How to Deploy a Free AI Customer Support Chatbot on a Next.js Website

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A new tutorial outlines how to build and deploy a fully functional AI customer support chatbot using an entirely free toolset. The stack combines Hexabot for workflow building, OpenRouter for accessing free large language models, and Railway for cloud hosting with a Postgres database. A key feature is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which allows the bot to ingest a website's own content and deliver more relevant, context-aware answers to customer queries. The project is developed locally using Node.js and the Hexabot CLI, then pushed to GitHub and deployed live on Railway. The guide covers the full end-to-end process, from initial setup to embedding a chat widget on a live website, requiring no credit card or paid subscriptions.

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