# ChatNode

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/chatnode/ · added 2026-10-26 · updated 2026-10-26

**In short.** ChatNode (AI customer-support chatbots, USA (company), France (founders)): Sold for a six-figure price, June 2024. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 2 founders according to Starter Story; the October 2023 About page listed 3 people. Launched May 2023; sold 13 months after launch.

AI customer-support chatbots · USA (company), France (founders) · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · sold · group: Customer support agents

- Outcome: Sold for a six-figure price, June 2024 (evidence grade of the headline number: D; headline in US dollars: 100000)
- Launch: May 2023; months from launch to the outcome: 13
- Team: 2 founders according to Starter Story; the October 2023 About page listed 3 people
- Outside funding: None reported; Starter Story calls it bootstrapped
- Main factor: Distribution
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Bootstrapped, Exit, B2B, Customer support

**The product.** A company gives ChatNode the addresses of its web pages and uploads its documents. ChatNode turns that material into a chatbot that answers customer questions on the company's website, in Slack and in other tools, and hands the conversation to a person when needed. The current pricing page lists plans from US$35 a month, with models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and DeepSeek.

**Why it worked.** Starter Story reported that the founders copied a proven idea, Chatbase, and built a first version in about two months. They then launched it where early buyers of AI tools already look: Product Hunt, AppSumo and AI directories. According to Starter Story, they sold the company through Acquire.com about 13 months after the first public post.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

ChatNode builds AI chatbots for customer support. An AI chatbot here is a chat window on a company's website that answers visitors' questions with a large language model, a program such as GPT-4 that writes text, and that uses the company's own web pages and documents as its source. The method is called retrieval-augmented generation: the program first searches the company's material for the passages that fit the question, then gives those passages to the model to write the answer.

On 16 May 2023 the Hacker News user tagarate, a name that matches the co-founder Thomas Agarate, posted the project and wrote that he was looking for the first users. On 6 July 2023 the same user posted the title "Review my startup, chatnode.ai – $2K MRR in 30 days", which reports US$2,000 in monthly recurring revenue one month after launch. Starter Story wrote in November 2024 that two founders built it, that an AppSumo lifetime deal made more than six figures in net profit in two months, and that the company was sold through Acquire.com in June 2024 for a six-figure price.

Every money figure on this page rests on one source each: a founder's post title, a Starter Story article and a Latka directory entry. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, so the page is graded D, reported, not verified. The page also shows four failed startups that sold automated or live customer chat before language models could answer from a company's own documents.

## Pricing

ChatNode plans on 26 October 2026, read on the company's pricing page (grade C). These are the prices of the current owner, not of the founders.

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 0 | 35 credits a month, 1 chatbot, 20 files and links |
| Lite | 29.17 | 35 | 1,250 credits a month, 1 AI agent, API access |
| Standard | 74.17 | 89 | 12,500 credits a month, 3 AI agents, 3 team members |
| Scale | 314.17 | 377 | 50,000 credits a month, 8 AI agents, 5 team members, own domain |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | Unlimited agents and messages, account manager |

A credit pays for one answer. The home page says most models cost 1 credit per answer and the advanced models cost 20 credits. Yearly billing gives two months free, about 17% less than monthly billing. The free plan uses Gemini 2.0 Pro only and deletes inactive chatbots after 14 days. In February 2024, while the founders still ran it, an archived copy of the same page showed a Standard plan at US$59 a month (US$50 billed yearly) and a Growth plan at US$99 a month (US$83 billed yearly).

## How much did ChatNode make, and what was it sold for? The numbers, graded

A support chatbot that its founders built in about two months and, according to Starter Story, sold for a six-figure price 13 months after the first public post

