Rapls AI Chatbot is a WordPress plugin from Rapls Works that adds a grounded, RAG-based AI chatbot powered by OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or OpenRouter. Free tier…
Category
AI Chatbots
Pricing
Freemium (free WordPress.org plugin plus a one-time-purchase Pro upgrade)
Rapls Works is the software studio and technical blog of "rapls," a Japan-based freelance web developer with more than six years of experience who also works as a Japanese-locale translator-editor for the WordPress project. The studio's flagship product, Rapls AI Chatbot, is a WordPress plugin that adds a grounded, retrieval-augmented (hybrid RAG) AI chatbot to a WordPress site. It can be connected to OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or OpenRouter, learns from the site's own content via a built-in crawler, and answers visitor questions from that knowledge base rather than the model's general training data. It ships as a free, fully functional WordPress.org plugin (unlimited responses, unlimited knowledge base) with an optional one-time-purchase Pro upgrade. Alongside the chatbot, Rapls Works publishes three other WordPress.org plugins — Prime Cache (a page-caching plugin, also with a Pro tier), Thanks Mail for Stripe (automated post-payment email plugin), and Rapls PDF Image Creator (auto-generates thumbnail images from PDF covers) — and runs a companion blog covering WordPress development, Xserver hosting, and AI development topics.
Key Features
Hybrid RAG grounded answers — Uses hybrid RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) search to answer questions from a knowledge base built by crawling the site's own content, reducing hallucinated responses.
Multi-provider AI support — Connects to OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or OpenRouter (100+ models via a single API key), so site owners can choose or switch AI providers.
MCP Server compatibility — Supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for tool-based AI workflows.
Usage controls — Built-in usage limits and controls to prevent unexpected AI API cost overruns.
13-language support — Supports 13 languages plus a configurable terminology glossary for domain-specific vocabulary.
Preset questions and business templates — Preset question buttons with fixed responses, plus ready-made business templates, speed up chatbot setup.
Gutenberg block and cross-site embedding — Ships as a native WordPress Gutenberg block and can be embedded across multiple sites.
Security and spam protection — Includes reCAPTCHA v3 protection, plus conversation history logging and visitor feedback tracking.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Free tier is fully functional — unlimited responses and an unlimited knowledge base rather than a capped trial
Supports four LLM providers (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, OpenRouter), so site owners aren't locked to one vendor
Pro tier is a one-time purchase with a 14-day money-back guarantee, not a recurring SaaS subscription
Hybrid RAG search grounds answers in the site's own content to reduce hallucinated responses
Cons
Site content and documentation are primarily in Japanese, which may be a barrier for non-Japanese-speaking users
Built and maintained by a single freelance developer rather than a company, which carries typical solo-maintainer support/continuity risk
Only works on WordPress — no standalone SaaS or non-WordPress version is offered