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Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

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31–40 of 112 posts

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#31
post #30

Intercom pricing[1] shows 5 seats for $119 - am I missing something in their pricing page ? If not Chatwoot seems expensive at $99/user/month ? [1] : https://www.intercom.com/pricing

Our community edition which is available with MIT license and is free for use should cover the starter plans in Intercom.

$99/user/month is targetted at large enterprises requiring enterprise support.

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#32
post #30

Intercom pricing[1] shows 5 seats for $119 - am I missing something in their pricing page ? If not Chatwoot seems expensive at $99/user/month ? [1] : https://www.intercom.com/pricing

Our community edition which is available with MIT license and is free for use should cover the starter plans in Intercom. $99/user/month is targetted at large enterprises requiring enterprise support.

Makes sense.

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#33
post #24

Since you are an open core business, how do you plan to deal with the situation where the community contributes features that are already in the proprietary enterprise version?

nice to hear you guys open sourcing this product! Also be interested how you resolve this issue.

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#36
post #24

Since you are an open core business, how do you plan to deal with the situation where the community contributes features that are already in the proprietary enterprise version?

This is a hard decision to make. It would be considered on the basis of a couple of things. If it is derivate of already existing code, we would suggest not to do that. If it is an original work, then we would consider those.

Having said that, we want to reduce such kind of conflicts happening in the community. So we would try to limit an entire module under EE License rather a part of it.

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#37

MIT license. Easy to copy and host cheaper. Curious how long this will work before you change it.

We have a enterprise edition in works. We will launch it soon. Whatever is MIT now, will stay as MIT.

screenshotting

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#39

MIT license. Easy to copy and host cheaper. Curious how long this will work before you change it.

I was wondering the exact same thing, I think the MIT license is a really bad choice here for reasons explained here: https://www.lesinskis.com/MIT-licence-community-hostile.html

Re: Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk

#40
Thank you for licensing this under a proper open source license. Out of curiosity, how would you feel about a company selling this as a service? It's obviously legal per the license, but I'm wondering what your perspective is. If you encourage it, do you have any plans for how to ensure everybody are happy and turns a profit from it?

I have grown cynical over the years with these kinds of open source challengers as it seems to be a playbook these days to bait and switch, going from a) freely license a competitor to b) build a large user base to c) switch license to consolidate power over the software, make money and slowly kill it.

Of course what's once open source will always stay that way, but if you're large enough when you branch, your engineering resources alone might be enough to turn people off the OSS fork.

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