# Retalk Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/retalk/ · added 2026-11-06 · updated 2026-11-06 **In short.** Retalk (AI customer-support chatbot built from a company's own documents, Luxembourg): Live with paid plans and a 30-day trial, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: Founder and CTO Clément Janssens; operated by Mailhub SA, Luxembourg; headcount not published. Launched July 2025; still running. AI customer-support chatbot built from a company's own documents · Luxembourg · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running · group: Customer support agents - Outcome: Live with paid plans and a 30-day trial, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure) - Launch: July 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 16 - Team: Founder and CTO Clément Janssens; operated by Mailhub SA, Luxembourg; headcount not published - Outside funding: None reported - Main factor: Niche - Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 3, capital needed 1 - Tags: AI-native, Small team, Bootstrapped, Running, B2B, Customer support Links: - Visit retalk.bot: https://retalk.bot/en **The product.** A chatbot for a company's website or internal tools that answers customer questions from the company's own documents: web pages, PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, product sheets and FAQs. When it does not know an answer, it passes the question to a person by email, Slack or chat, and the answer is stored for the next time. It can also call other tools' APIs, for example to book an appointment. **Why it worked.** Small online shops and software companies answer the same questions every day, and the home page says the bot handles up to 80% of them. Retalk's pitch against general chatbots is that it only gives answers that the company has provided or approved, and that every question it could not answer becomes a new entry in a growing FAQ. 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; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts. ## Summary Retalk is a customer-support chatbot based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a method in which the program first searches the company's own documents for the passages that match a question and then gives only those passages to a language model to write the answer. A human handover, the step in which the bot passes a conversation to a person, sends unanswered questions to the team; the team answers once, and the bot reuses that answer. The terms of service say Retalk.bot is operated by Mailhub SA under Luxembourg law, and the company blog is signed by Clément Janssens, "Fondateur & CTO" (founder and chief technology officer). An Internet Archive copy from 12 March 2025 shows a waitlist page; a blog post of 11 July 2025 already speaks of customers. In November 2026 the site sells three plans in euros with a 30-day free trial. No dated revenue figure for Retalk was found, so this story is grade E: the product is real, live and selling plans, but its money is not verified. The page also shows earlier companies that sold support automation and chat to online shops. ## Pricing Retalk prices from the pricing section of its home page, 6 November 2026, converted from euros | Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit | |---|---|---|---| | Start | | 54.70 | 250 conversations, 1 agent, 1 user, 5 documents or product sheets | | Scale | | 166.33 | 500 conversations, 3 agents, 5 users, 500 documents or product sheets | | Boost | | 277.96 | 1,500 conversations, 10 agents, 10 users, 10,000 documents or product sheets | | Enterprise | custom | custom | custom limits, 24/7 support, dedicated account manager | The home page lists prices in euros per month: €49 (Start), €149 (Scale) and €249 (Boost), each after a 30-day free trial; Enterprise is priced on request. The page shows no yearly billing, so the yearly column is empty. US dollar values use the Federal Reserve H.10 rate of 1.1163 US dollars per euro for 30 October 2026 (release of 2 November 2026). ## How much revenue does Retalk make? The numbers, graded A live AI support chatbot from Luxembourg with three paid plans and no dated revenue figure | Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources | |---|---|---|---|---| | Status, November 2026 | Live, with three paid plans and a 30-day free trial | C | Home page read 6 November 2026, with a pricing section, a sign-in to app.retalk.bot and a demo request form. | [1] | | Operator | Mailhub SA, Luxembourg | C | Terms: 'Retalk.bot, operated by Mailhub SA'; 'These Terms are governed by the laws of Luxembourg.' Payments are processed by Stripe. | [2] | | Founder | Clément Janssens, founder and CTO | C | Blog post of 11 July 2025 signed 'Clément Janssens Fondateur & CTO' (founder and CTO, translation). Arrfounder lists the founder as 'Clément'. On Product Hunt a Clément Janssens presents Mailhub, an email API launched in 2025, as his own product. | [4, 6, 7] | | Team | headcount not published | D | No source gives a headcount. The CTO title suggests at least one other founder, but no source names one. | [4] | | First trace | waitlist page, 12 March 2025 | C | Internet Archive copy: 'Join waitlist', 'Open Source release coming soon', 'The first open-source chatbot that understands your business'. The live site in November 2026 does not mention open source. | [5] | | Prices | €49, €149 and €249 a month; Enterprise on request | C | Pricing section of the home page. | [1] | | Knowledge sources | website, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, text, product sheets, FAQ, blog posts, newsletters, documentation | C | Home page. Firecrawl