[webo]

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 different versions.
  * They charge by "active users" over last 90 days. A person is considered active if they've logged in to the site or was sent an email.
  * The pricing for products and add-ons are all over the place. In some places, they have an add-on listed as $199 (Product Tour) while others places have it as $119.
  * They try different "bundle" packages but yet it's impossible to tell what products or add-ons are actually included in each.

[danpalmer]

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.

[shostack]

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.

[dalyons]

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

[digitalbase]

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

[wdb]

Having similar feelings about prezly

[aaisola]

Had the same issue. Found customer response times extremely slow, especially for a live chat app! Additionally, the way they broke down their pricing made no sense to me. At the end I wasn't sure what the incremental cost of adding features I wanted would be.

[warent]

would like to take this opportunity to shout out crisp.im. I've used them for my business for nearly 2 years and they've worked great (Except for one time when my subscription randomly ended and the support rep was either intoxicated or didn't speak English. But it resolved within an hour)

[webo]

Once you incorporate your systems and teams workflows around a specific system, it’s hard to justify a migration to another system. Most companies (like ours) just eat the cost at that point.