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Flarepipe: Chat Documentation

Flarepipe: Chat is an AI support chatbot for WordPress. Unlike hosted chatbot services, it does not run on our servers and we never see your content or your visitors' messages. It provisions Cloudflare Workers AI and Vectorize inside your Cloudflare account, indexes the content you choose, and answers questions from a widget on your site.

Beta

The plugin is at version 0.3.0 and is going out to a small group of sites first. These docs describe what it does today. Anything not built yet lives on the roadmap and is kept out of here on purpose.

How it works

There are four moving parts, and three of them live in your Cloudflare account rather than on your web server.

  1. The plugin, in WordPress. It handles setup, decides what content to index, chunks it, and renders the widget.
  2. A Worker, in your Cloudflare account. It receives visitor messages, retrieves relevant content, calls the model, and streams the answer back. Your site's PHP is not involved in answering a question at all.
  3. A Vectorize index, in your Cloudflare account. It holds numerical representations of your content so the Worker can find the passages relevant to a question.
  4. Workers AI, in your Cloudflare account. It provides both the embedding model that turns text into vectors and the language model that writes the answer.

Why it is answered by retrieval, not by the model alone

A language model asked about your business will confidently invent an answer. To avoid that, every question goes through retrieval first: the question is converted into a vector, matched against your indexed content, and the closest passages that clear a confidence threshold are handed to the model as the material it is allowed to answer from. Each passage carries the URL of the page it came from, so the bot can link the visitor to the source.

When nothing relevant is found, the bot is instructed to say so and point at your human support link rather than guess. That behaviour is the single most important thing to test before you put it on a live site, and it is covered in troubleshooting.

What it costs

Nothing to us: the plugin is free. On the Cloudflare side, Workers, Workers AI and Vectorize all have free allocations, and a typical site fits inside them. Very large sites or high message volumes may need Cloudflare's paid Workers plan, which Cloudflare bills you for directly. See limits and costs for the numbers and where the ceilings actually are.

What you need

  • WordPress 6.0 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer, with the openssl extension available.
  • A Cloudflare account. The free plan is enough.
  • The ability to create an API token on that account.
  • WP-Cron running, so content indexing and the daily sync can do their work.

Your site's DNS does not need to be on Cloudflare. The chatbot works for sites hosted anywhere; a Cloudflare zone is only needed if you want to serve the bot from your own subdomain instead of a workers.dev URL.

Where to go next