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sale of the company, June 2024 | a six-figure price, through Acquire.com | D | Starter Story, November 2024. The exact price and the buyer are not given. The page title says sold in 12 months, the text says within 1.5 years. outcomeUsd on this page is the lower bound of six figures, US$100,000. | [2] |
| Monthly recurring revenue about 30 days after launch | US$2,000 | D | Only the title of a Hacker News post by tagarate on 6 July 2023, with no text. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month. | [1] |
| MRR in the first week after the Product Hunt launch | nearly US$1,000 | D | Starter Story, without a date. It also says ChatNode was the second product of the day. | [2] |
| Net profit from the AppSumo lifetime deal | more than six figures in two months | D | Starter Story, without a date. Six figures means at least US$100,000. A lifetime deal is one payment for permanent access. | [2] |
| Annual revenue, November 2023 | US$42,000 | D | Latka directory, which writes source not recorded. | [3] |
| Average monthly revenue implied by the Latka figure | US$3,500 | calc | Calculated: 42,000 divided by 12 equals 3,500. | [3] |
| Monthly revenue on the Starter Story card | US$10,000 | D | Starter Story, without a date. The same card estimates 3 employees. | [2] |
| Team in October 2023 | 3 people | C | The archived About page lists a web developer, Thomas Agaraté as marketing director and Sacha Dumay as data engineer. Starter Story counts 2 founders; Latka counts 3 employees in November 2023. | [4, 2, 3] |
| Outside funding | none reported | D | Starter Story calls the company bootstrapped. No source mentions an investor. | [2] |
| Company that ran ChatNode in October 2023 | SDATAS LLC, registered in Wyoming, United States | C | Archived terms of use: SDATAS LLC, doing business as ChatNode AI. | [5] |
| Company that runs ChatNode in October 2026 | Chatnode AI LLC, Delaware | C | Current terms. The change of company name agrees with a sale, but the page does not say who owns it. | [6] |
| First public post | 16 May 2023 | C | Hacker News post by tagarate: Chatnode.ai, building a tool to train ChatGPT with any of your data. The Wayback Machine has its first copy of the home page on the same day. | [7, 8] |
| Time from the first public post to the sale | 13 months | calc | Calculated: May 2023 to June 2024. | [7, 2] |
| Customers in October 2026 | more than 3,500 companies | C | Home page of the current owner. It is a claim, not a count of paying customers. | [9] |

How to read this table: a grade C value is stated by the company or its founder on its own pages and is not a money figure. A grade D value is a money figure that only one source states: a founder's post, a Starter Story article or a directory. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.

## When did ChatNode launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a first Hacker News post to a sale through Acquire.com, in 13 months. Each entry carries its grade.

- **16 May 2023** (grade C [7]): The Hacker News user tagarate, a name that matches Thomas Agarate, describes the tool: train GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 chatbots on web pages or PDF files and embed them on a website as a support bot. He asks for the first users.
- **21 June 2023** (grade D [2]): Starter Story embeds a post by Thomas Agarate from this date in its section on the AppSumo launch. The post itself could not be read.
- **6 July 2023** (grade D [1]): Hacker News post title: Review my startup, chatnode.ai – $2K MRR in 30 days.
- **October 2023** (grade C [4, 5]): The About page lists a team of three. The terms name SDATAS LLC, a Wyoming company, doing business as ChatNode AI.
- **November 2023** (grade D [3]): Latka lists US$42,000 in annual revenue and 3 employees, source not recorded.
- **February 2024** (grade C [10]): Archived pricing page: Standard US$59 a month, Growth US$99 a month, both with a two-week free trial.
- **June 2024** (grade D [2]): Sold through Acquire.com for a six-figure price, according to Starter Story. Starter Story also embeds a post by Sacha Dumay dated 1 July 2024 in that section; the post could not be read.
- **October 2026** (grade C [6, 9, 11]): Chatnode AI LLC, a Delaware company, runs the site. It sells AI support agents with AI Actions, many models and plans from US$35 a month, and says more than 3,500 companies use it.

## Why did ChatNode work?

### Copy a proven product fast

Starter Story wrote that the idea came from watching Chatbase, an earlier chatbot builder. The founders built a minimum viable product, the smallest version that people can use and pay for, in about one to two months, and took shortcuts such as sending buyers to Stripe's hosted checkout page.

### Launch sites for early buyers

The first users came from Product Hunt, where Starter Story reported ChatNode as second product of the day, and from AI directories, small Facebook groups and a Discord community. All of these cost little or nothing.

### A lifetime deal with the customer's own API key

On AppSumo the founders sold lifetime access for one payment. Starter Story reported that buyers had to use their own OpenAI key, a password that bills the model use to the buyer's OpenAI account. That rule kept the founders' model costs from growing with each lifetime customer.

