Intercom for Early Stage Program

I enrolled a year ago but the price is crazy for early startups after 1 year. As a consequence, I switched to Crisp since they offered a great lifetime discount as an early startup.

Yeah, as others have already commented, Intercom doesn't understand that many SaaS startups need to be freemium and when they charge based on active users, after one year on the Early Stage Program, we are less than thrilled with their email:

"Congratulations, you've graduated out of our Early Stage program" - and will go from $49/month to... "based on your current subscription plan, your Mar 05 invoice is estimated to be $1716/month."

So, this is way beyond impossible for us. Wouldn't it be magnanimous if YC shared with founders that they push to Intercom that they will have this shocker to contend with in one quick year? Or, does YC think it's reasonable to expect us all to go unicorn or die within 12 months...?

To those who are on early-stage program - how many active users could you use within the $49 plan? I have been told we can only get 500 active users ( which seems quite less when you consider these are site users and not necessarily customers).

Hey so my team actually did use it for some time but unfortunately, it didn't allow us to do everything we wanted!

We've now moved away to Kustomer 🚀I think this post my colleague wrote on our reasons why will be of interest to you 👉https://bit.ly/2FxXL4c

If you are really early stage, I wouldn't add Intercom or any similar service. That kind of money if better allocated to real sales. What's the estimated LTV of your customers vs how many leads do expect to convert using Intercom. Is that worth the $50/month?

I just started using Intercom via the Early Stage Program and I'm loving it compared to Drift. It is so powerful yet simple.

We have! They essentially have a flat rate of $50 per month for a year. We are a SaaS product (MFY) so having a direct line to customers was important. And we needed to send out email campaigns too. We also use their Articles feature to host getting started articles and general customer knowledge base. And since we were bootstrapped chose to go with Intercom. I am not sure we are still utilizing it to the full potential yet. Do you have any specific questions wrt how we use it?