AI Chatbot Free Models

AI Chatbot Free Models is a fully self-contained AI chatbot platform for WordPress. It provides everything you need to run professional live chat, customer support and virtual-assistant experiences on your website while leaving the choice of the AI model entirely in your hands.

There is no paid SaaS behind this plugin. No mandatory subscription, no premium gateway, no external dashboard, no account required with the plugin developer. The only thing you need is access to an AI model: a hosted provider (many of which offer generous free tiers) or a self-hosted, local inference server. Every other component – interface, conversations, knowledge base, notifications, styling – runs on your own WordPress installation and your own database.

Bring your own model, keep control of your data

• Connect OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
• Run completely free with free-tier models or a local server (llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, gateways and proxies).
• Conversations are stored only if you enable it, in dedicated tables inside your own database.
• The knowledge base is built from your own published posts and pages – no external crawling, no third-party index.

Core features

• Provider-agnostic AI connection with configurable endpoint, API key and model
• Dynamic model selection where the provider supports model discovery
• Streaming responses with live typing indicator
• Stop generation at any time while a response is being streamed
• Retry failed responses and start a new conversation without reloading the page
• Configurable maximum response tokens and streaming timeout with inactivity watchdog
• Conversation context maintained with a configurable token budget
• Optional pre-chat form to collect name and email for support and lead generation
• Live knowledge base with FULLTEXT-indexed search over titles and content, response caching and clickable source citations in answers
• Per-IP rate limiting and server-side sanitization of conversation history
• Dedicated database storage with optional message and IP retention (disabled by default)
• Unread conversation notifications, search and conversation management in the WordPress admin
• Floating widget (bottom-left or bottom-right) or embedded chat via the [newcodebyte_chatbot] shortcode
• Extensive appearance customization: colors, images, sounds, widget position
• Translatable frontend interface, responsive layout, multilingual AI support
• Modern object-oriented codebase following current WordPress standards

Requirements

• WordPress 5.0 or later (tested up to 7.1)
• PHP 7.4 or later (compatible with current PHP 8.x releases)
• MySQL 5.6 or later / MariaDB 10.0 or later (required by the FULLTEXT knowledge base index)
• An API key for the provider you choose – or none at all, if you use a local OpenAI-compatible server

How it works

1. A visitor sends a message from the floating widget or the embedded chat.
2. WordPress receives the request and the plugin prepares the conversation context.
3. The configured provider or endpoint is selected and the request is sent.
4. The response is streamed back to the visitor when streaming is supported.
5. The conversation can optionally be stored in your own database for review.

A note on costs

The plugin is free and adds no usage fees of its own. AI costs depend exclusively on the provider and model you configure: free models and free quotas are fully supported, and a self-hosted server removes usage costs entirely.

Looking for a platform-independent version? A standalone build for non-WordPress websites (HTML, PHP and more) is available on GitHub: https://github.com/NewCodeByte/chatbot-ai-free-models

Configuration

Open the Chatbot settings page. Depending on the selected provider you can configure:

• Provider (OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenAI-compatible endpoint)
• API endpoint and API key
• Model, selected from discovery or entered manually
• Maximum response tokens and streaming timeout
• Knowledge base, pre-chat form, storage options, appearance and sounds

Read the full description on the official page →