A free or cheaper alternative to review management tools
Start with genuinely free, because it exists: your Google Business Profile lets you reply to every review, from a browser or the app, without paying a penny. That is the starting point, and for many businesses it is enough.
Reply is not free. This page exists to help you work out whether you need to pay for anything, and if so how much. The answer depends on two numbers: how many reviews you receive, and what your hour is worth.
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Free and Reply, honestly
| Reply | Free, by hand or with ChatGPT | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | 14 € for one business | Zero |
| Time per review | A few seconds to approve | Two to five minutes, reading included |
| Nothing to remember | Reviews arrive on Telegram | You have to remember to go and look |
| Consistent tone | Learnt from your past replies | Yours, when you are available |
| Reviews in another language | Reply in the language of the review | Translate it yourself |
| Backlog building up | No | The most common failure mode |
When free is the right choice
If you get three or four reviews a month, reply yourself. It takes a quarter of an hour, it will be better written than any tool, and there is no reason to pay a subscription for it.
If you have quiet time in the week and you enjoy writing, same answer. A reply written by the owner is always better. The problem was never quality, it was always regularity.
When free gets expensive
At fifteen reviews a month and three minutes each, that is forty five minutes. Not enormous, except that time does not exist: it would have to come between two services, exactly when nothing can be taken.
What happens then is always the same. Nobody replies for two weeks, then everything gets answered at once with the same sentence, which shows on the profile and fools nobody. The real cost of free is not the time spent, it is the backlog that ends up readable in public.
ChatGPT, the half free option
Generating a reply with a consumer assistant works well. What does not work is the whole chain: open the profile, copy the review, paste it into the assistant, read it back, copy again, publish. Six actions per review, and you still have to remember to go.
There is also the tone problem. An assistant given nothing writes correctly, politely, and exactly like every other business doing the same. That is what a reader recognises immediately.
What Reply adds to free
- Reviews come to you, so there is nothing to remember.
- Four and five star reviews need nothing at all from you.
- The tone is taken from your past replies rather than a generic instruction.
- Reviews in another language get an answer in that language.
What free keeps
- It costs nothing, and Reply costs 14 € a month.
- Nobody but you writes, which is still the best possible result.
- No third party access to grant on your Google profile.
- No dependency: you stop and nothing changes.
Do the sum before you pay
Count last month’s reviews, multiply by three minutes, and see whether that time exists in your week. If it does, stay on free, genuinely.
If you already have old reviews with no reply, that is the sign free does not fit your week. Seven days of trial is enough to clear that backlog and see how it reads.
Reply has no free plan and no hidden fees: 14 € a month for one business, 49 € for up to five, cancel in one click.
Common questions
Is there a free tool that replies automatically?
Not that we know of, and there is a reason: every reply costs a call to a language model. A free service would have to fund itself another way, which raises the question of what it does with your data.
Can I answer only the negative reviews?
You can, but it is the opposite of what works. Answering only the negatives leaves a profile where only complaints are commented on, which highlights them.
Does the price change with the number of reviews?
No. Reviews are unlimited on both plans. The only variable is how many businesses you have.