Why startups should avoid Intercom
This is actually a rant disguised as a blog post, but I thought my experience could be useful for fellow founders.
TL;DR: don’t use Intercom. Software is good, but the price & support is so bad it ruins everything. We use Crisp and it’s pretty good.
My startup, Claimer, used Intercom for about a year, making use of their ‘startup discount’, which is significantly cheaper than their ordinary rate.
When considering it I was worried about the sudden hike we’d have once our discount ended after the first year (Intercom is not cheap — I believe it’s by far the most expensive live chat solution out there), but they told me they are very ‘startup friendly’ and would ensure they would be happy to discuss ramping the price up to the full rate over an agreed period of time. It almost goes without saying that cashflow is a startup’s lifeblood, so this was incredibly important to me.
We spent the next few days getting it integrated into the app, and it worked well — it was much more reliable than previous live chat systems I had used. HelpCrunch was one we started with back in 2019, but the native mobile app was so unreliable (not getting messages, sending double messages, etc) that is was untenable.
HelpCrunch caveat: it’s been over a year since we used it, and I know they’ve made a plethora of updates, so this issue may well have been fixed by now.
Back to Intercom. Fast-forward a year later, I got automatic notifications saying our plan was going to expire and we’d be moved on to the new (very expensive) tier.
I messaged them about this (on their own live chat), but nobody got back to me after 2 weeks, so I chased — I had to chase twice in the end to get a response after 3 weeks.
3 weeks. Just to remind you, this is a live chat company…
In response, to summarise, they said there is nothing they can do aside from apply a 10% discount, and they are sorry I got the impression that they could ramp up the price over a longer period of time. The price was going from $45 a month to $950/month. I figured the software was so good, maybe we could migrate some of our services away and keep the key intercom bits to lower the price to about $350/month after the discount.
It took me another 1.5 weeks to get hold of someone to discuss this option, but they agreed that it was possible, and so I asked them to apply it to our account.
The end of plan date passes, and our first month on the new plan goes by. Guess what? The invoice was for $950 - there was no discount or reflection of the services we had migrated away from and were not using, as per my conversation with them a few weeks prior.
So I contacted them again to complain, again having to chase more than once. They were no help at all, and said the 10% discount would have only applied if we paid 12 months upfront. Not exactly startup or cash-flow friendly.
This was enough for me to immediately throw in the towel and seek alternatives. And I’m sorry to say my experience is not unique — other founders i’ve spoken to have had similar issues with them. I ended up immediately changing the credit card over to one with no balance to get another 2–3 weeks out of them before closing the account, giving us time to switch to an alternative.
After what seemed like forever searching and trying different options out, we settled on Crisp.chat.
Here’s my review after using it for 3 weeks: the software is clearly not as high quality as Intercom, but it does have more features than other alternatives, and does the job pretty well. The features it does have are not as rich as Intercom, though; niggly things like an inability to tag messages in a conversation, an inability to manage/delete their version of tags, a lack of API coverage for the whole product, etc.
The support is very responsive — I would say a mean time of 15 mins response time — but it appears as though they are not native English speakers and it can be a bit of a frustrating experience at times getting a solution to your problem. But you usually get there in the end.
Honestly these were fairly minor tradeoffs, because here’s the kicker: Crisp.chat is $95/month all in, for unlimited users. For me that’s the the killer blow to Intercom, at least for pre-seed to seed stage startups that need to be careful with their expenditure.
I hope this provides some perspective on anyone considering a live chat solution. If you have any questions about any of the software mentioned, just give me a shout in the comments below or pop me an email.
