM via Ollama with a custom endpoint. Quality is lower than paid mini-tier models, but for low-stakes hobby sites it is workable and costs zero ongoing.

The chatbot replies stop generating, but the plugin and the conversation logs remain intact. Add credit later and the bot resumes. There is no SleekAI-side data loss or feature disablement when the provider balance hits zero, only the model calls themselves fail until topped up.

The full SleekAI feature set is included in the one-time license. There is no SleekAI-side cap on conversations, chatbots, or data sources. The only cap is whatever your model provider sets on their free tier or your paid balance. A small site usually never hits either.

License terms cover updates for a stated duration (typically one year, renewable annually at a discount). After the update window, the plugin keeps running on its current version indefinitely. Some users renew for ongoing updates, others stay on the last stable version they have and keep using it for years.

SaaS free tiers cap conversations and aggressively upsell. They also reserve the right to deprecate the free tier or change the model behind it without notice. SleekAI under your own provider key has no such mechanism, because there is no SaaS vendor whose roadmap you depend on. The catch is the model token cost, which is small but real.