is listed as the web-crawling subprocessor. | [1, 3] | | AI provider | OpenAI | C | Subprocessor list: 'OpenAI — AI Features (US/EU)'. No other model provider is listed. | [3] | | Infrastructure | Vercel, Supabase, Mailhub, Plausible, PostHog, Stripe | C | Subprocessor list. Mailhub, the operator's own email API, sends the transactional email. | [3] | | Directory revenue line | US$50 a month, US$600 a year (no date for the figure) | D | Arrfounder listed US$50 monthly revenue for Retalk; its page says 'Last updated: Aug 1, 2026' and that its data is 'collected from various sources, primarily Twitter/X'. The figure has no date of its own, so it is not the headline. | [6] | | Outside funding | none reported | D | No source mentions a funding round. | [2, 6] | | Time from launch to the November 2026 status | 16 months | calc | Calculated: July 2025, the first dated source that mentions customers, to November 2026. | [4, 1] | How to read this table: product values come from the Retalk home page, terms and subprocessor list read on 6 November 2026; the founder's title from the company blog; the early state from an Internet Archive copy; the revenue line from a directory that gives no date for its figure. No value is grade A or B. ## When did Retalk launch, and how did it grow? Timeline From a waitlist page in March 2025 to a live product with paid plans in November 2026. Each entry carries its grade. - **12 March 2025** (grade C [5]): The first Internet Archive copy of retalk.bot shows a waitlist for an 'open-source chatbot' that books calls, takes payments and tracks orders through other tools. - **2025** (grade C [7, 2, 3]): Clément Janssens launches Mailhub, an email API, on Product Hunt; Mailhub SA later operates Retalk and Mailhub sends Retalk's email. - **11 July 2025** (grade C [4]): The founder's blog post ranks Retalk first among e-commerce chatbots, against Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio and Crisp, and mentions customers in furniture and fashion. - **1 August 2026** (grade D [6]): Arrfounder's product page, marked as last updated on this date, lists US$50 a month for Retalk with no date for the figure. - **November 2026** (grade C [1, 8]): The site is live in French and English with three paid plans, a 30-day free trial, a white-label offer for web agencies and blog comparisons with Gorgias and Zipchat. ## Why did Retalk work? ### Answers only from the company's content The bot answers from documents the customer uploads or from the customer's website, which Firecrawl reads. The FAQ says this is the difference from ChatGPT: answers come from the documentation provided, which lowers the risk of invented answers. ### Unknown questions become FAQ entries When the bot has no answer it forwards the question by email, Slack or chat and groups similar questions. The team answers once and the bot reuses the answer, so the home page promises support work that 'reduces a little more each day'. ### Tiered by conversations and documents The plans differ by the number of conversations, agents, users and documents per month, from 250 conversations to 1,500, which ties the price to the cost of model calls. ### Built on the founder's own email product Retalk's transactional email runs on Mailhub, the email API that Clément Janssens launched earlier, and the same company operates both, according to the terms and the subprocessor list. ## How it was built The subprocessor list and the home page describe the stack. - OpenAI for every AI feature, the only model provider on the subprocessor list. - Firecrawl to crawl customers' websites into the knowledge base. - Supabase for the database and Vercel for hosting, both in the EU. - Mailhub, the operator's own email API, for transactional email. - Stripe for payments; Plausible and PostHog for analytics. - Integrations with Slack and WhatsApp, plus API calls to tools such as Stripe, Notion, HubSpot, Shopify and Google Calendar shown on the home page. Sources: [3, 1] ## Who tried this before Retalk, and why did they fail? Four companies in our database of failed startups sold support automation or chat to online businesses and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified. The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade. ### Answerly (2013 to 2016; funding US$550K; cause: Product/Tech Failure) - Promise: Fewer support tickets through an intelligent FAQ that matched customer questions to written answers and routed the rest to people. - Why it died: Language processing was not good enough for real customer questions, setup took months, and Zendesk and Intercom took the market. - Record: ### RightHello (2014 to 2022; funding US$600K; cause: Ran Out of Cash) - Promise: Live chat that turns e-commerce visitors into customers. - Why it died: Intercom, Drift and Zendesk raised far more and bundled chat; small shops churned and could not pay enough. - Record: ### Vanti (2019 to 2024; funding US$18M; cause: No Market Need) - Promise: Conversational AI for shopping on brand websites. - Why it died: Brands ran pilots but saw no better sales, and large language model APIs made its custom models obsolete. - Record: ### Hipmob (2012 to 2015; funding US$120K; cause: Competition) - Promise: Customer-support chat inside mobile apps and websites. - Why it died: Intercom and Zendesk added the same chat features and it could not stand out. - Record: ## What changed Answerly had to match questions to pre-written answers with weak language processing, and Vanti built its own models. Retalk sends retrieved passages to OpenAI's model, so one technical founder can build the bot on Supabase, Vercel and a crawler, without training a model. The market risk is the one that ended RightHello and Hipmob: large support suites (Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgias) now sell AI agents too, and the founder's own blog compares Retalk with them. Retalk's answer is a lower entry price, a French and English interface and the FAQ that grows from unanswered questions. ## Can one person copy Retalk now? **Verdict: Yes; the method is common, and the hard part is getting customers in a crowded market.