Chatwoot Pricing Teardown
Intercom and Zendesk can be replaced by Chatwoot, an open source customer engagement platform. I believe it's worth switching to and explain its pricing
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.
What is Chatwoot?
Chatwoot is a customer engagement platform that helps you stay in touch with your users over website chat, email or social media. It's an open source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk or Salesforce Service Cloud.
Chatwoot provides a shared inbox for your support and success teams
16500 stars on Github
Pricing structure
4 plans with seat-based pricing:
Free plan works only with website, is limited to 2 seats and 500 monthly chats (17 chats/day) lacks most features. I highly doubt it is usable even for smallest Shopify sellers because it provides no way to reach customers after they've left your website
$19/seat/month Startups adds all the channels, custom views and filters, business hours, auto-responding, reports, customer grouping with segments and CRM campaigns. Once you start to pay, there's no limit to monthly conversations
$39/seat/month Business adds teams (necessary for assigning tickets based on expertise), automations, custom attributes and capturing user data with pre-chat forms. All of this is a must for support teams over 50 people – at this stage you start to want to optimize your salaries and load of customer-facing teams
$99/seat/month Enterprise allows you to set agent capacity to balance workload further, check logs, sign in with SSO and do custom branding. It also pays for phone support and dedicated account manager
MIT license for everything but Enterprise features
Cloud deployments store data in the US only
Does it make sense to pay?
Yes – if you're too lazy to self-host or big enough to need support and/or high level of access control and/or balance agents' workload. At this point, it's $99/seat/month for self-hosted and cloud alike.
MIT license covers features that are useful for most of the companies. It seems a no-brainer to suffer an ops efficiency drop in 2-3 months you're retraining staff and stop paying these humongous Intercom bills.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.