How To Create a SMS Bot for Free in 2026 (4 Steps)
By Joren Wouters • Updated on
In this SMS chatbot tutorial, I will show you how you can create an SMS chatbot or text message bot in 2026.
And I will guide you step-by-step, so I will cover:
- What SMS bots are and how they work
- What SMS bot platform you should use
- And how you can create your SMS chatbot, without writing any code
I will even give you the template for FREE, so you can copy and paste it.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
What is an SMS Chatbot?
An SMS chatbot or text bot is a computer program that can automatically reply to text messages.
SMS bots or text message bots work 24/7 and can have multiple conversations with several people at once. They often send notifications, automatically answer questions and promote marketing campaigns.
There are lots of different SMS chatbot builder tools you can use. But, before I get into that, let’s look at how these messaging bots work.
Benefits of SMS Chatbots
SMS chatbots are game-changers for any business.
Here are three huge benefits of SMS chatbots that can impact your business today:
1. Boost sales
SMS is one of the most effective communication channels out there.
Why?
- SMS messages have an open rate of 98%
- Most texts get a response within ten minutes
- Response rates are around 7-8 times higher than email (45% and 6% respectively)
This makes SMS an ideal channel for sending promotions, abandoned cart reminders, limited-time deals, and more.
Unlike email (which often gets buried in the inbox), your messages via SMS are almost guaranteed to be seen.
| Name | SMS | |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 15-25% (varies depending on industry) | 98% |
| Response Rate | 6% | 45% |
In fact, many businesses are already using SMS campaigns to drive immediate action and boost revenue without increasing ad spend.
2. Reduce costs
Hiring more support agents can get expensive fast. But SMS bots offer a smart alternative.
They can:
- Instantly answer FAQs
- Handle basic order updates
- Guide users through processes
All without human intervention.
This means your team can focus on more complex issues, while your chatbot handles the bulk of incoming queries.
And yes, that leads to serious cost savings.
According to IBM, chatbots can reduce customer support costs by up to 30%.
And I see the same results with my clients. Here’s a screenshot of how we automatically replied to 2,000 questions within the first month of going live:
3. Improve customer experience
Nobody likes waiting hours (or days) for a reply. With SMS chatbots, your customers get instant responses.
Whether it’s:
- Tracking an order
- Getting a shipping update
- Redeeming a coupon
This not only boosts satisfaction, but also builds trust and loyalty with your customers.
And because SMS is native to every phone, there’s no app to download, login to remember, or internet connection required. Just fast, frictionless support.
How To Create an SMS Chatbot in 4 Simple Steps
Creating a SMS or text message bot in 2026 is super simple, here’s how you can do it in 4 steps:
Step 1: Create a free Manychat account
In this tutorial, we’ll use two tools to build your SMS chatbot: Manychat and Twilio.
- Manychat is the “brain” of our SMS bot, taking care of chat flows and automation
- Twilio is used to send and receive text messages
So the first step is to create a free Manychat account, which is one of the best chatbot platforms on the market.
In fact, I’ve used it for almost all of my clients in the last 6 years. I use it because it’s:
- Easy to use, you can get started without any prior experience
- Simple & Advanced, you can get started easily and also create more advanced bots
- Cheap, they offer a free plan and paid plans start at $15/month
Just click on the button below to create a free Manychat account (click below to get my 100% discount code):
Then, click on Get Started Free:
Select Facebook:
And Continue with Facebook to sign up for your free Manychat account:
Step 2: Connect your Twilio number to Manychat
The next step is to get a number from Twilio and connect it to Manychat.
Twilio is a SMS platform that lets you send and receive SMS messages globally. It’s fast, reliable, and very affordable.
When you sign up, you’ll receive $15 trial credit to test things out. If you’re happy with the platform, you can always upgrade later.
To get started, create your free Twilio account by clicking the button below:
On the Twilio homepage, click Start for free in the top-right corner.
