Do you use Intercom? If so, why?
We used Intercom with one of our earlier products, but it became prohibitively expensive. So, we started building our own all-in-one tool for inbound chat support and product updates.
Given the tough economic climate, I figure a number of folks will look at cost reduction measures. As such, I figure we might be a good option for SaaS companies that need these tools—but want to reduce overhead.
That said, I also suspect there are some Intercom features that folks will find hard to leave behind. That’s why I’m posting here: to probe for what we’re missing. This sort of information will help me better understand what we need to prioritize—and help inform our roadmap.
If you’re willing to share this information, I’d also like to know how much you currently spend on Intercom, and any problems it’s giving you.
No, I use Freshchat - it’s free for my current needs across 3 projects. Beautiful UI and has a tonne of premium features for a few bucks per month.
no. no need for it quite yet. we're still too small!
Quite curious about this pricing model I'm seeing more often thse days - $99/mo unlimited everything. I've seen this in Crisp's pricing page.
What I'm unable to fathom is - how does one offer a truly unlimited plan at $99?
If someone could shed light on this and help me understand better.
I suspect their customers aren’t generally exceeding a certain amount of usage—and that they can still make money at that rate. It is recurring, which helps, too. It’s the unlimited lifetime deals that freak me out. ;-)
I swear, I just can't wrap my head around lifetime deals.
That's an interesting thought. If their customers are generally not exceeding a certain amount of usage, does that imply that big customers are still going elsewhere / paying larger sums? 🤔
I think so. They’re likely choosing Intercom and Zendesk because those are trusted names.
Still using Intercom.
Noticed a lot of new competitors since they increased the pricing.
Which ones have you noticed?
Crisp, User.com, Helpcrunch
We used Intercom for quite a while, but as you've mentioned it really did start becoming prohibitively expensive. We decided to go all in with Zendesk, as we were using it for support anyway. The chat product is nowhere near as good as Intercom, so we've seen a bit of an impact.
Where does Zendesk’s chat product fall short for you (when compared to Intercom)?
Also, which other Zendesk features do you depend on?
Intercom is great but it's expensive. In my previous project I used it but the costs were growing out of the hand. The intercom pricing per number of users and upselling on additional "features" is quite hostile towards small companies.
That’s what we experienced with one of our products. It started out reasonably, but as our userbase grew it became prohibitively costly.
Intercom is great if you have very high revenue per customer and relatively low number of them.
Not sure if I'm the right profile to answer since we didn't ended up using Intercom, but:
We wanted live inbound chat for our landing page & app and the two most well-known options are Intercom and Drift. However, we really only want a clean chat interface that integrates with Slack; don't need any other features either service offers at the moment (not even a chat bot). And for that reason, the two options just seemed really $$.
And so we ended up using Smallchat which is simple, to-the-point and more reasonable at $19/month for more customizations.
Was the Slack integration a key part of your decision making?
Also, you reference customizations. Are there specific ones that you’re using?
Yea, we prefer interfacing via Slack than having to keep getting emails or checking in on the app itself. It's really been a game changer in terms of keeping up with inbound interactions.
For customization, I mean mostly automated responses for when none of us happen to be online, by computers, or sleeping.
That’s interesting. Do you ever need to go back into the Smallchat workspace, or are you entirely using it from Slack?
To change any of the default and automated messages you have to do so via the smallchat app.
We do.
I choose it because it seemed to package two things in one: live chat and support site (help desk).
The live chat is really excellent but the support site feature (which costs around $49 / month) is a pretty lame CMS. It doesn't feel worth the premium price.
We're not feeling a money crunch right now but when we have the time to revisit the question, I'd like to move off of Intercom.
What part of the support site isn’t working for you?
I recently started using intercom for a tool I just built. I didn't realise how insane setting up a customer messaging kit would be!
Intercom basically solved all my problems. Mostly due to the fact that it does so much out of the box. I mainly set up live chat, email marketing, and product tours. I know it's going to be a pain to deal with the price in the future.
Any alternatives would mean setting up a bunch of different tools and syncing the data between all of them, that's just stress. I went through a lot of tools, looking for the best fits, with lower plans that allowed integrations. Honestly there's a lot to unpack, I'd be happy to hop on a call to tell you my experience.
On pricing: I only just signed up for the trial, but I'll be on the $49/month plan for a year.
Thanks—I appreciate that! I’ll email you to set up a call. :-)
I’ve been using Tawk.to. It’s free and has all the functionality I need: messages to my phone, set operating hours, email fallback, lightweight code.
I’m at the stage of finding product-market fit, and my proposition is B2B, so low website traffic. I couldn’t justify paying more, so cancelled Intercom after no user interacted with it (100 per day), so I didn’t see the point in paying for It.
I wanted to continue testing my hypothesis that users will appreciate live chat support, so I’m continuing with Tawk.to on a free basis.
How is it working for you? Are there any key features you feel that it’s missing?
So far none. It is covering all my use-cases. To give some highlights:
Those sound useful. Seeing what the user is typing seems a bit on the creepy side, though. ;-)
My first thought too, but now it's become table stakes for a live chat app.
With it, I can provide more helpful responses, and keep the chat engaging by writing my reply as they write (and count 3 seconds before sending my response, so doesn't freak them out).
Hey Eric. We moved from Intercom to Crisp. And when I say "we", I mean the company I work for. And it has thousands of users on different perp courses. As a designer I miss Intercom a lot due to its email/in-app campaigns. It was so easy to reach specific people and analyse the results. In Crisp it is more of a suffer and took us a lot of hacking to work with our audience. We even thought of going back to Intercom. But Crisp gives you unlimited users, unlimited seats and is cheap. Quite a deal-breaker. Also Crisp has a feature to observe what your users are doing live (a bit creepy and I am not sure if it is ok) and it gives you a possibility to launch a video call with a user and even take control of user's screen with magic browse. In fact we never used that functionality. What we use the most are tagging (to group complains & suggestions) and email/in-app campaigns.
I’d like to ask you more questions about the features you miss most. Is it OK if I email you?
Sure thing. If you prefer video calls I can do that too (I just hate to type), but email works fine. Do that.
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What did you end up switching to?
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Same here, but what do you plan to do after the 12 months?
I’m curious about this, too. Will you guys just bump up your spend with them, or switch to another tool?
The price question is an interesting one to me. At one point, our Intercom bill was nearing $500/mo., on a project that was essentially a goodwill side-gig.
I liked the core functionality of Intercom, and the ability to automate messages—but I couldn’t justify that cost any longer. (At the time, Intercom was costing us more than our product was generating.)
Our product isn’t nearly as mature or function-rich as Intercom. That said, it has most of what we need.
As such, I’m trying to sort out if others feel like me: that a stripped down feature set focused on small SaaS—at a tighter price point—might be attractive to others like us.
I haven't put too much thought into it yet, but it depends what my users find most useful. So far, I have about 31 users and $1.4k MRR with Mortly.com, and they don't need help all that often. I haven't used the product tours, help pages (though the help pages look awesome) and I mostly just use it for chat/email.
Now am I using it effectively? Absolutely not. If I discovered after my 12 months though, that all my users were really enjoying was my quick chat responses, then I will end up going with something else that's much cheaper.
If you do want to try something other, feel free to email me (address in profile). We’re really working to make our product suit the needs of smaller SaaS companies. Getting a few folks like you to work with our product would help inform where we push it. :-)