### Paid search after the launches

Starter Story reported that the founders then used Google Ads on product keywords and said the ads returned 2.5 to 3 times their cost. After that, the founders sold the business instead of building it into a larger company.

## How it was built

These details come from the founder's Hacker News post and from Starter Story's summary of the founders' statements. They are grade C and D.

- Backend in Python with FastAPI, a Python framework for web services. Frontend in Svelte and TypeScript, hosted on Vercel.
- Pinecone, a vector database, stored the embeddings of the customer documents. An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of a passage, so that similar passages can be found by search. LangChain connected the search to the model.
- The OpenAI API answered the questions. In May 2023 the founder named GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Supabase is also listed in Starter Story's tool list.
- Stripe took the payments, at first through Stripe's own checkout pages instead of a custom payment form.
- Starter Story reported that the founders hired help for customer support so that they could stay on development.
- Since the sale, the current owner's pricing page lists GPT-5-mini, GPT-5.2, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity Sonar and DeepSeek models.

Sources: [7, 2, 11]

## Who tried this before ChatNode, and why did they fail?

Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold customer chat or automated answers before language models could read a company's documents. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from Loot Drop (https://www.loot-drop.io/), a free database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Loot Drop describes its entries as AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Answerly (2013 to 2016; funding US$550K; cause: Product/Tech Failure)

- Promise: FAQ chatbots that answer common support questions so humans handle only the complex ones.
- Why it died: The language processing of the time could not understand real questions, and the large help-desk companies Zendesk and Intercom already owned the customers.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly

### Hipmob (2012 to 2015; funding US$120K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Customer chat inside mobile apps and websites.
- Why it died: Intercom and Zendesk added the same feature to larger products, and with almost no funding it stayed unknown.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1184-hipmob

### RightHello (2014 to 2022; funding US$600K; cause: Ran Out of Cash)

- Promise: Live chat for online shops that turns visitors into buyers.
- Why it died: A person had to answer every chat, and Intercom had raised US$240 million while RightHello had US$600,000.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello

### Vanti (2019 to 2024; funding US$18M; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: Chatbots that guide shoppers to a purchase.
- Why it died: It did not find enough buyers in a crowded market, and the cost of each customer and of each integration was too high.
- Record: https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti

## What changed

Before 2023, a support chatbot needed its answers written by hand. Answerly's customers wrote FAQs and decision trees, and the bot still failed when a visitor asked the same thing in other words. Hipmob and RightHello avoided the problem by selling chat windows for human agents, and lost to larger help-desk suites.

Language models removed the hand-written part. In May 2023 the founder wrote that a customer only gives links to its web pages or documents and waits for the training to finish. Because the model is rented from OpenAI, a small team could copy Chatbase within weeks, and according to Starter Story it sold the result for six figures, where Vanti had spent US$18 million and closed in 2024.

## Can one person copy ChatNode now?

**Verdict: The method, yes. The same product, no.**

A website chatbot trained on a company's documents was copied by hundreds of teams in 2023, and the market now includes Chatbase, SiteGPT and the help-desk suites Intercom and Zendesk. What can be copied is the sequence that Starter Story described: build a small version of a proven product, launch on Product Hunt and AppSumo, protect the margin with the customer's own API key, then sell the business while it is still growing.

1. Pick a product that already sells well and build a smaller version in one or two months.
2. Launch on a weekday on Product Hunt and list the product in AI directories.
3. If you sell a lifetime deal, make the buyer pay for model use with their own API key.
4. Plan a sale on a marketplace such as Acquire.com once the revenue is steady, if you do not want to run the company for years.

**What is still open.** Support chatbots for one industry or one language, with the rules and integrations that industry needs, are less crowded than general website chatbots.

