We're essentially a nicely designed web-based irc interface with integrated hosted bouncer.

You don't usually get that for free afaik, you'd have to run a bouncer yourself on a vps or something, or attach to screen and use irssi.

Plenty of our users are former screen+irssi users, and many of them are perfectly capable of running a vps+bouncer+whatever themselves, but choose to use us because it's less hassle / more convenient.