CloseBot & HighLevel Conversational AI | A Pricing & Features Comparison

This is the first of a two-part series examining the real costs agencies face when using CloseBot or HighLevel. Part two will be released later this week.

We’ve had a lot of positive feedback since launching CloseBot’s update about our new features and continued low pricing. We’ve also seen some users who have misunderstood our pricing, leading them to believe HighLevel is a cheaper alternative. This blog aims to bring clarity to both HighLevel pricing (usage based and unlimited) and CloseBot pricing.  We love HighLevel and this is not a true us vs. them post.  CloseBot is focused on filling a gap that HighLevel does not currently provide – high reliability lead qualification and lead routing.

A Note – Apples to Apples

It’s first important to understand that we are examining two products that are not apples to apples in comparison.

CloseBot is a platform that:

• Utilizes a drag-and-drop flow builder – useful for complex flows where words cannot describe a job accurately
• Functions across all channels – including email and custom channel providers like MyCRMSIM
• Allows for conversational advanced rescheduling / cancellations – even with different calendar appointment types with a single bot / agent
• Provides unlimited custom field updating – instead of working around limits
• Includes 5 different LLM options – no single point of failure
• …and much more that HighLevel does not provide

HighLevel is a CRM that is an all-in-one platform for marketers. This means features provided are typically surface level and lack reliability.

When it comes to AI innovation, it continues to be true that CloseBot is innovating.  CloseBot is able to innovate faster because it is truly an AI-first company.  HighLevel has taken up a follower role in this space. It has been that way since we first launched our objective based AI builder with CloseBot Classic 3 years ago. This unwavering commitment enables us to accelerate development while maintaining top quality standards.

Let’s start by taking a look at a side-by-side cost comparison.

HighLevel Pricing

When comparing CloseBot and HighLevel, we are not going to take the monthly HighLevel subscription price into account. This is because HighLevel users will have to pay that regardless of which tool they use

Did you know? CloseBot is the #1 installed sub-account app in the HighLevel app store

HighLevel has two ways to use conversational AI:

• Pay as you go
• AI Employee, which includes other AI features like calling

Option 1: Conversational AI Usage Alone

$0.02/message (rebillable)
With conversational AI alone, you do not gain access to other features like calling and workflow AI. You pay per message and you can re-bill this to your customers.

Option 2: AI Employee

$97/sub-account/month unlimited (re-billable)
AI Employee includes unlimited usage for a few features within HighLevel, including the conversational AI. Here is a table that shows the price of each paid a-la-carte (including the $0.02/message conversational AI), vs. the unlimited AI Employee. This table was pulled from the HighLevel website HERE.

 

CloseBot Pricing

CloseBot’s agency plan is $397/month. We will include this cost in our calculation for CloseBot costs since this is a payment made in addition to the HighLevel subscription. We do not have an unlimited option. Instead, we have implemented a low usage-based billing system as shown below. These usage costs have been put in place so we can continue to keep our monthly pricing low for our users, while providing superior features and customer care.

Message Costs

$0.006/message (rebillable)
You’re charged a rate of $0.006/message and you have the option to rebill this amount to your clients as you wish. This is a cost on top of token costs (discussed below)

Token Costs

$0.0025/msg – $0.01/msg depending on chosen AI Provider (rebillable)
Token costs are paid to the AI Provider (OpenAI, for example). Contrary to HighLevel, who is dependent on OpenAI, you can use CloseBot with your own Grok, DeepSeek (25% the cost of OpenAI on average), Anthropic, and Gemini account(s).

Seat Costs

$5/seat (rebillable)
CloseBot allows you to add users to your team as well as client seats. Client seats are optional, and allow your clients to have access to a client portal where they can monitor their own dashboard, conversations and upload their own knowledge base items (that you can rebill). All CloseBot plans allow you to connect unlimited sub-accounts. Do not confuse seat costs with sub-account costs (which are $0/sub-account).

Storage Costs

$0.006/mb-day (rebillable)
Storage costs are billed at a rate of $0.006/mb-day. This means an upload of 1MB of text (this is about 1,000 pages of plain text) would cost you $0.006 x 1 x 30 days in a month = $0.18/month.

Real Costs

While we recognize a breakdown of pricing is helpful, we think a couple real-world examples are even better. Below are two case studies of what actual CloseBot customers are doing (metrics) and how much that is costing them. We’ve also provided what it would cost them to operate with HighLevel instead.

