Understanding the Difference: Elvin vs. Life Ring Button & Copilot

Elvin Copilot is the successor to the Life Ring Button (LRB) and the Legacy AI Assistant embedded within it. For new clients, Elvin fully replaces both products and is the only available option. If you are an existing client, you can continue using the Life Ring Button and its Legacy AI Assistant indefinitely, or switch to Elvin at any time without any change in pricing.

Product Definitions

The Legacy AI Assistant was introduced as part of the Life Ring Button, under the "Chat" tab. It provided conversational assistance alongside other LRB features such as Newsfeed and Feedback.

Elvin Copilot is a combined, modernized experience. It delivers near-complete feature parity with the LRB and Legacy AI Assistant setup, but unifies everything into a single widget. Elvin also introduces new capabilities that were not available in the older products.

Availability

Existing clients can continue using the Life Ring Button and Legacy AI Assistant indefinitely, or switch to Elvin at their own pace. There is no price increase when transitioning.

New clients have access to Elvin Copilot only. The Life Ring Button and Legacy AI Assistant are no longer available in new environments.

Billing: How Usage Is Counted

How your AI assistant usage is measured depends on which plan your account is on. To check your current plan, go to Settings → Billing — your plan name is displayed at the top of that page.

Legacy Plans (Starter, Pro, Enterprise) — Resolution-Based Billing

Clients on legacy Starter, Pro, or Enterprise plans use the Legacy AI Assistant in the Life Ring Button, and usage is tracked in Resolutions.

Resolutions are an obsolete billing unit. They are retained solely for clients on legacy plans and exist only to support existing configurations. If you are on the new plan, this does not apply to you.

A Resolution is a completed support conversation in which the system has determined that the user's issue was resolved. Unresolved conversations are not counted. A conversation is considered resolved when:

• Multi-message conversations: the last few messages reflect positive sentiment, or the user does not give thumbs-down feedback, does not request a human agent, and exits without further activity for 24 hours.
• Single-message conversations: no negative feedback and no human support request is received within 24 hours of the assistant's response.

Each Resolution counts as one billing unit, applied first to your monthly quota and then billed at the overage rate if exceeded. Once resolved, a conversation becomes read-only. Product Fruits stores the Resolution timestamp and maintains a seven-day audit trail for all resolved chats. Resolutions are counted per company — not per workspace — so all workspaces pool into a single company-level count.

New Plan — Elvin Copilot and Conversation-Based Billing

Clients on the new plan use Elvin Copilot, and usage is measured in Conversations.

Unlike Resolutions, a Conversation is counted every time a user engages with Elvin Copilot — regardless of whether the issue was resolved or not. There is no outcome-based logic. Every interaction counts, whether it ended with a solution, a handover to a human agent, or no conclusion at all. This makes usage more straightforward and predictable compared to the legacy model.

Feature Comparison

Elvin and the Legacy AI Assistant share the same content sources, so there is no need to re-upload your knowledge base when transitioning. Both also support user segmentation, human handover, and placement as a floating widget over your application.

Where Elvin goes further is in its design and integrations. It offers a modern interface, a configurable home page, and hosts Newsfeed and Feedback natively. It also introduces Actions, which allow admins to connect API calls and integrations directly into the copilot, and a native HubSpot connector for CRM-based personalization.

Actions in Elvin

Only Elvin supports Actions. Actions allow administrators to define external or internal functions that the copilot can call when it detects a matching user intent. Supported types include REST API calls, JavaScript functions, and HubSpot CRM integrations — enabling direct system integrations that were not possible with the Legacy AI Assistant.

Running Elvin and the Legacy AI Assistant Together

Elvin and the Legacy AI Assistant can technically run in parallel, but they cannot be shown on the same page for the same user. Both render as floating widgets, so enabling them side by side causes overlap.

The recommended approach is to use segmentation or page-level rules. For example, you might configure one user group to see the Life Ring Button with its Legacy AI Assistant while another group sees Elvin, or assign Elvin to a subset of pages while keeping the LRB active elsewhere. This lets you test Elvin without disrupting existing users. Once Elvin is validated, the older widget can be safely disabled/

Migrating from the Legacy Life Ring Button

To migrate, go to Help → Life Ring Button → Configuration and click "Migrate from Legacy" in the upper-right corner. This transfers your current Home tab items, Draggable setting, and URL filtering rules to the new version. Note that this will overwrite all items in the new button, so save any new configurations elsewhere before proceeding.