And fill in the details for your new account:
Once you are signed up to Twilio, the next step is to get a phone number.
Click on Get a trial phone number to claim your free number:
Choose for Get a phone number and try it:
Pro Tip: Twilio trial accounts can only send and receive messages from verified phone numbers. So, the chatbot won’t work for real customers until you upgrade to a paid Twilio account. To upgrade, you receive the $15 in credit includes, and then it’s pay-as-you-go per message.
Once you have your number, go back to the dashboard and scroll down until you see “Account Info”. Here, you need to copy three things:
- Account SID
- Auth Token
- Twilio phone number
This is the info we need to connect Twilio to Manychat.
In Manychat, go to Settings, select SMS and click on Connect:
Click on Connect again:
And paste the Twilio information to Manychat and click on Connect:
Now, your Twilio is connected to Manychat and you should see the following screen:
Step 3: Add your number as a verified phone number
Because we have a Twilio trial account, only specific phone number can text it. These are called “verified phone numbers”.
To text your Twilio number, you must add your phone number to the list of verified numbers.
To add your number, click on the verified phone numbers link under “Account Info”:
Click on Add a new Caller ID:
And fill in your own phone number:
Now, Twilio will send a verification code to your phone number. You can just fill in the verification code in Twilio and your phone number is verified!
Step 4: Create your SMS greeting message
Now that we’ve connected our Twilio number to Manychat, the next step is to welcome users when they message your SMS chatbot.
In this tutorial, we will build a chatbot for an eCommerce store.
In Manychat, go to Automation and click on New Automation:
And as a starting step, we will add a trigger.
A trigger is an event that starts this automation. And in this case, we want to start the flow when someone greets us.
To create a new trigger, click on New trigger:
Now click on SMS and choose Contact sends a message with a keyword:
Then we set it to message contains “Hey”, “Hi” or “Howdy” and click on Create:
Now, every time someone greets us, we automatically reply with this automation.
Next, we need to add a message to our automation. So you can just click on SMS:
And then add our greeting message:
Hey! I’m the chatbot of eBizz.
I will answer your question. If I don’t know the answer, I can connect you with a support agent.
What is your question about?
Pro Tip: Text messages have a maximum of 160 characters. So it’s best to stay under the 160 character limit, otherwise Manychat breaks up your message in multiple messages.
And that’s it! Now you only have to click on Set Live and your chatbot is working:
And then you can preview your automation by clicking on Preview and selecting In Messengers:
If you click on Preview again, it opens up a pop-up where you can fill in your phone number:
And Manychat automatically sends the chat automation flow to your phone number!
Now, you can test it and check whether it is working correctly.
Auto Reply to Questions with a SMS chatbot
The next step is to automatically reply to questions that people are asking.
To do that, we can create a New automation in Manychat.
As our trigger, we will use the Contact sends a message with a keyword:
As an example, we want to automatically answer questions about payments.
Then we can add “payment” as our keyword:
And auto reply with our answer:
You can use two payment methods: Creditcard and Paypal.
You can also use one of our custom payment plans to split the payments over several months.
How to Add AI to your SMS Chatbot
Right now, your SMS chatbot automatically replies to keywords you’ve set up. That’s already helpful, but also a bit limited.
With AI, your chatbot can automatically answer any question, using info from your website, help center, or internal docs. No need to build complicated flows, you just have to train it once.
Here’s how it works:
- You upload documents or website content to your AI bot
- The AI learns from your material
- When someone asks a question, it finds the answer and replies instantly
Unfortunately, Manychat’s AI isn’t great. So that’s why we will connect Manychat to Relevance AI.
We will do it in three simple steps:
- Sign up to Relevance AI (Free)
- Create an AI Agent in Relevance
- Connect the SMS chatbot to Relevance AI
Step 1: Sign up to Relevance AI (Free)
Relevance AI lets you create custom AI agents trained on your own data. You can even connect it to tools like Google Calendar or Shopify, so it can do things like book appointments or track orders.
