Does Desk need a paid ModelRiver plan?
No. Desk works on the Free plan, because every ModelRiver plan, including Free, has every feature Desk uses. A paid plan only matters once your chat gets more traffic than Free allows.
How many chats does the Free plan cover?#
Each AI answer is one ModelRiver request, and the Free plan includes 25,000 requests a month. To keep you inside that, Desk's AI limits are set for Free out of the box:
- 20 AI answers per minute across the whole site
- 800 AI answers per day across the whole site
That's about 24,000 answers in a 30-day month, just under the Free allowance.
What happens when the daily cap is reached?#
Visitors can still get help. A chat that reaches the cap is handed to your team instead of showing an error, and everything else keeps working, so nobody hits a dead end.
When should I upgrade?#
When your team sees chats handed over because of the cap, or you expect more than about 800 AI answers a day. On Pro or Scale, raise Desk's two limits (GLOBAL_MESSAGES_PER_MINUTE and GLOBAL_MESSAGES_PER_DAY) to fit your plan. A simple rule for the daily cap: your monthly requests divided by 31, minus room for any other apps using the same ModelRiver organization. See Which ModelRiver plan do I need?
Do my team's replies count as requests?#
No. Messages from your team, and visitor messages while a person is handling the chat, are added to the conversation without calling the AI, so they don't count.
Do Shopify or Stripe lookups cost extra requests?#
No. A lookup adds its result to the same AI request; it doesn't make another one.