65
39 Comments

I've Built an open source alternative to Intercom , Drift, Zendesk ...

  1. 4

    Main features:

    • Customer Segment Filters with custom attributes support
    • Web Messenger embed
    • Agent's conversation routing
    • Text chat with customizable content blocks support
    • Video Calls !
    • Triggerable conversational bots
    • Mailing campaigns
    • Onboarding tours
    • API integrations - Whatsapp / Twitter DM / Slack / Calendly / Zoom and more!
    • CRM integration - Pipedrive supported
    • Webhooks
    • Help Center system with multilanguage support
    • API support - consumible via GrapqhQL with Oauth authorization
    • Quick replies (as canned responses)
  2. 3

    This is awesome! I think Intercom’s pricing has become progressively expensive over the years and has essentially priced out smaller companies.

    So thank you for your work @michelson to provide an open source alternative.

    If you ever need to add search capabilities in Chaskiq (eg searching for support tickets, docs, etc), I’m building an open source and light-weight alternative to Algolia and ElasticSearch that you might want to consider: https://github.com/typesense/typesense.

  3. 2

    Congrats on all the work! It looks like a big undertaking with all the features that you built. I'm in the open-source space as well and it's good to see others around.
    I'm assuming you already have a business model going for it. Are you able to share it here with us?

    1. 2

      Hi @razvanilin, yeah it has been a lot of work 😅 From the beginning of the development we thought to open the project as open source, mainly because this could position us as an alternative to the big competitors, and would allow us to generate a development community around the product, also as a form of free marketing. As you know, in the world of chatbots and conversational platforms, competition is tough, there are so many competitors. Currently our business model consists of two parts, one is the support and development of on-prem installation and the second is to offer the service as SAAS, for the latter we still need to polish and prepare the platform a little more.

  4. 2

    Impressive!

    Stumbled upon Chaskiq via opensource.builders (which I believe is also an IH's product) and found it impressive!

    Since some time as I feel open source companies evolve alot, I am wondering: What is the business model behind it? Could you elaborate on that?

    Thank you and welcome to Indiehackers!

    Chris

    1. 2

      Thanks @thanisch 🤗
      Currently our business model consists of two parts, one is the support and development of on-prem installation and the second is to offer the service as SAAS, for the latter we still need to polish and prepare the platform a little more.

  5. 2

    This is really awesome! Would love to see a community get behind this and some polishing on the UI.

    Since you mentioned that you have an investment, what is your plan moving forward and monitizing this?

    Also do you see any advantages on releasing this with GPL licence instead of, say MIT?

    Keep up the great work!

    1. 1

      Thanks @thmsobrmlr , we've adopted GPLv2+ in order to protect some aspects of the product and give us some space to offer commercial products/services without others offering the same with our own product 😂, we might be wrong in the approach here but we have seen that some successful projects like discourse or gitlab which have that license too

      1. 1

        Great choice! One of my go-to favs for very similar reasons. AGPL is also a candidate for primarily hosted SaaS type software projects.

        When you get a chance you might want to look at why Linus Torvalds chose the GPLv2 and stayed with it despite extreme pressure from RMS to adopt v3 later on.

        I'll mirror your repo on one of my Gitea servers and look forward to playing around with it. From what I've glossed over really quick it's appears that you've done a fine job

  6. 2

    Did you build this primarily by yourself? 🤯 Must've been quite the undertaking given the number of features that you have! Congrats!

    When did you start working on this?

    1. 3

      I started the project a couple of years ago (first commit May 2018), at the beginning it was a proof of concept to see what it would be like to make my own intercom, after a month I put the project aside because the goal actually seemed unattainable, but I ended up with a working prototype. However, last year from May I resumed the project because in the company where I worked (preyproject.com) needed to create a window with customized messages for the users, so I dusted off the project, Although we never used Chaskiq in that company, I ended up associating with my ex boss who financed 8 months of development from June 2019 to January 2020, becoming the first investor and partner of the project. So I was lucky enough to get the chance to left the company and work on this exclusively.
      It has been a great journey so far.

      • fun fact: I've rewritten the frontend 3 times, first with Atlassian ui kit , then material ui and finally with tailwind ui :)
      1. 1

        That's amazing. Would you be willing to share technical details on how it's architected?

        How does segmenting and targeting work? how do you decide to trigger a modal/popup or not for a user?

        What were the most challenging aspects of this project?

  7. 2

    Impressive at first glance, congratulations! With so many open source projects, many companies fear abandonment of the tools so they typically stay away and turn to commercial products. How can you assure users that you are in it for the long haul?

    cheers

    1. 2

      Thanks @antarctican, we are currently giving commercial support for a handful of companies that are using Chaskiq on prem, so I guess we will stay here for a while, but in the end of the day I can't guarantee that we will stay until the end of the internet :D , I really hope so though.
      As an open source project the governance of the product is distributed , so my bet here is also build a trustful dev community around the platform that could give the continuity with little dependance on us.

  8. 1

    this looks nice and definitely needed... but looks like it's based on rails? seems an odd choice for a messaging app.

  9. 1

    Honestly man. Thank you and respect. I was so irritated with Intercom that I wanted to build something like this next month. Thanks you for making this. :)

    1. 1

      Thanks @imkarthikk, you are more than welcome to use & collab on the project ✌

  10. 1

    Holy moly this is awesome

  11. 1

    This is awesome! I am definitely going to use it in my projects, really appreciate your effort!

    1. 1

      that's great @bozkan, let me know when you do, I will be glad to help 🏄‍♀️

  12. 1

    We need to install on Heroku for personal use? Not possible on cpanel hosting?

    1. 1

      you can deploy chaskiq on any VPS, I don't know much about CPanel, but if you can deploy ruby on rails apps it should work with Chaskiq.

  13. 1

    Hey Miguel,
    That's a tough task to take on but it looks like it's going well so far. I've recently added Crisp to GitMagic (did look at Intercom too) but the features that I really need such as email marketing campaigns are only available in the highest price bands. Will keep an eye on Chaskiq certainly.

    Side note: happy to offer GitMagic for free (with unlimited run quota) to assist with those PRs and issues if that's any help.

    Regards
    Tom

    1. 1

      Hey that sounds good, I will check GitMagick over the weekend, thanks for the offer @tommyd ! 👀

  14. 1

    This is mind-blowing!!! Welcome!

  15. 1

    Hey Miguel, nice work! 🥁

    And very welcome to the indie hackers community. ❤️

    1. 1

      Thanks @marvindanig, this community rocks! ✌

  16. 1

    Wow, this looks very well done. Nice job.

  17. 1

    Wow, this is incredible. Something I've wanted for a long time. Thanks for sharing, I'll be following this closely.

    1. 1

      Thanks Hunter, PlatformKit looks good too! maybe we could integrate platforms in the future!

  18. 0

    This looks excellent! I love OSS but you should be charging for something this polished! I hope you monetize this successfully.

    1. 1

      Thanks @shirabe 🙌 , we hope that too!

  19. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      thanks! now you know 😉

Trending on Indie Hackers
Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments