Help center
Write it once, and it answers twice
A FAQ list is a handful of sentences. A help center is the real explanation: how collection works, what the warranty covers, what you do about a late cancellation. Formala shows those articles in the widget for people who would rather read, and quotes them back for people who would rather ask.
Writing and serving a help center starts on the Starter plan. On Free the assistant still answers from your FAQ list.
Dana Okafor
Owner
Marcus Bell · 11:42 PM
Dana · 8:05 AM
Emailed to marcus@bell.co with a link back to this thread. No account, no password, nothing to install.
Two ways of having written it down.
A customer wants to know whether they can collect an order today. It is a quarter past nine at night.
True, and it answers nothing. They wanted a yes or a no and got a promise about tomorrow.
- They still do not know whether to drive over.
- Somebody has to answer this by hand in the morning.
- By the morning they have bought it somewhere else.
The article said 11am. It read the article, and it did the arithmetic about tonight.
- They know the answer at twenty past nine at night.
- Nobody had to be awake for it.
- You wrote that sentence once, months ago.
One source
The same paragraph, doing two jobs
Everything you write is available to be read and available to be quoted. A visitor who opens the widget and browses sees the article; a visitor who types a question gets its sentences in the reply. You are not maintaining a public help page and a separate set of AI instructions that slowly stop agreeing with each other.
One article you wrote
Collection and delivery
Same-day collection is available on orders placed before 11am.
Someone who wants to read
- Collection and delivery
- Returns and exchanges
- Care instructions
Browsed in the widget, before anybody types a word.
Someone who wants to ask
can I pick up today?
Same-day collection is available on orders placed before 11am.
Answered in your own words, not a summary of them.
Help center, in three parts
Articles, not a field full of notes
Each one has a title, a body and its own place in the order. Write them in the dashboard, publish when they are ready, and keep drafts sitting there until they are.
The assistant answers out of them
Published articles go into the assistant’s instructions, so a question it could only half-answer from a one-line FAQ gets the real explanation instead, in the words you used.
Scoped to the site it belongs to
Run more than one form and each article can belong to one of them, all of them, or a few. A trade customer never reads the retail returns policy.
Worth knowing. It answers from what the articles say and nothing else. An article that does not cover a case gets the same honest “I will get somebody to confirm that” as no article at all. That is the point, and it does mean a thin help center reads like a thin one. Writing them starts on the Starter plan.
Help center: the questions people ask
No. The articles live in the widget: the Home tab lists them and they open inside the panel. There is no separate help subdomain to look after, and nothing to style.
Help center works with
Pricing
Simple pricing. Every core feature included.
10 conversations a month free, no card. Every plan has every core feature. Bigger plans add volume, and then Starter adds your own help center and learning from real chats; Growth adds team seats; Pro adds the AI follow-up engine and sending from your own domain; Business adds auto-sent AI replies. How billing works →
Free
$0/mo
10 conversations / month
no card, ever
- Every core feature
- Form, messages and booking never stop
- Formala badge stays on the widget
Starter
$19/mo
150 conversations / month
about 13¢ per conversation
- Every core feature
- Your own help center
- Learns from real chats
Growth
$39/mo
400 conversations / month
about 10¢ per conversation
- Every core feature
- Your own help center
- Learns from real chats
- Team seats
Pro
$79/mo
1,000 conversations / month
about 8¢ per conversation
- Every core feature
- Your own help center
- Learns from real chats
- Team seats
- AI follow-up engine
- Send from your own domain
And it never switches off
10 conversations a month are answered by the AI. Past that the AI stops answering until the month turns over, while the rest of it keeps working as it was, carrying a small “Powered by Formala” line that any paid plan removes.
- The contact formThe widget falls back to your own form, so a visitor who wants to reach you still can, and the lead still lands in your inbox.
- Direct messagesVisitors can still leave a message for you or for a named person on your team, and reply to yours from the same thread.
- BookingYour booking page keeps taking appointments, with the reminders and the calendar sync that go with them.
Add voice: let visitors talk to it out loud
A microphone in the chat. Visitors speak instead of typing and hear the answer back, and you get the same transcript and the same lead as any other conversation. Works with any plan, on as many forms as you like.
$59/mo200 spoken minutes a month
Not sure what something does? Every feature, explained in plain English →
Every plan starts on the free one: no card required, cancel anytime. If Formala catches one job you'd have missed, it's paid for itself.
Priced for small businesses, not enterprises.
You get the qualifying, structuring, and follow-up you'd expect from tools that cost far more, at pennies per conversation.
| Formala | A plain contact form | Chat / chatbot suites | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turns vague visitors into qualified leads | — | Limited | |
| Clean, structured leads, no transcripts to read | Limited | — | |
| Answers 24/7 and follows up on its own | — | Limited | |
| Live in minutes. One line, no code or setup fees | Limited | — | |
| Your brand, no “powered by” badge (any paid plan) | Limited | — | |
| Typical cost | From $19/mo · ~6–13¢ a chat | Free, but converts like a form | ~$30–130/seat + ~$1 per AI chat |
You pay less at every size
| Chats / mo | A comparable AI form tool | Formala |
|---|---|---|
| 250 | $59/mo | $39/moGrowth · 400 included |
| 500 | $98/mo | $79/moPro · 1,000 included |
| 2,000 | $330/mo | $149/moBusiness · 2,500 included |
Up to ~2.5× cheaper per conversation, and it does more.
Other tools' prices reflect major providers' publicly listed rates (AI form tools by conversation tier; live-chat suites per seat plus a per-AI-answer fee) and may change, so compare current plans before deciding.
Stop losing the visitors who almost reached out.
Set Formala up in the time it takes to read this page.
Start freeNo card required · cancel anytime · your data stays yours