Drift Free Plan: What You Actually Get Before Paying

Drift has no free plan for new users anymore — Salesloft is retiring it on 31 January 2027. Here is what happened and the free alternatives to try.

By Galactic News Editorial · Published 2026-11-09T07:37:54+00:00 · Updated 2026-11-09T07:37:54+00:00

Drift Free Plan: What You Actually Get Before Paying

Here is the short answer: nothing, if you are a new customer. Drift no longer offers a free plan to new sign-ups, and it no longer accepts new customers at all. Salesloft, which acquired Drift in February 2024, announced the gradual sunset of Drift in March 2026 and named 1mind as its successor. Drift is scheduled for retirement on 31 January 2027. This article explains what happened to the free plan, what Drift used to offer, what existing customers still get, and which free alternatives are worth trying instead.

What Happened to Drift?

Drift launched in 2015 and more or less invented conversational marketing: live chat and chatbots that qualify website visitors and book sales meetings in real time. Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024 and began folding it into its sales engagement platform. In March 2026, Clari and Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of Drift's conversational marketing solution and named 1mind as its exclusive successor. The Drift product pages are still live, but active development has ended. There is no hard end-of-life date published beyond the retirement date of 31 January 2027, when access ends or at the end of your contract if that comes first. No new sales are happening. If you are evaluating live chat today, Drift is not a product you can buy.

The Drift Free Plan: What It Used to Include

Drift once offered a basic free chat widget. The free tier gave small teams a live chat box for their website with limited features. It did not include the chatbot automation, lead routing or meeting booking that made Drift famous. Those features sat behind paid plans. Over time, Drift's pricing moved upmarket. Paid plans were quoted through sales, with the entry-level Premium plan reported at around $2,500 a month, or about $30,000 a year billed annually. Advanced and Enterprise tiers were custom quoted, reportedly from about $40,000 to over $150,000 a year. There was no public pricing page and no self-serve trial. Getting started meant booking a sales demo. That sales-gated model is now closed entirely. The free plan is gone, and so is the signup flow.

What Existing Drift Customers Get Now

Existing customers keep access until the retirement date or the end of their contract, whichever comes first. Salesloft's own help pages list the Drift packages that existing customers run: Premium, Advanced, Enterprise, Startup and Essentials. There is no free package in that list. If you are an existing customer, the practical work now is migration planning. Inventory your playbooks, targeting rules and integrations before you move, because conversational marketing logic does not transfer automatically between platforms. Salesloft points customers toward 1mind as the successor product. Other teams are moving to HubSpot, Intercom, Crisp or Tidio, depending on their size and budget. Start the move early. A chatbot with months of tuning cannot be rebuilt in a weekend.

Drift Pricing: The Numbers That No Longer Matter

These figures come from buyer reports and review sites, not from a public Drift pricing page, because Drift never published one. They are historical now. No new buyer will pay them, because no new buyer can buy Drift at all. The lesson is about the model, not the numbers. Drift priced itself as an enterprise sales tool. The free plan was a narrow on-ramp to a product that cost $30,000 a year at the entry point. That gap between the free widget and the paid product was always the honest story of the Drift free plan.

Free Alternatives to Drift Worth Trying

If you wanted Drift's free plan, these tools give you a real free tier today. Crisp offers a permanent free plan for two seats with live chat included. Tidio offers a free plan with 50 conversations a month, plus live chat and an AI agent in one bill. Its Starter plan costs about $24 a month billed annually. HubSpot's free CRM includes live chat and a basic chatbot, which covers the same ground Drift's free widget once covered. Intercom has no free plan, but its Essential plan starts at $29 a seat a month billed annually and includes a 14-day trial. Freshchat, part of Freshworks, also offers a free tier for small teams. Each of these tools is actively sold and supported, which Drift no longer is. For a small team, Crisp or Tidio is the closest like-for-like replacement for the old Drift free widget. For a B2B sales team that wants Drift's meeting-booking workflow, HubSpot's free tier is the better starting point.

How to Pick a Drift Replacement

Start by listing what you actually used Drift for. If it was just a chat box on your website, any free live chat tool will do. Crisp or Tidio covers that in an afternoon. If you used playbooks to qualify leads and book meetings, you need a tool with chatbot logic and calendar integration. HubSpot and Intercom both cover that workflow, and both have free or low-cost entry points. If you used Drift's Salesforce integration, check that your replacement connects to your CRM before you commit. Test the free tier with real traffic for two weeks. Measure how many conversations it handles and how many meetings it books. That number, not the feature list, tells you whether the replacement works.

Bottom Line

The Drift free plan no longer exists for new users, because Drift itself is being retired. Salesloft announced the gradual sunset in March 2026, named 1mind as the successor, and set retirement for 31 January 2027. New customers cannot sign up, and there is no free tier to try. Existing customers should plan their migration now. Everyone else should look at Crisp, Tidio or HubSpot, which all offer real free plans for the same live chat job Drift once did for free.