Chat Thing
Chat Thing is a no-code chatbot builder, a tool that people use without writing program code. A customer connects its own content, such as a website, files, Notion pages, YouTube videos or an RSS feed, and gets an AI agent that answers questions from that content on a website, in Slack, Discord, WhatsApp or Telegram, by email or on the phone. The answers are written by a large language model, a program trained on very large amounts of text to produce replies. In October 2026 the customer can pick from more than 20 models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, and the plans cost US$14 to US$299 a month, with a free plan.
Jozef Maxted and Gemma Vincent, a married couple who run Pixelhop, their small digital studio, started a prototype on 27 February 2023 and had their first paying subscriber 23 days later, on 22 March. They posted demo videos on Twitter, collected a waitlist of 1,319 people, and a week after the first sale Seth Godin linked to a bot built on his blog. In June 2023 the founders reported £5,000 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the total of the subscription fees that customers pay each month: about US$6,314 at that month's exchange rate. By November 2024 eBiz Facts quoted their Indie Hackers interview: US$12,000 a month, a run rate (the monthly figure times 12) of US$144,000 a year.
Every revenue figure on this page is a founder statement, grade C. The UK company register confirms the company, its two directors, its £2 share capital and that it reports no employees, but the filed accounts leave out the profit and loss account, as small companies may, so they cannot confirm the revenue. No figure later than 2024 was found. The page also shows earlier support-bot companies that failed when larger products added the same feature.
The numbers, graded
Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.
| Fact | Value | Grade | How we know | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue per month, by November 2024 | US$12,000 | C | The founders' figure in the title of their Indie Hackers interview, "We built a $12k/mo AI chatbot generator", as quoted by eBiz Facts on 14 November 2024. The interview itself was not opened (Indie Hackers blocks AI agents), so its date and its text are not verified here. | [2, 3, 4] |
| Run rate from the November 2024 figure | US$144,000 a year | calc | Calculated: US$12,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page. | [2] |
| Monthly recurring revenue, June 2023 | £5,000, about US$6,314 | C | Founder's post of 12 June 2023, under three months after the first paying customer; the case study repeats the same figure. Converted at US$1.2627 per pound, the June 2023 average of the Federal Reserve's daily rates. | [1, 5, 21] |
| Growth between the two figures | about 1.9 times in 17 months | calc | Calculated: US$12,000 divided by US$6,314, from June 2023 to November 2024. | [1, 2, 21] |
| Users, 5 June 2023 | 5,316 users with 3,902 bots, 35,698 chats and 227,095 messages | C | Founder's post. The bots had used nearly 1 billion OpenAI tokens. | [1] |
| Waitlist before launch | 1,319 subscribers by 27 March 2023 | C | Founder's post. Filled by demo videos and progress posts on Twitter, collected in ConvertKit. | [1] |
| From first prototype to first paying customer | 23 days | calc | Calculated: 27 February to 22 March 2023, dates from the founder's post. | [1] |
| Growth in the third month | slowed down a lot | C | Founder's words in June 2023: the AI hype was cooling and more competitors were arriving. | [1] |
| Goal set in June 2023 | £10,000 a month | C | Founder's post: at that level the project would pay for itself and the profits could be reinvested. At the June 2023 rate that is about US$12,627, slightly above the US$12,000 figure of November 2024. | [1, 21] |
| Operating company | Chat Thing Ltd, company number 14789358, incorporated 10 April 2023 | C | UK company register and the footer of the company's site. Its directors are the two founders, appointed on that day. Business: software development. | [6, 22] |
| Share capital | £2 | C | Filed accounts for the years to 30 April 2024 and 2025. No outside shareholder money appears; the case study says the product was built without external funding. | [7, 8, 5] |
| Employees of Chat Thing Ltd | none in either year to April 2025 | C | Filed accounts give the average number of employees as nil. | [7, 8] |
| Cash at bank | £6,242 on 30 April 2024 and £6,166 on 30 April 2025 | C | Filed accounts. The company used the small-company right to leave out the profit and loss account, so the register shows no revenue. | [7, 8] |
| Net assets | £293 on 30 April 2024, minus £4,068 on 30 April 2025 | C | Filed accounts. Creditors grew from £14,149 to £22,338. The accounts do not say why. | [7, 8] |
| Prices, October 2026 | a free plan, then US$14 to US$299 a month | C | Company pricing page. Yearly billing gives two months free. Voice minutes and phone numbers cost extra. | [9] |
| Models offered, October 2026 | more than 20, including GPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok models | C | Company pages. Requests go through OpenRouter, a service that sends each request to the provider that the customer selected; OpenAI handles speech for voice. | [10, 11] |
| Default model, March 2024 | OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 | C | Company changelog. When OpenAI cut its price, the message tokens almost doubled on most plans. | [14] |
| Users claimed, October 2026 | 10,000+ | C | Company models page. It gives no date and no definition of a user. | [10] |
| Time from launch to the November 2024 figure | 20 months | calc | Calculated: March 2023 to November 2024. | [1, 3] |
| Outside funding | none | C | Case study: developed and launched without external funding. Share capital of £2. | [5, 7] |
How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in their posts or interview, a page of the company, or an entry that the company itself filed with the UK register. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.
| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 0 | 1 agent, 1 data source, 80,000 message tokens |
| Basic | 11.67 | 14 | 3 agents, 3.5M message tokens a month, 2 team members |
| Standard | 40.83 | 49 | 6 agents, 19M message tokens, 4 team members; model choice, all channels |
| Pro | 82.50 | 99 | 20 agents, 38M message tokens, 6 team members; chat analytics |
| Enterprise | 249.17 | 299 | 50 agents, 120M message tokens, 8 team members; bot testing |
| Voice pack, add-on | 10 | 60 minutes; phone numbers US$5 a month each |
Prices are in US dollars per month; yearly billing gives two months free. Each plan has monthly allowances of message tokens (the pieces of text that model providers charge for) and storage tokens, and add-ons raise single limits, for example US$250 a year for 5 million more message tokens. Voice minutes cost US$10 a month per pack of 60 minutes, and phone numbers US$5 a month each, billed monthly on every plan. In November 2024 eBiz Facts gave US$14 a month for 3 chatbots, the same as the Basic plan today.
The timeline
From a weekend prototype on Notion to US$12,000 a month in 20 months, with growth that slowed in the third month. Each entry carries its grade.
- 27 February 2023CThe founders start a prototype at their studio, Pixelhop: ChatGPT answering from Notion pages, after reading Supabase's article on its "Clippy" bot for its documentation. [1, 5]
- Early March 2023CA working prototype by 5 March. The first demo video on Twitter gets four likes; a second post the same day does much better. [1]
- 17 March 2023CThe first 50 users are invited from the waitlist, then more in small batches. [1]
- 22 March 2023CFirst paying subscriber. [1, 5]
- 27 March 2023C1,319 people on the waitlist, in under a month. [1]
- 29 March 2023CSign-ups open to everyone. Seth Godin, one of the first paying customers, links to a bot trained on the 5,000,000 words of his blog, and traffic spikes. He introduces Dave Winer, who wants a bot for 27 years of Scripting News. [1, 15]
- 10 April 2023CChat Thing Ltd is registered, with the two founders as directors. [6]
- 5 June 2023C5,316 users and 3,902 bots. The product has six data sources and five channels, up from one of each at launch. [1, 5]
- 12 June 2023C£5,000 a month in recurring revenue, but growth slowed in the last month. Next goal: £10,000. [1]
- 6 November 2023COpenAI launches GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT with extra knowledge that anyone can build without coding. [13]
- 30 November 2023CCustomers ask whether OpenAI has "just killed Chat Thing". The founders answer that GPTs take only 10 files, show no conversations and stay inside ChatGPT. [12]
- 11 January 2024CGemma Vincent writes that the couple now runs two businesses, Pixelhop and Chat Thing, with separate goals for each. [16]
- 20 March 2024COpenAI cuts the price of the default model; the message tokens almost double on most plans. [14]
- November 2024CeBiz Facts quotes the founders' Indie Hackers interview: US$12,000 a month. The cheapest paid plan is US$14 a month for 3 chatbots. [2, 3]
- December 2025CAccounts to 30 April 2025 are filed: cash of £6,166, net liabilities of £4,068, no employees and no profit and loss account. [6, 8]
- 2026CPixelhop calls itself an AI product studio that runs Chat Thing alongside client work. Chat Thing adds phone calls and a published test of 20+ models, and free website tools bring leads. [17, 9, 10, 19]
Why it worked
Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.
Speed
Twenty-three days from the first prototype to the first paying customer. The founders, who normally polish client work, spent 15 minutes on the logo and built the landing page from a Tailwind UI template. A bug charged some customers for two subscriptions; the founders fixed it after the charges, and the customers forgave it.
A waitlist built from public progress
Demo videos and updates on Twitter filled a waitlist of 1,319 people in under a month. Invitations went out in small batches from 17 March, so the founders could tune the product before the list opened to everyone on 29 March.
Well-known early users
Seth Godin asked for a bot trained on his blog of more than 5,000,000 words, paid for it, and linked to it from his blog on 29 March 2023. He introduced Dave Winer, who wanted a bot for 27 years of Scripting News. The large bots tested the system, and the links brought traffic.
Many sources, many channels, many models
In three months the product went from one data source (Notion) and one web channel to six data sources and five channels, including Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and an API. By 2026 it offers more than 20 models and publishes its own test of them on 31 scripted support conversations, so a customer picks a model on scores and cost.
