Earlier quoted context omitted.
yea, I figured it probably doesn't work out for all. Though, most "inbox CRM" people I've talked to have scaled well past 200 customers (including us). What is the biggest pain that a specialized CRM solves for you?
Looking at Olark's pricing model it would seem that it would have to scale to 1000 customers + prospects (estimated breakeven for a team of 4 at 20K/month divide by $30 as most popular plan yield 670 customers, assume 330 prospects in pipleline needed to counteract turnover and enable grown) just to get a reasonable breakeven point for a small team. What is the limit of this approach in your plan for growth?
In general, I'd say support bandwidth is dedicated more to a "moving window" of how many new customers you have, rather than total customer base. Most customers tend to be pretty low-touch after the first month, where they get most of their questions answered.
(btw, just posted a more detailed reply to your comment on the article itself)