Mottle
Mottle is a no-code chatbot builder for your own website. Upload your text documents, split them into snippets, and Mottle turns them into a ChatGPT-powered assistant that answers visitors from your content alone.
What is Mottle?
Mottle is a hosted chatbot builder from MottleBot Pty Ltd, an Australian company, aimed at businesses that want a knowledge assistant on their own website without hiring a developer. Its documentation states the problem plainly: ChatGPT hallucinates confidently and knows nothing about your business, which makes it awkward to use commercially. Mottle's answer is to switch off the model's general knowledge and keep only its language-processing ability, feeding each prompt with your own material.
That material is made of snippets, chunks of text capped at 450 OpenAI tokens, roughly 1,800 characters of English. You upload a .txt file and mark the boundaries yourself with a ==//== token on its own line. Nothing else is required: no code, no hosting, no API to wire up. You sign in with a Google, Microsoft or GitHub account and a blank bot is created for you straight away.
Each bot is then configured with four settings: its name, its personality, a persistent sticky context holding background facts, and the message it returns when it does not know. The homepage highlights no-code setup, multilingual support and easy debugging. That last point is unusual at this price, because a Debug page shows exactly which snippets were used to produce each answer, so a wrong reply points straight at the missing content.
Deployment is either an embeddable website widget or a JSON API, a POST to api.mottle.com/connect authenticated with a bot id and a secret, documented with JavaScript, Python and curl samples plus a conversation mode and an email mode. Slack, Facebook Pages, Discord, Microsoft Teams and email are reachable too, but through Zapier rather than natively, and the vendor says so in as many words.
Documented use cases run from product-expert and customer-service bots to a study companion, a personal journal you can question, and a bot trained on a historical figure's writings. The homepage claims more than 2,000 businesses. Pricing is subscription-only, from 19.95 USD per month, with no permanent free tier, and the vendor openly admits the bot still invents a detail from time to time.
What it does
- Build a website chatbot trained on your own documents, without writing any code
- Turn a plain text file into searchable snippets using a simple separator token
- Shape the bot's name, personality, background context and fallback message
- Trace every answer back to the exact snippets that produced it
- Embed the bot on your site with a widget, or call it through a JSON API
- Route the bot into Slack, Facebook, Discord, Microsoft Teams or email via Zapier
- Delete a bot along with all its documents and query logs in one click
When to use Mottle / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Mottle is the right fit.
When to use Mottle
- Small businesses that want a 24/7 FAQ or support bot on their site without hiring a developer
- Support teams that already maintain a written knowledge base or FAQ and want to put it to work
- Online shops and local retailers looking to guide visitors towards the right product or service
- Software vendors who want a bot sitting on top of their existing documentation
- Independent consultants and small agencies who need a bot live in an afternoon on a modest budget
When not to use Mottle
- Anyone needing a mobile app or a browser extension: Mottle offers neither
- Teams expecting native Slack, Teams, Discord or Facebook connectors, since all of them run through Zapier
- Organisations bound by contractual data obligations, as no DPA, subprocessor list or security certification is published
- Users who want to train a bot on PDFs, spreadsheets or media rather than plain text files
- Buyers looking for a permanent free tier, since the cheapest plan costs 19.95 USD per month
How to use Mottle
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Sign in at the Mottle app with a Google, Microsoft or GitHub account; a blank bot is created automatically
- Open the bot's Settings page and set its name, personality, sticky context and failure message
- Prepare a .txt file containing your FAQs, policies or product information
- Split that file into snippets by placing the ==//== token on a line of its own between blocks
- Upload the file on the Training page, using the upload button or drag and drop
- Ask real questions on the Test page to see how the bot behaves
- Open the Debug page to inspect which snippets were used for each answer
- Edit and re-upload the text file until the answers are right, expecting some trial and error
- Publish from the Publish / API page: embed the widget on your site or call the JSON API
- Optionally build a Zap to route the bot into Slack, Discord, Teams, a Facebook Page or email
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely fast to set up: the vendor claims a working bot in under five minutes and a site embed in under ten
- The Debug page makes every answer traceable to its source snippets, which is rare at this price point
- Documentation is short, concrete and unusually candid, including a worked example of the bot getting it wrong
- A 60-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee is advertised in the FAQ
- You can open an account without a credit card and try the bot on the homepage beforehand
- Implementation consulting is included on every annual plan, from 30 minutes upward
- Leaving is simple: one click deletes a bot with all its documents and logs
Cons
- No permanent free plan, with an entry ticket of 19.95 USD per month
- The terms say refunds are not available while the FAQ promises a 60-day guarantee, and the site never reconciles the two
- Slack, Facebook, Discord, Teams and email are not native integrations, all running through Zapier under a use-at-your-own-risk warning
- Every uploaded document is passed to OpenAI at query time, as the FAQ states outright
- No data processing agreement, no published subprocessor list, no security certification and no EU Article 27 representative
- Training is text-only, with manual splitting and snippets capped at roughly 1,800 characters
- Terms and privacy policy are unchanged since 7 March 2023, and no retention period of Mottle's own is published
Pricing & Plans
Mottle does not offer a permanent free plan. Access starts at 19.95 USD per month with the Hobby tier, and all prices are quoted in US dollars. An account can be opened without a credit card, and the FAQ advertises a 60-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. Unused query credits do not carry over to the following month, and additional implementation consulting is billed at 300 USD per hour.
