Intercom for indie hackers?
Is there anyone building intercom for indie makers?
I saw a tweet today about what this maker I follow has to pay intercom for his business and man the pricing is ridiculous.
Is there someone building intercom for bootstrappers/indie hackers?
Trending on Indie Hackers
crisp.chat has done it
Yes, crisp.chat is a good option. Also, they have a free tier which would suffice in most cases.
interesting but isn't intercom like a sales tool rather than support?
It started as support too but now has become a full leads or crm tool. They hiked everything in recent year.
Crisp paid plan offers a CRM, Knowledge base, lead management, and email campaigns.
We selected crisp.chat for our SaaS and have been through all of them over the years. Crisp is a great balance for us and a pleasure to use.
I think there is an important pricing lesson in here especially for Indie Hackers who are getting their own pricing set up. Specifically in relation to the tweet that was shared. When Intercom offer their early stage plan at $49/month, that is effectively anchoring a user to that price point.
In a year, when a user 'graduates' to the normal pricing tier they are being delivered 0 additional value when the price increases. All they see is that they are paying 20x for the same thing. It's an incredibly hard up-sell, it relies on the friction of moving out weighing the pain of the price increase.
Unless you deliver incremental value, it is virtually impossible to expand an account without negative sentiment.
GoSquared is a great alternative if you want to also really tap into the behaviour of your users, and avoid the high prices!
https://www.g2.com/products/gosquared/reviews/gosquared-review-2314491
Formito.com can help with support and sale, but not as powerful as Intercome.
I'm building https://undersend.com - we handle automated email campaigns based on users' activities.
try crisp.chat. FLat fees, comparable with intercom.
The fact is that Intercom has grow into a tool that's irreplaceable.
We are using Helpcrunch (https://helpcrunch.com/) for Duplikit. It's a little rough around the edges but working well. Meant to be a cheaper alternative to Intercom.
It depends what you really need. Something combination of multi-channel help desk and separated email marketing solution with built-in integration is as good as Intercom, for cheaper price and with more advanced ticketing features. We are operating LiveAgent.com and we are far more inbound-oriented than sales-based like Intercom and other conversational marketing tools.
Anyways if you are looking for their alternative, Crisp is fine (but worse), but I would just map what part of customer service channels you are using and if there are not other suitable options out there.
Depends on what features you need!
I'm building splitbee.io and it allows you to do email automations (messaging part of segment) even for free!
HubSpot has a decent free tier that includes live chat, email marketing, CRM, and a bunch of other sales/marketing/customer service tools (disclaimer: former employee, but I also use it myself).
Drift also has free basic live chat, but all other features are paid.
Another thing to consider, depending on your budget–a lot of these companies run startup discount programs that lower the price a ton for the first year or two if you can get approved. You can get 40% off HubSpot's paid plans very easily (https://www.hubspot.com/startups), or 90% off if you happen to be associated with any sort of accelerator, incubator, etc, which is a bit harder as a bootstrapper, but not impossible.
With Drift, last time I checked, they were giving 95% off to all types of startups including bootstrappers (https://www.drift.com/startups/).
Intercom's startups program is $49/month for all features, which could be a good deal at a certain level but not so great for just starting out (https://www.intercom.com/early-stage).
not sure what features in particular you're looking for in an intercom alternative
i see a lot of people mentioning crisp, which is awesome. if you're a small team though, the biggest feature missing in their free tier however is slack integration
in that regard, i'm a big fan of https://small.chat/; it's not super robust, but it has all the basics you need to take any inbound communications from your landingpage/app
We applied for the Intercom Startup program and we only pay $49 a month. I'm really enjoying it so far. I've tried a lot of other chat tools, and Intercom is just on a whole different level.
Intercom is really crazily expensive!
Hi, am building https://helpninja.com We are more of a support tool (shared inbox + knowledgebase) than sales.
How about a slack group?
This post might help. @bobburch’s building something interesting, highlighting indie hacker products alternatives to big tech companies.
In term of functionality the closest thing to intercom that is also open source is https://github.com/erxes/erxes
Last time I've checked there were still some bugs, but I think they're doing a great job, cloud platform is also available.
Ps: I'm not affiliated with them, i just like to keep an eye on open source projects that may be useful for me.
Also it depends what part of intercom you need, for example if you only need the live chat there are a lot of free alternatives.
Or if you just need the email automating, you can check out mautic, another open source tool.
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Intercom can be really expensive and can straight away increase your support cost and investment. Honestly, if you’re a small business then it is complete madness to opt for an enterprise live chat solution such as this.
You can give ProProfs Chat a try. It even has a free plan. Doesn’t cost much either. It starts with $10/user/month. It offers live chat, help desk, and knowledge base in its free plan. Let me know if it works for you.
Ruby on Rails opensource live chat software, an alternative to Intercom, Zendesk - https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
Late to the conversation but I started building something in this line a few months back as a weekend project. https://wee.bio/
After covid hit, I couldn't focus on this and only last week I got back to finishing this. That's an outdated landing page, I am releasing the product next week.
If anyone is interested in the progress, follow along on twitter https://twitter.com/howbadeh
You can use Freshchat as a cheap alternative (Free tier available) with cool integrations with other Freshworks products, for example to convert a chat into a support ticket
https://www.freshworks.com/live-chat-software/
Definitely there's a need. However I seems small.
Have you tried Tidio / Chatroom?
Crisp, Tidio, and Tawk.io are awesome.
https://twitter.com/alexanderisora/status/1325415605139369985 Heres the tweet