Real-World Example 1

This is an example of actual costs for a real user with a high performing account.  This user has continued commitment to CloseBot because of high uptime (99.8% with V2) and higher accuracy appointment booking. Here are their account metrics:

• 102 sub-accounts
• Average 108 conversational appointments/day
• Projected to have 24,720 messages in July
• No additional seats
• Uploaded 50MB of data to the Knowledge Base
• Using OpenAI as their AI Provider (most common)

CloseBot Cost Analysis

Here is how that breaks down into real-world costs with CloseBot:

• $397 – base plan
• $148 – CloseBot message costs ($0.006/message) – 24,720 monthly messages
• $0 – seat costs (not giving clients dashboard access)
• $9 – knowledge base ($0.006/mb-day) – 50 MB
• $255 – token costs to OpenAI (as low as $63 if used DeepSeek instead)

Total: $809/month
It’s worth noting a change to DeepSeek would cut total costs to $617/month, which has shown to be comparable in quality and much cheaper.

HighLevel Cost Analysis

This user would have two options in HighLevel:

HighLevel Equivalent AI Employee Unlimited
$9,894 ($97/sub-account x 102 sub-accounts)

HighLevel Equivalent Pay per Use Conversational AI
$511 ($0.02/message)*

If they were using some of the other HighLevel features, they could select the AI Employee. However, this would be a massive hit to their profit margin. *They could also select the pay per use option, which is slightly cheaper than CloseBot, but remember this is not truly an apples-to-apples comparison (more on that below).

Real-World Example 2

This is an example of actual costs for a real user who is in a beginner phase.  They have chosen to start with CloseBot because they’ve done the math and know that CloseBot will not only be much cheaper at scale, but support from CloseBot is far superior and extra features allow them to stand out ahead of other agencies that use HighLevel’s Conversational AI. Account metrics:

• 4 sub-accounts
• Average 2 conversational appointments/day
• Projected to have 468 messages in July
• No additional seats
• Uploaded 3MB of data to the Knowledge Base
• Using DeepSeek as their AI Provider

CloseBot Cost Analysis

Here is how that breaks down into real-world costs with CloseBot:

• $397 – base plan
• $3 – CloseBot message costs ($0.006/message) – 468 monthly messages
• $0 – seat costs (not giving clients dashboard access) – 0 seats
• $0.50 – knowledge base ($0.006/mb-day) – 3 MB
• $3 – token costs to DeepSeek

Total: $403.50
It’s worth noting, if they did use OpenAI, the token cost would increase $12 for a total of $415.50/month.

Keep in mind, if you don’t want to re-bill, you could use our Business Plans instead and use our $64/month entry plan where 500 messages/month are included for free (no message or token costs)

HighLevel Cost Analysis

This user would again have two options in HighLevel. AI Employee or Conversational AI pay-per-use. The costs for a starter agency are smaller, but starter agencies building their business around AI are limited when committing to HighLevel as far as features, reliability and stability.

HighLevel Equivalent AI Employee Unlimited
$388 ($97/sub-account x 4 sub-accounts)

HighLevel Equivalent Pay per Use Conversational AI
$9.36 ($0.02/message)

Feature Comparison

HighLevel is a great all-in-one tool, but if the foundation of your business is AI, HighLevel is not the answer.  Build the foundation of your business around a business that is focused on that thing.  For us at CloseBot, that’s AI lead qualification and booking. HighLevel has also proven not to be a viable option if you are scaled or plan on scaling past 4 sub-accounts. Let’s look into some of the feature comparisons as of July 2025.

Drag-and-Drop Builder

Not having this hurts your business and decreases your AI’s reliability → revenue loss

Learn more about why drag and drop building is so important HERE. You’ll see that a lot of lead qualification AI systems you want to build would be literally impossible to do without a drag and drop builder.

CloseBot has allowed users to build their AI with a drag and drop builder since December 2022. There were many challenges that were overcome in making this possible, and users in the early days likely remember the struggles. We were pioneering a new way to communicate with the AI, and it ultimately paid off. You’ve now seen other companies try to implement their own versions of drag and drop builders for AI, but they are all encountering some of the same issues we overcame 3 years ago. HighLevel being the latest one, mentioning a beta of their own drag and drop builder being released “in the coming months”.