How it was built
These details come from the founders' posts and the company's own pages. They are grade C. [1, 11, 10, 14, 19, 20]
- Built by Pixelhop, the founders' studio, as a side project between client projects. The first version connected ChatGPT to Notion, which the studio already used for its handbook and project management.
- The website is a Nuxt application (Nuxt is a framework for Vue.js); its robots file is generated by a Nuxt module.
- Services that the company lists in July 2026: Supabase for the database, file storage and login; Railway for hosting; Cloudflare for the network; Stripe for payments; Plausible and PostHog for analytics; ConvertKit for email; Nylas for the email channel.
- Models: OpenAI at first, with nearly 1 billion OpenAI tokens used by June 2023 and gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 as the default in March 2024. In 2026, more than 20 models reached through OpenRouter, and OpenAI for speech in the voice features.
- Launch marketing: demo videos on Twitter, a ConvertKit waitlist, and Plausible to watch the traffic. The founders wrote in June 2023 that they had been bad at marketing so far.
- By 2026, free website tools (an agent-readiness checker, FAQ and llms.txt generators) bring search traffic, and the studio's AI agent researches the businesses that use them.
Tools named in the sources
Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.
The dead that came before
Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised a bot or chat tool that answers customers or staff, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.
Niles
The promiseA Slack chatbot that answered staff questions from the company's own knowledge.
Why it diedSlack and knowledge tools such as Guru and Confluence added similar features, and AI answers became a common feature faster than Niles expected.
Answerly
The promiseFAQ chatbots on company websites that deflect support tickets and pass only hard questions to people.
Why it diedThe language technology of the time could not handle real customer questions, and each customer needed long manual setup of FAQs and decision trees.
Hipmob
The promiseLive support chat inside mobile apps and websites.
Why it diedIntercom and Zendesk added the same chat features to products that customers already used. With little money, Hipmob could not stand out.
Vanti
The promiseConversational AI shopping assistants for brands.
Why it diedIn a crowded conversational-AI market it could not show that chatbots sold more than ordinary shop pages. Customers were expensive to win and integrations were complex.
What changed
Answerly and Niles had the same idea before large language models existed. From 2013 to 2020 a support bot needed long manual setup, with hand-written FAQs and decision trees, and still failed on real questions, so each customer cost too much to serve. Large language models removed most of that setup. In 2023 a bot could read a Notion workspace or a 5,000,000-word blog and answer from it on the first day, which is why two people at a small studio could build one and sell it within about three weeks.
The other cause of death is still present. Hipmob and Niles failed when larger products added the same feature, and Chat Thing faces the same risk: OpenAI's GPTs since November 2023, help desks such as Intercom and Zendesk, and many small builders. The company's own site has comparison pages against eleven named products. Its answer so far is breadth and price: many data sources, channels and models, a published test of the models, a free plan and a US$14 plan.
Can one person copy it now?
The timing, no. The method, yes.
A no-code chatbot trained on your own content was new in March 2023 and is a crowded product now, also sold by the model makers themselves. What can still be copied is the method: a prototype on a tool you already use within a week, a waitlist filled by public progress posts, early users whose own posts bring traffic, and frequent releases at low prices.
Where it is still open: Narrow versions for one trade or one language, voice and phone answering for small firms, and test results that show a business which model answers its own customers best.
- 1Build the first version on top of a tool that your team already uses, here Notion, and ship it within a month.
- 2Post short demo videos while you build, and collect a waitlist before you open sign-ups.
- 3Invite users in small batches and charge from the first weeks.
- 4Serve well-known early users well: one link from Seth Godin's blog brought a traffic spike.
What to watch
The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.
Founder figures only
Both revenue figures come from the founders: £5,000 a month in their own post of June 2023, and US$12,000 a month in their Indie Hackers interview, which this page could read only as eBiz Facts quoted it. The company files its accounts without the profit and loss account, so the register cannot confirm the revenue. No figure after 2024 was found.
The model makers sell the same idea
On 6 November 2023 OpenAI launched GPTs: anyone can build a custom ChatGPT with extra knowledge and no coding. Customers asked the founders whether OpenAI had "just killed Chat Thing". Their answer was more data sources, conversation history and channels outside ChatGPT. Each new feature from a model maker can raise the same question again.
Many builders compete
Competitors appeared within weeks of the March 2023 launch, the founders wrote. In 2026 the company's own site has comparison pages against eleven named products, from small builders such as Chatbase and DocsBot to help desks such as Intercom and Zendesk.
Growth slowed early
Three months after launch the founders wrote that growth had slowed a lot in the last month, as the AI hype cooled and more competitors arrived. By November 2024 the figure was US$12,000 a month, close to but below the goal of £10,000 that they set in June 2023 (about US$12,627 at that month's rate).