** A support bot that answers from a company's documents and hands unknown questions to a person can be built by one developer with a model API, a crawler and a hosted database. Many products on this site do the same, so the work is in choosing a market (here, French-speaking small shops and agencies) and in making the handover and the growing FAQ work well. 1. Let customers add their website and files, crawl and split them into passages, and index them for retrieval. 2. Answer only from retrieved passages, and hand the conversation to a person when no passage matches. 3. Store each human answer as a new FAQ entry and show which questions are asked most often. 4. Price by conversations and documents, so heavy users pay for their model calls. **What is still open.** Support bots for one language market or one industry where the large suites are weak, and white-label versions sold through web agencies. ## What could go wrong for Retalk? - **What is not verified.** No dated revenue figure for Retalk was found. The only money figure is Arrfounder's listing of US$50 a month (US$600 a year), which gives no date for the figure, says its page was last updated on 1 August 2026, and says its data is collected mainly from founders' posts on X; this pipeline cannot open X. No payment-processor profile, founder interview or company filing with revenue was found. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile or Mailhub SA's annual accounts in the Luxembourg business register. - **Logo wall and illustrative numbers.** The home page section 'They can't live without Retalk anymore' shows five logos (easy virtual tour, Vizion, Mailhub, Talanoa, Ojetables) without links or quotes, and Mailhub is the operator's own company. The agent cards show counters such as '1 234 utilisateurs aidés' (users helped) that read as examples; no source explains them. The '80%' reduction in support requests is the company's own claim. - **Competition.** This is one of the most crowded groups on the site: Chatbase, SiteGPT, DocsBot AI and Answer HQ sell the same kind of document-trained support bot, most with more evidence of revenue, and the founder's blog compares Retalk with Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgias, Tidio and Crisp. - **Dependence on OpenAI.** The subprocessor list names OpenAI as the only provider for 'AI Features'. A price or policy change at OpenAI would hit Retalk directly; no source mentions a second model provider. - **The founder's other product.** Mailhub, a transactional email API that a Clément Janssens launched on Product Hunt, is run by the same company and sends Retalk's email. It is a developer tool for templates and tracking; nothing on its Product Hunt page sells inbox warming or sender rotation. ## Sources 1. Retalk - AI Chatbots for your business (home page) — https://retalk.bot/en (grade C). Read in full on 6 November 2026. Source for the features, prices, FAQ, industries, logo wall and agent cards. 2. Retalk Terms of Service — https://retalk.bot/en/legal/terms (grade C). Read in full on 6 November 2026. Source for the operator Mailhub SA, Luxembourg law, Stripe payments and the OpenAI integration. 3. Retalk Current Subprocessors — https://retalk.bot/en/legal/subprocessors (grade C). Read in full on 6 November 2026. Source for the stack: Stripe, Vercel, Supabase, Mailhub, Plausible, PostHog, OpenAI, Slack, Firecrawl, WhatsApp. 4. Les 5 meilleurs Chatbot Ecommerce en 2025 : mon vrai classement de pro (Retalk blog, 11 July 2025) — https://retalk.bot/fr/blog/article/les-5-meilleurs-chatbot-ecommerce-en-2025-mon-vrai-classement-de-pro-et-pourquoi-retalkbot-passe-devant-tout-le-monde (grade C). Read in full on 6 November 2026 (French). Source for the founder's name and title and the first mention of customers. 5. Retalk.bot home page, Internet Archive copy of 12 March 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20250312165859/https://www.retalk.bot/ (grade C). Read in full. The earliest archived copy; a waitlist page for an open-source chatbot. 6. Arrfounder: Retalk product page — https://arrfounder.com/product/retalk (grade D). Read in full on 6 November 2026. A directory listing of founder-disclosed figures with no date for the Retalk figure; source for the US$50 a month line and the founder's first name. 7. Product Hunt: Mailhub, Send & monitoring Tailwind Email with ease — https://www.producthunt.com/products/mailhub-3 (grade C). Read in full on 6 November 2026. Source for Clément Janssens as maker of Mailhub and its 2025 launch. 8. Retalk sitemap — https://retalk.bot/sitemap.xml (grade C). Read in full on 6 November 2026. Lists the blog articles, including comparisons with Gorgias and Zipchat. 9. Federal Reserve H.10 Foreign Exchange Rates, release of 2 November 2026 — https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/current/ (grade A). Read the euro row in the copy the pipeline downloaded on 6 November 2026; 1.1163 US dollars per euro on 30 October 2026, used for the price conversion. 10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors. Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Retalk? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Retalk).