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A guide to live chat tools for startups

satchel.com

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Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#41

Post by wdb »

digitalbase wrote: post #23
webo wrote: post #9

Our company recently "graduated" from Intercom's early-stage program. Intercom is a mediocre product but their pricing does not make sense whatsoever. I exchanged about 20 emails (while being very slow) with their account rep only to find out even they don't understand their own pricing. Here's some hot mess that's going on: * They A/B test their pricing page with completely different models. I've seen at least 3 dif…

Great post. Made my question my bill and start a twitter rant sharing some billing details. 1488$/month for a support chat software that is average https://twitter.com/digitalbase/status/1324461575483379712

Having similar feelings about prezly

Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#42

Post by areichert »

thompsonparker wrote: post #32
areichert wrote: post #11

We were probably writing the first few lines of code for Papercups around the time this article was written (in July), but we're another Intercom alternative :) Like Chatwoot, we're open source and have a free tier on our hosted version for anyone who'd like to give us a try! Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2]. [0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups [1] https://papercups.io/ [2] https://app.papercu…

I love your product but might I just say I would be hesitant to use your product for the simple fact that there is no apparent about page on your site. I think it helps to know who is behind a company and there is a clear way, aside from the chat widget, to get contact information.

Thanks for the feedback! Here's a little blurb about us if you're curious https://papercups.io/blog/story

And we'll get on setting up an About page soon :)

Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#43

Post by areichert »

anonu wrote: post #22
areichert wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is something you'd find useful, but we (Papercups) recently released a product on top of our live chat tool that allows you to view what your users are looking at in real-time while chatting with them :) Details: https://storytime.papercups.io/

Thanks for this - this is really cool - and I actually signed up for an account to look around based on an earlier comment. Now can I get a programmatic hook into storytime? I suppose some competitor products would use this feature for an "AI Bot".

We just released Storytime last week in beta, so it's still quite basic in its feature set :P What kind of hooks would you like? (e.g. on certain events, trigger certain callbacks?)

Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#44

Post by shostack »

danpalmer wrote: post #10
webo wrote: post #9

Our company recently "graduated" from Intercom's early-stage program. Intercom is a mediocre product but their pricing does not make sense whatsoever. I exchanged about 20 emails (while being very slow) with their account rep only to find out even they don't understand their own pricing. Here's some hot mess that's going on: * They A/B test their pricing page with completely different models. I've seen at least 3 dif…

The problem we always had was that per user pricing. This is fine if you’re a SaaS business with very high value per user, but if you’re B2C it’s very hard to make it work for most businesses because lifetime values are often several orders of magnitude lower. Either their margin is so low that they need to charge like this, or they have just rules out whole markets on the basis of pricing.

I've encountered this when evaluating email platforms in a b2c situation. In some cases pricing was just a non starter because it was user based not volume based.

Unless you're a deal they really want, it may just not be a good fit.

Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#45

Post by huxflux »

areichert wrote: post #3
etuil wrote: post #2

I'm surprised papercups.io is not evaluated elixir, open source, 2 seats in their free tier. Easy and reliable. (no affiliation)

Alex from Papercups here! Thanks for mentioning us :) Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2] for anyone who wants to check us out! [0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups [1] https://papercups.io/ [2] https://app.papercups.io/demo

We'll check this out, looks great!

Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#48

Post by dalyons »

danpalmer wrote: post #10
webo wrote: post #9

Our company recently "graduated" from Intercom's early-stage program. Intercom is a mediocre product but their pricing does not make sense whatsoever. I exchanged about 20 emails (while being very slow) with their account rep only to find out even they don't understand their own pricing. Here's some hot mess that's going on: * They A/B test their pricing page with completely different models. I've seen at least 3 dif…

The problem we always had was that per user pricing. This is fine if you’re a SaaS business with very high value per user, but if you’re B2C it’s very hard to make it work for most businesses because lifetime values are often several orders of magnitude lower. Either their margin is so low that they need to charge like this, or they have just rules out whole markets on the basis of pricing.

this is exactly why two companies i have been at have left intercom. Their pricing does not make sense for B2C. And in the end it isnt that hard to build the key parts of what they offer, given the financial incentive

Re: A guide to live chat tools for startups

#50

Post by zupa-hu »

Zaheer wrote: post #5

I've tried a number of chat tools including a few on this list. I'm a big fan of Crisp. Their mobile apps and usability I think is one of the simplest and cleanest to use (in contrast to article). Also the free tier is super generous and I've been running it for free on multiple sites for years. For me a mobile app was a must and Crisp has one of the best.

+1 for Crisp.

As a pre-product-market-fit startup, I was looking for the cheapest option, to basically figure out if people would message me at all or not. (They do!) I've started with Drift around half a year ago and everything was broken. (Maybe they fixed everything by now, can't tell.) Went over to Crisp and I'm super happy with it. For now I'm still on the free plan.

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