Dependence on model providers
Every answer uses tokens bought from a model provider. In 2023 the bots ran on OpenAI's models, with nearly 1 billion OpenAI tokens used by June, and in March 2024 a price cut by OpenAI let the company almost double its token allowances. The reverse can also happen: prices, model changes and terms set by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or the router OpenRouter change Chat Thing's costs.
Two founders, two businesses
The founders also run Pixelhop, a studio that builds for clients, and run Chat Thing alongside it. Chat Thing Ltd reports no employees, and its balance sheet showed net liabilities of £4,068 in April 2025.
Sources
The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.
- C Pixelhop blog, 12 June 2023, by Jozef Maxted: The story of Chat Thing, bootstrapping our first side project to £5000 MRR in under 3 monthsRead in full. The founder's own account. Source for the £5,000 monthly recurring revenue, the launch dates, the waitlist, the user counts of 5 June 2023, the slowing growth and the £10,000 goal.
- C eBiz Facts, by Niall Doherty: Start a Service Business With This $12K/Month AI ChatbotRead in full. Gives US$12,000 monthly revenue for Chat Thing and quotes the title of the founders' Indie Hackers interview. The page says it was updated on 6 March 2025.
- C Niall Doherty's blog on Goodreads, 14 November 2024: the same eBiz Facts postRead in full. A copy of source 2 with its first publication date, 14 November 2024, and the US$14 price for 3 chatbots.
- C Indie Hackers: We built a $12k/mo AI chatbot generator while exploring England with our babyCould not open: the robots.txt of indiehackers.com blocks AI agents. Cited from eBiz Facts' quotation of its title (sources 2 and 3).
- C Pixelhop case study: Chat ThingRead in full. Repeats the £5,000 figure of June 2023 (the same figure, not a second one), and states that the product was built without external funding.
- C Companies House, the UK company register: CHAT THING LTD, company number 14789358Read the overview, officers and filing history pages. Source for the incorporation date, the directors, the nature of business and the filing dates. Names and roles only.
- C Companies House: accounts of Chat Thing Ltd made up to 30 April 2024Read in full in the machine-readable version. Unaudited small-company accounts without the profit and loss account. Source for cash, creditors, net assets, share capital and the number of employees.
- C Companies House: accounts of Chat Thing Ltd made up to 30 April 2025Read in full in the machine-readable version. Same form as source 7, with the 2024 figures for comparison.
- C Chat Thing pricing page, read 15 October 2026Read in full. The prices are in the page text, not loaded by script.
- C Chat Thing models page, read 15 October 2026Read the model list and the SupportBench table of scores. Source for the 20+ models and the 10,000+ users claim.
- C Chat Thing list of sub-processors, updated 29 July 2026Read in full. Source for the database, hosting, network, payment, analytics, email and model-routing services.
- C Chat Thing blog, 30 November 2023: OpenAI GPTs vs Chat ThingRead in full. The founders' answer to customers who asked whether GPTs had ended Chat Thing.
- C OpenAI, 6 November 2023: Introducing GPTsRead the announcement. Source for the launch date and for what GPTs do.
- C Chat Thing changelog, 20 March 2024: More tokens for everyoneRead in full. Source for the default model and the effect of OpenAI's price cut.
- C Seth's Blog, 29 March 2023: Opening the pod bay doorRead in full. Seth Godin announces an AI chat bot trained on all 5,000,000 words of his blog and links to it on chatthing.ai.
- C Pixelhop blog, 11 January 2024, by Gemma Vincent: Navigating the year, setting and achieving SMART goals in a small companyRead in full. Says that the two founders run two businesses, Pixelhop and Chat Thing, and set goals for both. No figures.
- C Pixelhop about page, read 15 October 2026Read in full. Describes Pixelhop as a small AI product studio that runs Chat Thing alongside its client work.
- C Pixelhop blog, 3 February 2026: AI in 2026, how we learned to build smarterRead in full. Says that Chat Thing keeps growing, with no figures.
- C Pixelhop blog, 9 September 2026: We built free AI tools for SEO, then realised they could generate leads tooRead in full. Source for the free tools made for Chat Thing and the lead research done by the studio's AI agent.
- C Chat Thing sitemap, read 15 October 2026Read in full. Lists 62 blog pages, the free tools, and comparison pages against eleven named competitors.
- B Federal Reserve, H.10 release: historical rates for the British pound, in US dollars per poundRead the daily rates. The June 2023 average of the 21 daily values, US$1.2627 per pound, was computed with python3.
- C Chat Thing terms of service, read 15 October 2026Read in full. The footer gives company number 14789358, which is Chat Thing Ltd in the register, and says the site is built by Pixelhop.
- C Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startupsLocal export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.