- up to 2 bots
- up to 4
- 000 snippets per bot
- up to 4
- 000 queries per month across all bots
- GPT4-o
- Zapier integration
- API access
- up to 5 bots
- up to 10
- 000 snippets per bot
- up to 20
- 000 queries per month across all bots
- GPT4-o
- Zapier integration
- API access
- up to 10 bots
- up to 30
- 000 snippets per bot
- up to 100
- 000 queries per month across all bots
- GPT4-o
- Zapier integration
- API access
- Custom plan on request through the contact page
- with additional consulting available at 300 USD per hour
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Mottle handles your data.
GDPR overview
The privacy policy, dated 7 March 2023, devotes a section to European Union users and states that, in accordance with the GDPR, they are entitled to six rights: access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection to processing and portability. Requests are answered within one month. One reservation is stated openly: the company may charge a small fee for a copy of personal data. Beyond that, implementation is thin. No EU representative is designated under Article 27, although the publisher is established in Australia. No data protection officer is named and no dedicated privacy address exists, so every request goes to the single generic contact address. The policy says nothing about legal bases, international transfers, standard contractual clauses, retention periods or a data processing agreement.
Who owns the data?
Under the terms, you keep every right to the content you submit, and the company says so explicitly. In exchange you grant MottleBot a licence to use, modify, reproduce, publicly display and distribute that content, including to other users and to the general public. A separate clause is harsher: submissions, meaning questions, comments, suggestions and feedback about the service, become the company's exclusive property along with all intellectual property rights, without compensation and with no way to withdraw them. The site's own code, databases, designs and marks remain the vendor's. The terms also disclaim any liability for the loss, breach or corruption of your data.
Reuse rights
Reuse works differently in each direction. You keep ownership of the documents you upload, so nothing in the terms prevents you from using that material elsewhere, and deleting a bot erases its documents and query logs immediately and permanently. What you may not reuse is Mottle's side of the arrangement: the terms forbid systematically retrieving content from the site to build a collection or database, copying or reverse-engineering the software, and using the service to create anything competing with it. Feedback is the exception that cuts the other way, since submissions become the company's exclusive property once sent. Bot output remains subject to OpenAI's usage policy, which the terms incorporate by reference, and the documentation reminds you that respecting other people's intellectual property in what you upload is your responsibility.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site is sparing on hosting detail. The FAQ states that documents you upload are stored on the vendor's servers, on Google Cloud and Pinecone, and are passed to OpenAI at query time for embedding and completion. Payments are handled by Stripe. Beyond those four names nothing is specified: no hosting country, no region, no data residency option and no security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001. The privacy policy limits itself to promising reasonable physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that comply with federal standards, without saying which standards or whose federal law. The publisher, MottleBot Pty Ltd, is Australian and the terms are governed by the law of New South Wales, so any dispute lands in an Australian jurisdiction whatever the servers' location. Buyers with data residency requirements will find nothing on the site to satisfy them and should ask the vendor directly.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Mottle.
- Every document you upload is sent to OpenAI at query time, so confidential material should be treated as disclosed to a third party
- Documents sit on Google Cloud and Pinecone with no hosting country, region or residency option published
- The terms turn feedback and suggestions into the company's exclusive property, permanently and without compensation
- The terms disclaim all liability for the loss, breach or corruption of your data
- A bot answering from your documents will still occasionally invent a detail, as the vendor's own troubleshooting page demonstrates
- Staff and customers may take a bot's answer as authoritative, so keep a human route open for anything consequential
- Refund expectations raised by the FAQ's 60-day guarantee are contradicted by the terms, so obtain any commitment in writing
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for the standard path. Sign in with a Google, Microsoft or GitHub account and a blank bot appears; the real work is editorial, preparing a text file and splitting it with the ==//== token. Embedding the bot means pasting a widget. Two paths raise the bar: the JSON API expects someone comfortable with a POST request and a secret, and the Zapier route to Slack or Teams requires building a Zap, including one documented trap, since leaving bot messages as triggers sends the bot into an endless loop. Expect some trial and error before the answers are right.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Mottle
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does Mottle actually do?
Is there a free plan?
Does OpenAI see my documents?
Do I need my own OpenAI API key?
What is a snippet?
Can I connect the bot to Slack or Microsoft Teams?
Is there an API?
How long does Mottle keep my data?
Is there a mobile app?
How do I request a new feature?
Should you pick Mottle?
Mottle does one thing and does not pretend otherwise: it turns a text file into a chatbot that answers from that file and nothing else. For a small business, an independent consultant or a support team with a written FAQ already in hand, that narrowness is a feature. Setup takes minutes, needs no developer, and the Debug page, which shows which snippets produced each answer, makes a wrong reply diagnosable instead of mysterious. The vendor's documentation is refreshingly frank, going as far as publishing an example of its own bot inventing a detail.
The limits are just as clear. There is no permanent free plan and the entry ticket is 19.95 USD per month. Anything beyond the website widget or the JSON API, meaning Slack, Teams, Discord, a Facebook Page or email, runs through Zapier, and MottleBot says openly that it has no relationship with Zapier and that you use it at your own risk. Training is text-only, with manual snippet splitting and a cap of around 1,800 characters per snippet.
The paperwork is where buyers should look hardest. Every uploaded document reaches OpenAI at query time, which the FAQ states plainly. There is no data processing agreement, no published subprocessor list, no security certification, no EU Article 27 representative and no retention period of Mottle's own. The terms and privacy policy have not changed since March 2023, and the terms deny refunds outright while the FAQ promises sixty days.
In short, a well-judged and honestly documented tool for public-facing knowledge bots built on non-sensitive content. Organisations with contractual data obligations should ask MottleBot for written answers before uploading anything.
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