It comes with a free plan. And if you need more, paid plans start just at $19/month (billed annually).
So just click the button below to create your free Relevance AI account:
Create Free Relevance AI account
And click on Sign Up:
Step 2: Create an AI Agent in Relevance
Once you’re in, click on Agents and choose New Agent:
Next, click on Give agent knowledge. This is where we train our AI bot on our business content:
Here, you can upload your own docs, or use this one as an example:
Just upload it by dragging it in the box or selecting a file from your computer:
And make sure to turn on Allow agent to search:
This lets the agent be more efficient, because it only searches information that is relevant to a question.
Once the agent has trained itself on the document, click on Save changes in the top-right:
Now, give your agent a name and prompts, so it knows how to respond to questions:
Pro Tip: Instruct your AI Agent to respond within 160 characters, which is the max of text messages. Otherwise, Manychat will break it up in several messages.
And that’s it – your AI agent is ready to go! You can click Run and ask it anything:
Step 3: Connect the SMS chatbot to Relevance AI
Now that your AI is ready, let’s connect it to your SMS chatbot.
We’ll use Make — a no-code automation platform that lets you send data between apps, without any code. We’ll use it to connect Manychat to Relevance AI.
If you haven’t used Make before, just click the button below to get 30 days of Make Pro for free (only if you use this link):
Get 30 Days of Make Pro for Free
This might sound like a lot, but I actually have created a step-by-step video on how you can connect Manychat to Relevance AI using Make:
Note: This video has been created for WhatsApp, but it works exactly the same on SMS. The only difference is that we don’t use the “Defaulty Reply”, but a keyword trigger with “a,e,i,o,u”.
So let’s set this up in Manychat.
In my free Manychat template, go to my “SMS Chatbot > Default Reply” automation. This is the automation that runs any time someone sends you a message:
Here, we save the last user input to a custom field in Manychat (called “Relevance AI > Question”).
And then, we send the question to Relevance AI via Make.
Here’s what the integration in Make looks like:
Here’s how it works:
- The scenario starts when we send the question from Manychat
- Then, we send that question to Relevance AI
- Relevance AI returns the answer, which we store in a custom field (“Relevance AI > Answer”)
- Finally, we trigger a Manychat automation to send the answer to the user
That automation is the “SMS Chatbot > Send AI Answer” automation from the template:
Once everything’s done, just click Set Live — and your SMS bot is ready to go!
Free AI SMS Chatbot Template
So that’s how you can create your own SMS chatbot.
If you want to get started quickly, just fill in the form below and get FREE access to my SMS chatbot template:
Your Next Steps
And that’s it! Now you know how to make an SMS chatbot by yourself.
The next step is to get more familiar with Manychat. To learn more, check out my tutorials below:
Alternatively, if you want to compare SMS tools before committing to Manychat and Twilio, see my full breakdown:
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 160-character limit and why does it matter?
SMS messages are capped at 160 characters. When a message goes over this limit, it splits into multiple messages. This ends up costing you more, and it looks unprofessional.
Do I need a separate phone number for my SMS chatbot?
Yes, you need a separate phone number for your SMS chatbot.
A service like Twilio gives you a number that can send and receive automated text messages. You cannot use your personal number because it’s not built for chatbot automation or carrier rules.
Most businesses use either a long code or a toll-free number.
Can my SMS chatbot send outbound messages or only reply?
Your SMS chatbot can do both. It can reply to incoming texts based on keywords, and it can also send outbound messages like promotions, reminders, or updates.
Outbound SMS has stricter rules, especially in the US. For example, businesses often need 10DLC registration before sending marketing texts.
What happens if someone texts something my chatbot doesn’t recognize?
If your chatbot doesn’t recognize a message, you can set up a specific reply for that. For example, this reply can ask the person if they want their question to be forwarded to a human team member.
This makes sure people always get a response instead of being ignored. It helps prevent silent failures and guides users to the next step or a support option.
