Our company recently "graduated" from Intercom's early-stage program. Intercom is a mediocre product but their pricing does not make sense whatsoever. I exchanged about 20 emails (while being very slow) with their account rep only to find out even they don't understand their own pricing.

Here's some hot mess that's going on:

  * They A/B test their pricing page with completely different models. I've seen at least 3 different versions.
  * They charge by "active users" over last 90 days. A person is considered active if they've logged in to the site or was sent an email.
  * The pricing for products and add-ons are all over the place. In some places, they have an add-on listed as $199 (Product Tour) while others places have it as $119.
  * They try different "bundle" packages but yet it's impossible to tell what products or add-ons are actually included in each.

The problem we always had was that per user pricing. This is fine if you’re a SaaS business with very high value per user, but if you’re B2C it’s very hard to make it work for most businesses because lifetime values are often several orders of magnitude lower.

Either their margin is so low that they need to charge like this, or they have just rules out whole markets on the basis of pricing.

I've encountered this when evaluating email platforms in a b2c situation. In some cases pricing was just a non starter because it was user based not volume based.

Unless you're a deal they really want, it may just not be a good fit.

this is exactly why two companies i have been at have left intercom. Their pricing does not make sense for B2C. And in the end it isnt that hard to build the key parts of what they offer, given the financial incentive

Great post. Made my question my bill and start a twitter rant sharing some billing details.

1488$/month for a support chat software that is average

https://twitter.com/digitalbase/status/1324461575483379712

Having similar feelings about prezly

Had the same issue. Found customer response times extremely slow, especially for a live chat app! Additionally, the way they broke down their pricing made no sense to me. At the end I wasn't sure what the incremental cost of adding features I wanted would be.

would like to take this opportunity to shout out crisp.im. I've used them for my business for nearly 2 years and they've worked great (Except for one time when my subscription randomly ended and the support rep was either intoxicated or didn't speak English. But it resolved within an hour)

Once you incorporate your systems and teams workflows around a specific system, it’s hard to justify a migration to another system. Most companies (like ours) just eat the cost at that point.

We were probably writing the first few lines of code for Papercups around the time this article was written (in July), but we're another Intercom alternative :)

Like Chatwoot, we're open source and have a free tier on our hosted version for anyone who'd like to give us a try!

Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2].

[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[1] https://papercups.io/

[2] https://app.papercups.io/demo

Definitely a fan, love how much you've executed since your initial Show HN - nicely done!

I love your product but might I just say I would be hesitant to use your product for the simple fact that there is no apparent about page on your site. I think it helps to know who is behind a company and there is a clear way, aside from the chat widget, to get contact information.

Great point we'll be sure to add it soon! Quick context about us we're a YC company that went through the S20 batch https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/22051 We did our launch hn about 3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

Thanks for the feedback! Here's a little blurb about us if you're curious https://papercups.io/blog/story

And we'll get on setting up an About page soon :)

My company has been using Papercups since it launched. It works pleasingly well for such a new product, and we've found the team very responsive when we've asked for support.

Since you are offering a opensource self hosted alternative along with your paid version, how committed are you folks to not doing a reddit and flipping on the users one day?

Love papercups!

I'm a late stage Intercom customer, very disappointed by their price gouging. I also find their 1 day support response time for existing customers, in contrast to immediate responses for new prospects very telling of their general ethos. This article is welcome.

Intercom is basically unusable for anyone who's not Enterprise. Which is baffling to me.

I'm surprised papercups.io is not evaluated elixir, open source, 2 seats in their free tier. Easy and reliable. (no affiliation)

Alex from Papercups here! Thanks for mentioning us :)

Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2] for anyone who wants to check us out!

[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[1] https://papercups.io/

[2] https://app.papercups.io/demo

Great product and generous free tier for builders.

We'll check this out, looks great!

I've tried a number of chat tools including a few on this list. I'm a big fan of Crisp. Their mobile apps and usability I think is one of the simplest and cleanest to use (in contrast to article). Also the free tier is super generous and I've been running it for free on multiple sites for years.

For me a mobile app was a must and Crisp has one of the best.

+1 for Crisp.

As a pre-product-market-fit startup, I was looking for the cheapest option, to basically figure out if people would message me at all or not. (They do!) I've started with Drift around half a year ago and everything was broken. (Maybe they fixed everything by now, can't tell.) Went over to Crisp and I'm super happy with it. For now I'm still on the free plan.

Very timely article for me.

I spent most of last week looking at live chat tools and also came to the same conclusion re ChatWoot (ie: good product + open source + lacking some features + but possibly extensible)

We're moving off of Intercom. Great set of features - but the pricing is horrendous.

I think live chat is more important than just the live chat. Using the chat widget for analytics, tracking, and automated messaging is also important.

I want to be able to take screenshots of what my users are looking at when they need support. I want to be able to detect what pages theyre on and provide contextual help when they need it.

Not sure if this is something you'd find useful, but we (Papercups) recently released a product on top of our live chat tool that allows you to view what your users are looking at in real-time while chatting with them :)

Details: https://storytime.papercups.io/

Thanks for this - this is really cool - and I actually signed up for an account to look around based on an earlier comment.

Now can I get a programmatic hook into storytime? I suppose some competitor products would use this feature for an "AI Bot".

We just released Storytime last week in beta, so it's still quite basic in its feature set :P What kind of hooks would you like? (e.g. on certain events, trigger certain callbacks?)

Could you expose an API so I could write my own custom bots?

