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Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

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Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#51

Post by sojanofficial »

alexnewman wrote: post #25
pranavrajs wrote: post #2

Founder here, Chatwoot is a customer support tool for instant messaging channels which can help businesses provide exceptional customer support through their websites or social media channels. This was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. We built on Vue.js and Rails. It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead…

omg I love you. I probably wont switch til you have a hosted version where I can pay you, sorry. Maybe you can launch one on heroku for me as a beta user and I'll pay you?

Chatwoot Co-founder here: Thanks a lot for the support. A hosted version will be up by end of this month. Meanwhile, you can deploy the repo easily to heroku. Will be happy to assist if you face any issues.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#52

Post by chimen »

edoceo wrote: post #19
joshmn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on the launch. As a fellow Ruby/Rails developer I love seeing great open-source Ruby/Rails apps in a world where everyone seems to be trending to what's "sexy" now instead of what's tired and true.

Remember when folks called RoR "sexy" and CGI tried and true? Or swap any two nearly similar stacks. Stack don't matter, it's not the wand, it's the wizard and time makes fools of us all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno These two actually made me hate the language/framework which is why I never gave it a shot.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#53

Post by nathan_f77 »

This is great! I'm using Intercom, but I know it's going to get very expensive over the next few years, so I will keep an eye on this project.

I'm thinking about starting to run my own tools instead of relying on third-party software, e.g.

* GitLab.com (free, ~$80/mo for CI) => Self-hosted GitLab

* Sentry.io (free) => Self-hosted Sentry

* Slack ($24/mo) => Mattermost

* Google Analytics (free) => Matomo

The main reason would be for GDPR, HIPAA compliance, SOC-2, and PCI certification.

I also don't think I would save any money by running these on AWS. I would probably need a few m5.xlarge instances, and it would cost about $150/mo per instance. And then I have to monitor and upgrade all of the software, debug any problems, etc.

So right now I don't have any big incentives to go down this road, but that might change once I'm ready to look into HIPAA compliance.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#54

Post by robotmay »

randomb_1979 wrote: post #33
brenden2 wrote: post #26

Here's a blocklist for all these super annoying chat widgets: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/master/... You can import this into uBlock origin so you never have to see these things again.

Too bad there is no way to make a blocklist to block all freeloaders from visiting websites. The person who actually owns anything at all (the website owner) is somehow expected to give everything for free to someone who doesn't own anything at all (the website visitor). Plus I have found that the same people who complain loudly on internet forums about chat widgets (and many similar marketing tools) don't stop using…

I don't see how it's freeloading to not want to interact with a stupid popup chat robot. I will never, ever, use your stupid chat popup. Ever. So if I'm blocking it, you are losing nothing. Nothing changes for you when I block all your marketing tools, because I will not engage. In fact I actively disengage if I see any of them, so by blocking them, you actually stand a chance of me sticking around on whatever your service is, and unless your service is providing chat robot popups, you probably then stand a better chance of me actually making you money.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#56

Post by King-Aaron »

pranavrajs wrote: post #15
vicnov wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the reasons for failure? It would be great to learn more about your experience.

There are a couple of things which I can tell, most important is that we were naive and we were not patient enough to see the project grow organically and reach the users and find its USP. We wanted instant gratification which is not always available in the startup world.

A lot of first-time entrepreneurs need to listen to this comment.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#57

Post by justinclift »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #53

This is great! I'm using Intercom, but I know it's going to get very expensive over the next few years, so I will keep an eye on this project. I'm thinking about starting to run my own tools instead of relying on third-party software, e.g. * GitLab.com (free, ~$80/mo for CI) => Self-hosted GitLab * Sentry.io (free) => Self-hosted Sentry * Slack ($24/mo) => Mattermost * Google Analytics (free) => Matomo The main reaso…

As a general thought, depending on your git hosting needs Gitea may be suitable instead of GitLab.

It doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of integrations, but if you just need something with a decent web interface (github like) and using the same fork/branch/PR/merge model, it'll work.

It's system requirements are much smaller than GitLab, and it's trivial to just leave running for months at a time with having to actively SysAdmin it. GitLab is more of an "enterprise" system with all the bells and whistles, requiring a correspondingly higher amount of resources and ongoing maintenance.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#58

Post by outime »

I’m glad to see open-source alternatives for this! Without judging how good or bad this technically is, I’m happy to see the devs made it visually appealing. Good job.

My only complaint is the docs page. If I use Safari on iOS I can only see this [1] and nothing is clickable besides the menu, which offers a link to the same place.

[1] https://imgur.com/aD1bJh3

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#59

Post by scrollaway »

chimen wrote: post #52
edoceo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when folks called RoR "sexy" and CGI tried and true? Or swap any two nearly similar stacks. Stack don't matter, it's not the wand, it's the wizard and time makes fools of us all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno These two actually made me hate the language/framework which is why I never gave it a shot.

What's that last jar supposed to represent?

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, FreshChat

#60

Post by obituary_latte »

scrollaway wrote: post #59
chimen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZsZEEpno These two actually made me hate the language/framework which is why I never gave it a shot.

What's that last jar supposed to represent?

Looks like gasoline/petrol which is sometimes used by people to huff (inhale) to get high.
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