Chattiv
A live chat platform for small business websites that we built, launched in October 2026 and now run ourselves, and the hard question at its centre: who is answering, a person or an AI?
Visit ChattivA chat window makes a promise. Most of them break it.
A chat bubble on a website tells the visitor that someone is there. For a small business that is rarely true all day, and the usual fixes make things worse: a window that looks live while nobody is watching, or a bot that loops until the visitor gives up.
Adding AI sharpens the problem rather than solving it. The moment software can answer, every conversation needs a clear owner. If the AI and a person both reply, the visitor gets two answers. If neither does, they get silence. And when a person does take over, the visitor should not have to explain everything again.
Honesty is the third constraint. Visitors deserve to know when they are talking to software, and in a growing number of places the law now says so. An assistant that blurs the line might look clever in a demo; in front of real customers it costs trust.
Where the engineering actually went
One owner per conversation, enforced
Every conversation has exactly one owner at a time, a person, the AI or nobody yet, and the platform enforces it. A late reply from the wrong side is dropped rather than shown, so a visitor never gets two contradictory answers.
Handoffs that carry the context
When a person takes over, they get a summary of what the visitor already asked. Handing a conversation back to the AI only happens when a person explicitly chooses it, never by accident.
Disclosure that cannot be switched off
AI messages always carry a visible label and a way to reach a person. It is built into the platform rather than left as a setting, so no configuration can make the assistant pretend to be human.
Notifications people can rely on
A chat nobody hears about is worse than no chat at all. Alerts reach the team on desktop and phone, and a missed conversation turns into an email follow-up instead of a dead end.
Running on other people’s websites
The widget lives on customers’ sites, so it has to be small, load last and never break the page it sits on. A tool that slows a small business website down is costing that business customers.
AI costs that cannot surprise anyone
AI usage is metered and capped per plan, with any extra spending opt-in and limited. Every account is isolated from every other, because a chat platform holds conversations its customers trusted to them.
What this proves, and what it does not
Chattiv is live, open for signups, and run day to day by us. It also runs on our own sites, including this one, so we use it the same way our customers do and feel the rough edges first.
What it means for a project of your own is not that we would build you a chat platform. It is that the parts that decide whether people trust software (who is responsible at each moment, being honest about what is automated, and failing safely when something goes wrong) are things we have already had to get right somewhere real.
If you are weighing up adding AI to something customer-facing, the most useful conversation we can have is about those parts. Tell us what you are considering and we will be straight with you about what it involves, including when the answer is that you should not build it.
Ready for a website that pulls its weight?
Tell us about your business and we will come back with a straight answer on what it needs, what it costs, and how long it takes.