## What could go wrong for ChatNode?

- **What is not verified.** Every money figure rests on one source. The US$2,000 in monthly recurring revenue is only the title of a Hacker News post by tagarate (Thomas Agarate) on 6 July 2023. The six-figure sale in June 2024, the six-figure AppSumo profit and the US$10,000 monthly revenue come only from one Starter Story article of November 2024, which embeds X posts by the founders that could not be read. The US$42,000 annual revenue of November 2023 is a Latka entry with no recorded source. A reader could look for the Acquire.com listing, a statement by the buyer, or the founders' own posts about the sale.
- **Sources that do not agree.** Starter Story calls Thomas Agarate a data engineer from Portugal, and Latka places the company in Portugal. The company's own About page of October 2023 lists him as marketing director with a French flag and lists Sacha Dumay as the data engineer. Starter Story's title says the sale came after 12 months, its text says within 1.5 years. Its pricing section says plans start at about US$19 a month, while the archived pricing page of February 2024 starts at US$59.
- **Competition.** Starter Story wrote that ChatNode was modelled on Chatbase. The same product is sold by Chatbase, SiteGPT, DocsBot, Chat Thing and many others, and by Intercom and Zendesk inside their help-desk suites. Competing products were easy to build, which is one reason a sale was a sensible outcome.
- **Dependence on model providers.** The product rents every answer from a model provider: OpenAI in 2023, and today OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and DeepSeek. The current terms say customers who connect their own API key pay those providers directly. A price change by a provider changes the margin of every plan.
- **Compared with other support-agent stories on this site.** Chatbase reached US$10 million in annual recurring revenue with a figure published by Stripe (grade A) and SiteGPT reports US$190,000 a year, while ChatNode is the only support-agent story here that ended in a sale, and its numbers are the weakest, grade D.
- **The business after the sale.** The current site, with more than 3,500 companies claimed, many models and AI Actions, belongs to the owner after the sale, Chatnode AI LLC of Delaware. Nothing on this page about today's product describes the founders' results.

## Sources

1. Hacker News post by tagarate, 6 July 2023: Review my startup, chatnode.ai – $2K MRR in 30 days (read through the Algolia API) — https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/36613046 (grade D). Read in full. The post has a title and no text, and no comments. Source for the US$2,000 MRR claim.
2. Starter Story, 10 November 2024: How 2 Founders Bootstrapped & Sold AI SaaS for Six Figures in 12 Months — https://www.starterstory.com/chat-node-breakdown (grade D). Read in full. A summary of the founders' statements, not marked as an estimate. Two embedded X posts could not be read. Source for the sale, the launch channels, the stack and the AppSumo profit.
3. Latka company page: ChatNode revenue — https://getlatka.com/companies/chatnode.ai (grade D). Read in full. A directory entry. Source for the US$42,000 annual revenue and the 3 employees of November 2023, which it lists with source not recorded.
4. ChatNode About page, archived 15 October 2023 by the Wayback Machine — https://web.archive.org/web/20231015074711/https://www.chatnode.ai/about (grade C). Read in full. Source for the team of three and their roles.
5. ChatNode terms of use, archived 15 October 2023 by the Wayback Machine — https://web.archive.org/web/20231015074741/https://www.chatnode.ai/terms (grade C). Read the section that names the company: SDATAS LLC, registered in Wyoming, doing business as ChatNode AI.
6. ChatNode terms and conditions, read 26 October 2026 — https://www.chatnode.ai/terms-conditions (grade C). Read the sections on the company, the governing law and third-party models. Source for Chatnode AI LLC of Delaware and the own-API-key rule.
7. Hacker News posts by tagarate, including 16 May 2023: Chatnode.ai – Building a tool to train ChatGPT with any of your data (read through the Algolia search API) — https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=author_tagarate&hitsPerPage=100 (grade C). Read in full. Four items by the user. Source for the first public description, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and the launch month.
8. Wayback Machine list of archived chatnode.ai pages, 2023 to 2024 — https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=chatnode.ai*&from=2023&to=2024&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=urlkey&fl=timestamp,original&limit=200 (grade C). Read the list. The first archived copy of the home page is from 16 May 2023.
9. ChatNode home page, read 26 October 2026 — https://www.chatnode.ai/ (grade C). Read in full. The current owner's claims: AI support agents and more than 3,500 companies. Checked for the purpose rules.
10. ChatNode pricing page, archived 25 February 2024 by the Wayback Machine — https://web.archive.org/web/20240225135934/https://www.chatnode.ai/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the Standard and Growth prices while the founders ran the company.
11. ChatNode pricing page, read 26 October 2026 — https://www.chatnode.ai/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the current plans, credits and the list of models. Checked for the purpose rules.
12. Loot Drop database export of failed startups — https://www.loot-drop.io/ (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.