I'd want to get all events occurring (through a webhook for example) and then make API calls to send both online and offline messages. Offline messages as a way of maybe sending product updates. Online messages to engage users as they're going through their journey

Yes, we are working on exposing our API :)

If you email me at alex [at] papercups.io I can keep you posted on our updates!

It's not surprising intercom has raised their prices so much given intercom has raised close to 300M, they really need to push their pricing up into ACVs where they can pay for the sales organization they've been building, and grow top line revenue.

I expect drift to adopt a similar pricing approach (raised 100M) to justify their valuation and push their ACVs up.

I appreciate the shoutout for http://www.olark.com (raised 85k total including YC) and noticed a few comments about the visitor UI being a bit dated -- I agree with the sentiment, or did, but we recently updated the visitor UI and it's currently live on Olark.com and will be rolled out to all customers by January. Probably time to update that review ;)

Live chat software was instrumental in helping me compete when launching my first hosting company, and a must have for startups, glad we are still hitting that niche well :) --- also have a bunch of really exciting things in the pipeline, I'll drop them on a Show HN when they are ready.

As other people are mentioning Intercom being super expensive - the software over at User.com was partially developed as an affordable alternative to Intercom, and has now evolved into a larger platform for multiple marketing tools with features that are all connected - e.g. chat users integrated into the CRM, and powerful segmentation based on visitor data that you can use on niche targeting campaigns, etc.

Also a shoutout to the other live chat creators in here, you guys also have great products too! @areichert and @bcx

Check out: https://user.com | Live chat: https://user.com/en/live-chat/

I use this video / live chat from a small startup. They have great support and also interesting angle with the troubleshooting. https://www.mavenoid.com/en/

I'm surprised tawk.to [1] hasn't got a mention yet. It was easy to set up and while quite limited, is free so perfect for our small startup.

[1] https://www.tawk.to/

It is actually mentioned in the article, and ranked last.

> Tawk.to was unfortunately the worst live chat service that we tested[...]

I think the big one everyone forgets about is hubspot. Works just as good as the ones in the list but its integrated with a platform a lot of us already use.

We love having all our chats tied to our CRM by default :)

Anyone know apps that include an SDK for iOS and Android. We've been stuck with intercom because we need to be able to send iOS and Android messages, and push notifications, for support.

I work here, but feel free to check user.com, we offer SDK - https://user.com/en/mobilesdk/

Disclaimer: I work there. But LivePerson has iOS and Android SDKs with push notification support.

Any clue what pricing is, without having to request a demo?

No, sorry, I’ve always been kinda curious myself. I’m just a dev though.

Not sure if anyone is interested, but I created an app allowing a company to directly chat with customers via text messaging (rather than a widget embedded on your website). Could be more useful for brick and mortar type businesses rather than web based. https://www.outseed.io/

Cool app. Just a note that I'm getting 404s on the three svgs displayed on the main page (https://tailwindui.com/img/logos/statickit-logo.svg etc)

Thanks for the heads up! I just removed them. I should have removed them a long time ago (they were just there as a placeholder haha). Appreciate the input.

PS TailwindUI has been a godsend for me. My app would look like a three year old made it without tailwind ui haha

How is business? I created something similar but as an embedded widget just prior to Covid. Had to pause it when brick and mortar businesses took a major hit in March.

Just curious if you're seeing interest from them again.

Sorry, I missed this comment! Yes! I am starting to see some traction which is really cool. This is one of my many start-ups but I am trying something different this time to see if I can be more successful. I am focusing solely on customer acqusition costs. I figure if I can hack my CAC to below any of my advertisements costs I can be successful. We will see what the future holds!

Drift's does about 10000000 things that Chatwoot doesn't do in terms of it's integration with sales tools and additional products that simplify sales workflows, which is the primary reason anyone should use Drift. If you aren't doing enterprise sales you shouldn't even be considering it.

I really really like Crisp. You can get the full package for $100, but even on the smaller one there is no limit on # of customers or seats (essential as we have a free offering used by many individuals, and we also want everyone to participate in conversations with users).

Wish they would have factored in things like performance impact; Zendesk for example is by far the largest and longest-loading script on my website. I hate it. As soon as I find a truly lightweight live chat solution which doesn't suck balls, I'm gone.

You might be able to easily load it in parallel via an iframe.

2 years ago I tried Intercom too, to discover their prices. They were charging me more than Google App, Slack, and AWS combined. Very disappointed and I told them back then. It is still the same 2 years later.

Is there a chat product that would allow you to do custom routing? Most chat products are like hubs / stars where all clients get to a central destination.

Is there something that would allow multiple such destinations?

I know it isn't very 'cool', but Zoho SalesIQ works very well for us for only $20 a month, which seems half the cost for the paid tiers for a lot of these.

How has nobody mentioned chatlio? Love it, it integrates into Slack so my Cust Service team doesn't have to use a new interface.

I vote for IRC ;)

Hm I was hoping for waaaay more tools being listed and compared. It doesn't even contain a single tool I would have considered (Signal, Wire, Discord, Riot (I know it got renamed)). I would also like to see unfortunately widespread tools in there like MS Teams or Slack.

It seems like you maybe didn't read this fully?

This is about website-integrated live chat tools for support, sales, etc-- not for within-team collaboration like the tools you mentioned.

These days, building and deploying your own chat from scratch with something like Django Channels can take you just a few hours. But I can see the appeal of getting a ready to use solution for a little fee.

We use kayako.com and it is excellent!