Over time, companies have seen that this drag-and-drop method of building is necessary for any kind of lead process with multiple steps at scale. It’s easy to make something that wows a demo, but an entirely different thing to put something to work that can conversationally book 108 appointments per day. Even a 10% reduction in quality (which is what we saw when split testing HighLevel and CloseBot side by side) can cost a business hundreds of thousands of dollars each month at this scale.

AI Provider (LLM) Options

Not having this means you’ll experience more downtime with sole reliance on OpenAI through HighLevel  → revenue loss and client loss

CloseBot Classic allowed OpenAI and Anthropic, but the update revealed in June 2025 expanded this by adding Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek as options. Learn more about those options compared HERE. Gemini is actually my personal favorite now for lead qualification. With CloseBot, you can select the AI Provider preference per Persona. We will automatically fall back to your other preferred models if your primary option(s) fail.

Dedicated 24/7 Support Specialized in AI

Not having AI-specialized support means you’ll be waiting longer for issues to be fixed → revenue loss from customer frustration

CloseBot has a team of support staff that are all trained in one thing… CloseBot’s AI lead qualification. We currently average 12 minutes wait time before a capable human steps in to assist. Compare that to the time it takes with HighLevel to be routed to the correct department for support on one of their many features.  When you do reach a person, they are not able to offer detailed help without elevating, which takes a considerable amount of time.  We attempted to contact support several times while doing the split testing between CloseBot and Conversational AI with HighLevel.  HighLevel’s AI failed to respond at all in some cases and this was the support team’s response.

Open-Sourced Prompts

Easier to self-resolve issues by examining our logs vs. the black box of HighLevel’s injected prompts → revenue loss with more troubleshooting time

At CloseBot we made the early decision to open-source our dynamic prompting. This means anyone, even competitors, can look at exactly how CloseBot is prompted. We are aware of many other platforms who have CloseBot accounts and use our open prompts in an attempt to fix their own prompting (including HighLevel). We have kept these prompts open because it helps our users feel confident in the system, helps us improve faster with user feedback on our prompting, and moves the entire industry forward.

Unlimited Custom Field Updating

Unnecessary restrictions dampen customer trust in product → revenue loss

HighLevel recently opened up their AI to allow you to update up to 20 custom contact fields – up from 3. CloseBot has always been able to update unlimited contact fields (since 3 years ago).

Learn more about CloseBot objectives which are used to update any contact field HERE.  Our 100% free plan even allows you to update unlimited contact fields.

All Channels Included… Including Email

Lack of all-channel support leads to frustration with users who manage emails → revenue loss

CloseBot added support for email replies almost 2 years ago. This is another area where HighLevel has yet to catch up. We have users booking hundreds of appointments per month utilizing our email channel. You cannot serve these customers if you use HighLevel’s AI.

Can See Images

Say no to customers needing image support → revenue loss

CloseBot can see images sent from a user. CloseBot will also be able to send images and understand audio messages within the next couple of weeks. HighLevel’s conversational AI can do neither of these things. There’s nothing extra you need to do to enable CloseBot to be able to respond to images… it just works.

Highest Accuracy Conversational Booking

Missed appointments… clients mad about missed opportunities → lost revenue for you

Remember, CloseBot is the #1 installed sub-account app for HighLevel for a few reasons.  This is one of the big ones.  We’ve been conversationally booking appointments with AI for almost a year longer than HighLevel themselves.  Part two of this blog releases later this week and will show data behind our split testing of HighLevel and CloseBot for conversational booking, cancellation and rescheduling.

Multiple Agents per Sub-Account Possible

Clients that want lead qualification for different lead types and channel types together? Not possible with HighLevel → revenue loss

HighLevel has sub-account-specific bots.  You can do bot handoffs, but the process is clunky and each bot can only book to a single calendar. With CloseBot, you can have unlimited agents and have them listen to different conversations based on channel (SMS, email, live chat, etc.) and/or tags.  It’s a seamless process.  And these agents are powerful enough that most find they don’t need a lot of different agents anymore… they just need one CloseBot agent to do what many HighLevel agents did previously.  Simplicity wins every time. You could have a different agent working through live chat, for example, than one you have working through email.

Summary

Many are looking to be AI-first agencies.  If you’re using HighLevel’s Conversational AI, keep in mind that you’re competing with thousands of agencies who have trusted the innovation of CloseBot to keep them ahead.

Grab your free plan today to see what CloseBot is all about!