[HN Gopher] A guide to live chat tools for startups
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A guide to live chat tools for startups
Author : Fission
Score : 59 points
Date : 2020-11-05 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (satchel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (satchel.com)
| webo wrote:
| 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 $119. * They try different
| "bundle" packages but yet it's impossible to tell what products
| or add-ons are actually included in each.
| danpalmer wrote:
| The problem we always had was that per user pricing. This is
| fine if you're a SaaS business with very high value per user,
| but if you're B2C it's very hard to make it work for most
| businesses because lifetime values are often several orders of
| magnitude lower.
|
| Either their margin is so low that they need to charge like
| this, or they have just rules out whole markets on the basis of
| pricing.
| digitalbase wrote:
| Great post. Made my question my bill and start a twitter rant
| sharing some billing details.
|
| 1488$/month for a support chat software that is average
|
| https://twitter.com/digitalbase/status/1324461575483379712
| aaisola wrote:
| 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.
| Zaheer wrote:
| 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.
| ihackforgood wrote:
| 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/
| jops wrote:
| 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.
| dbbk wrote:
| Intercom is basically unusable for anyone who's not Enterprise.
| Which is baffling to me.
| takklz wrote:
| 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/
| areichert wrote:
| 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
| fortydegrees wrote:
| Love papercups!
| sgrove wrote:
| Definitely a fan, love how much you've executed since your
| initial Show HN - nicely done!
| anonu wrote:
| 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.
| areichert wrote:
| 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/
| anonu wrote:
| 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".
| yani wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| etuil wrote:
| I'm surprised papercups.io is not evaluated elixir, open source,
| 2 seats in their free tier. Easy and reliable. (no affiliation)
| areichert wrote:
| 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
| vvram wrote:
| Great product and generous free tier for builders.
| mkl95 wrote:
| 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.
| harryvederci wrote:
| I vote for IRC ;)
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(page generated 2020-11-05 23:00 UTC)