I tried to add a simple chatbot widget to a few Next.js projects and ended up surprised by how much work it took with OpenAI ChatKit for something that, from the outside, feels like “just a chat bubble”.
In practice, I found myself spending most of the time wiring up things that feel like infrastructure concerns rather than UI:
deciding how to structure agents and tool calls
managing knowledge and retrieval so the bot is actually useful
handling auth, rate limits, streaming, persistence, and guardrails
making it all play nicely with a real app deployment
So I built CloudlyKit to make the “basic website chatbot” case trivial.
The idea is simple: you paste a snippet into your Next.js layout.tsx claiming a widget, and you have a working chatbot bubble on your site. Then you can optionally add knowledge sources and configure behavior, but the default path is meant to be fast.
I’m not trying to replace “serious” agent frameworks. This is mostly for teams that want a clean website widget without building a whole agent and RAG stack from scratch.
I’d love feedback on a few things:
Am I overestimating how painful ChatKit is, or did others hit the same wall
What do you consider the minimum feature set for a website chatbot widget
Where do you draw the line between “widget” and “agent platform”
If you’ve shipped something similar, what part was unexpectedly annoying
Project: cloudlykit.com
Happy to answer any technical questions about how it’s implemented and what tradeoffs I made.