
Bolnee Chat
Self-hosted RAG chatbot platform that answers visitor questions from your website and PDFs, with a two-line embeddable widget and citations.
Bolnee Chat is a self-hosted RAG chatbot platform for business websites. You create a bot in a dark-mode dashboard, point it at your website or upload documents, and it crawls and indexes that content into SQLite full-text search. When visitors ask questions, the bot retrieves matching chunks from your sources, builds a grounded prompt, and streams an answer through an embeddable chat widget with citations to the underlying material.
The ingestion pipeline accepts website URLs plus PDF, TXT, MD, and DOCX files. The Python crawler is same-origin only, respects robots.txt, and extracts headings, paragraphs, and list items; processing status is visible per source as it moves from queued to indexed. You can connect any OpenAI-compatible provider — OpenRouter, OpenAI, Groq, Ollama, and vLLM are listed — with per-bot provider, model, base URL, and API key settings, and keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM so they never appear in the embed snippet.
The visitor-facing widget is added with a two-line snippet (a BotConfig block plus chatbot-widget.js) that works on any stack, with configurable accent color, light/dark/auto theme, avatar, and greeting. Conversations are grouped by visitor and date in the dashboard and exportable as CSV, JSON, or PDF. Bolnee Chat runs on Node.js 18+ with SQLite and no external database, and deployment recipes for Vercel and Cloudflare Pages/Workers are included alongside local self-hosting.
Compared with hosted services like Chatbase, Tidio Lyro, or CustomGPT.ai, Bolnee Chat charges nothing and keeps your content, chat logs, and provider keys on your own infrastructure — the tradeoff is that you run it yourself and it has a much smaller community around it.








