This is a design story about a plugin I built, not a review of it. I want to be upfront about that, because the most useful parts here are the decisions and the tradeoffs, and those only mean something if you know they come from the person who made the calls.
The plugin is Rapls AI Chatbot, a free WordPress plugin that drops a chatbot on your site and answers visitor questions from your own content. I'll get to what it does, but the part worth your time is why it's shaped the way it is.
The canyon between install and first chat
When I looked at the funnel for an early version, the worst drop-off wasn't on the feature page or the settings screen. It was right after install, at one specific step: "get an API key and set up billing." People installed the plugin, activated it, opened the settings, and then walked away at the point of registering a card with an AI provider they'd never heard of, to open a meter with no visible price.
The gap between install count and the number of chats that actually ran was a canyon. And it wasn't a quality problem with anything downstream. Nobody was getting far enough to judge the quality. The wall was the card.
