Why is user onboarding software so expensive?
I'm trying to improve the onboarding experience of siteguru.co by adding a nice walkthrough for new users. So I started looking for Saas products that do this, but they're all super expensive (> $99 up). Examples are Intercom (offers much more, but I don't need all that now), Whatfix, Userguiding, and Userlane.
One interesting option is Shepherd (https://shepherdjs.dev/), which is open source. However, I was hoping for a cheaper solution without having to do to much work (yep, I'm lazy).
Any indie hackers who have good alternatives for user onboarding software?
I've been looking into entering this area myself.
You can get a basic walkthrough script for free. The thing is most of these apps go way beyond that (and for good reason) to even tracking per user over the life of using your app. How often are you annoyed by those stupid walkthrough scripts? You want to just exit them and do your thing. These pricey tools allow a lot more customization per customer and even over the lifetime of the use of your product, not just the onboarding phase. It takes a lot of customization and integration to know when to kick off each walkthrough piece/etc and track all that. For us devs that sounds simple, but to have people integrate it into their product takes a good amount of effort on the customers part.
If you read their help docs they get pretty involved and they often need to provide customer hand holding to get it going right. I think it's just the cost of doing all that.
In other words, their cost per customer is high, so they need to charge high.
I agree, was looking at Appcues and some competitors and all were hundreds of dollars monthly.
If an IH created a relatively simple solution for around $30/month, I think they could be very successful
What kind of features would you like to see in a relatively simple solution? I already spent some time with that topic and developed something and I would love to get some feedback from you guys.
Exactly, that's what I thought. But I guess if all the products out there, it's either really hard, or other people are just willing to pay more.
Hey @RickVanHaasteren, I'm Mert from UserGuiding.
I've always loved IndieHackers community and in my last post, a few hackers asked me to discuss this with my team.
And we've decided to offer a cheaper, limited but strong enough plan for Makers! Here's our form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfmIZH33kYUhsVZFnfNCEe_rzYlDGFxWPXkiYhoFFHthPaHTw/viewform
Because we've just started on this, we welcome any feedback.
I've been asking myself the same question. I had my hopes up high for boardme.app (@Butvidas). Not sure what happened to the project though.
Our current bill at Ministry of Testing for Intercom is stupid. We're in the process of trying to move away from it because of that.
To be clear: it's not really about the effort of building it myself or using Shepherd. I'm just wondering why the average price in this particular SaaS category is so high.
And, if anyone knows cheaper alternatives:-)
I believe an IndieHacker has built a lower cost alternative that is point and click and launched somewhat recently. I'll try to find it.
How much would you pay if someone automate the work to integrate Shepherd?
Might want to consider to develop your own solution that is tailored to your needs. In some cases, it is a lot more cost-effective.