I shipped chatsnip this week: a chatbot for your landing page that you install by pasting one script tag — and that your AI assistant operates for you. No dashboard. You never log into anything.
The two sins of chatbot SaaS
The dashboard tax. Every chatbot product ships an admin panel you must learn, configure, and babysit. You wanted answers on your landing page; you got another SaaS subscription to manage.
The token markup. Most resell LLM completions at 5–20x wrapped in "message credits". Your bill scales with your success.
The bet: agents are the new admin panel
If you're reading dev.to in 2026, you probably already have an AI assistant with a terminal — Claude Code, Codex, whatever. That assistant is better at operating software than any dashboard.
So chatsnip has none. After checkout you get a prompt — a block of text you paste to your assistant. It installs a small CLI, interviews you about your product, configures the bot, sets your spend limits, and hands you the script tag. Ongoing ops are one weekly command:
./chatsnip hosted digest -since 7d
→ "37 conversations — 5 support, 1 complaint (contact captured), and a lead named Sam who left sam@dev.io asking for a call about the Pro plan." When visitors show buying intent or frustration, the bot offers a personal founder follow-up and asks for contact info. Those get extracted automatically.
Your keys, your costs
Completions run on your own OpenRouter key (encrypted at rest). Pick any model, see real LLM spend on your own bill, set your own budgets: tokens/day, tokens/visitor, messages/minute. I don't resell tokens, so I have zero incentive to inflate your conversation volume — my price is flat.
Absurdly small, on purpose
The widget is ~6 KB of dependency-free JS — no iframe, no framework, no cookie banner. The entire backend (HTTP server, SQLite, LLM client, billing, CLI) is a single ~240 KB native binary written in machin, a language I've been building for AI agents. Self-hosting means: one file, one command, a €3 VPS.
Pricing
- Self-host: $79 one-time (launch price) — binary + a year of updates through your personal install URL.
- Hosted: €19/mo, 7-day free trial, 5 chatbots/sites included, +€2/mo per extra.
Full story on my blog: Your AI Assistant Can Run Your Website Chatbot Now — or watch your own assistant set it up at chatsnip.intrane.fr.
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