There are two ways to put an AI assistant on a WordPress site, and the choice affects cost, privacy and how much control you keep.
The hosted route
You sign up, paste a script tag, and point the tool at your website. It crawls your pages, stores everything on its own infrastructure, and bills you monthly — usually by conversation volume or seats.
It is genuinely easier. Someone else runs the servers, the model updates, and the uptime. For a team with no technical resource and no privacy constraints, that convenience is worth real money.
The self-hosted route
You install a plugin. Your content is indexed into your own database, conversations stay there, and the plugin calls an AI provider with your own API key.
It is cheaper at any real volume, because you pay the model provider directly instead of a reseller. And nothing about your customers leaves your hosting except the text of each question.
Side by side
| ChatFlint | Hosted widget | |
|---|---|---|
| Where conversations live | Your WordPress database | The vendor’s servers |
| Typical billing | Licence per site + AI at cost | Monthly, by conversations or seats |
| Cost as usage grows | AI cost rises gently; licence fixed | Bill rises with success |
| If you stop paying | The plugin keeps working; updates stop | The widget stops |
| When it does not know | It says so, logs the question as a gap, and offers a human | Depends on the vendor — many fill the gap from the model |
| Setup effort | Install, add an API key, sync content | Paste a script tag |
| Who your visitors’ data is shared with | Your AI provider only | The vendor, plus their AI provider |
| Customisation | Full — it is a plugin on your site | Whatever the dashboard offers |
How to decide
- Choose hosted if nobody on your side will maintain anything, you have no data-residency requirements, and predictable-but-higher cost is fine.
- Choose self-hosted if you already run WordPress, care where customer conversations are stored, expect meaningful volume, or want the assistant to reach into WooCommerce.
The deciding question is usually not technical. It is whether you are willing to hold an API key and spend an hour on setup, in exchange for owning the data and paying cost price. If yes, self-hosted wins on almost every axis. If no, a hosted widget is a perfectly reasonable purchase.
Questions
Is self-hosted slower?
No. The AI provider is the same one the hosted tools use, and that call dominates. Retrieval on your own database adds milliseconds.
What if my host is weak?
Retrieval is light — text search and vector maths on a few thousand rows. Shared hosting handles it. The heavy work happens at the AI provider.