SlimFAQ – Simple FAQ's for your app or website | Hacker News Reader

SlimFAQ – Simple FAQ's for your app or website

slimfaq.com

65 pointsdynjo58 comments

One thing that's really disappointing is that more and more sites are hiding pricing information until you sign-up. That feels like at least a gray if not a dark pattern. For me that's a terrible first impression. It's a sign that I have to look out for further deception, even if that's not the intention.

I'm guessing that A/B testing shows this to be more profitable than being upfront with pricing?

Internally, sometimes sales teams resist giving out information that would otherwise give them a chance to communicate directly. Unintended consequence of commission based compensation, I guess.

In this case, though, I suspect they are just trying to build a mailing list.

Good question! We've just launched and this was not on a bad intend (didn't even have time to A/B test this yet :)). I'll talk to the rest of the team - maybe we should put pricing on the landing page. We've nothing to hide: it's free for up to 20 questions (including all features) - it's 7$ a month for unlimited questions. Let me know if you have any more questions! Thanks!

You definitely should, I stopped checking out the offering completely because of the missing pricing.

Just as though experiment to see what we are feeling; "not bad intend" do you feel we should take away from secret pricing?

Thanks for the feedback. It's also in our FAQ ( https://slimfaq.com/faq/24-getting-started/84-how-much-does-... ) - accessible by clicking on the little speak-bubble in the bottom right of the page.

We'll think of a better way to make that more accessible on the landing page. Thanks!

No problem. Not trying to be a dick, but pretty much every time there isn't a pricing page, it means the price is "too rich for my blood" so I just close the browser.

It often means I'm going to get a sales call and a linkedin request too but that's a whole other story ...

@con from SlimFAQ here: With a free account you have access to all features but are limited to a maximum of 20 questions.

Seems like we are not doing the best we can to communicate our features and the difference between a free and a paid subscription. We will look into this and update the landing page. Thank you!

Let me know if you have any more questions.

You might want to link to your FAQ section ;-) from your landing page.

Good point! Although the FAQ is accessible by clicking the "Demo" link in the navigation and the little speak-bubble in the bottom right, we can do a better job. We'll rollout a version of the landing page that features pricing and a more accessible FAQ. Thank you!

You should just call it 'FAQ'. I actually browsed through it a bit thinking it was made-up stuff for a made-up demo.

If you call it FAQ, nobody in sound mind is going to think you're not using your own product to demo it ;)

I honestly thought you were being ironic at first. The pricing info is in their FAQ: https://slimfaq.com/faq (specifically at https://slimfaq.com/faq/24-getting-started/84-how-much-does-...)

Which, ironically, is not obviously located. The link for their FAQ says "Demo". And it's in the main navigation on the top, instead of somewhere down the page where their layout is guiding me. Right before "Intercom Integration", they should really have another section which says "Do you have more questions? Try our FAQ!"

Instead, all of their navigation is guiding me to the sign-up button as a next step. It's a product page for creating and maintaining FAQs, and they don't guide me to their own FAQ - that's not a good sign.

I agree. I did eventually find the pricing info in the demo, but it's not at all immediately obvious that the 'demo' plays double duty as the site's actual FAQ page. And why hide pricing info in a FAQ anyway? Pricing should not be just in a FAQ.

Also, $7/mo seems steep to me, but who knows? To me the FAQ system seems to involve an excess of clicking/navigating.

I could be wrong, but I'm almost positive the "demo" link just brought up the sign-up form before. Glad they changed that, maybe I should bring this up for every product featured on the HN front page ;)

Ironically, who reads the FAQ?

Thanks I came here to complain of no pricing page also. Shows how important conventions are.

"SlimFAQ is free for up to 20 questions. If your FAQ requires more, you can sign up to our standard plan that comes with unlimited questions for just 7 $ per month (annual payment)."

UPDATE: We heard you! We've rolled out a new version of our landing page that shows our current plans. Thanks for the great feedback!

It's still free (forever) to sign up and have an FAQ with up to 20 questions. You'll need to upgrade to a paid plan after that. Enjoy and feel free to get in touch! Thanks!

From my experience the difficult part of a FAQ isn't converting the questions and answers to rendered HTML, it's writing the content itself.

lol #truestory

That's why we tried to make content creation as simple as possible: you can add categories and questions by just typing and hitting return ("brain storm"). Only questions with actual answers will be visible to visitors. This helped us a lot with the writing process. (I'm one of the engineers at SlimFAQ)

This is, hands-down, the worst part of being hired to "build a website."

I can absolutely build you a website. I can make it work however you'd like. I'm a crappy designer, but I can cobble together HTML/CSS into something that looks reasonably professional via pattern matching on sites you like or just using bootstrap.

But ultimately, you're gonna need to have something to say.

I should miss the point. Why is it top 5 on HN ? Doing a FAQ may be one of the easiest thing on a website (as koolba said, writing the content is the difficult part).

Moreover, it is not free after 20 questions ?!

Well, I didn't know Intercom but this might be the only feature which worths it.

Hey there, @con from SlimFAQ speaking: We've build SlimFAQ out of our own pain: we wanted a simple, searchable FAQ that can be managed by our support team for SlimWiki (i.e. it's super simple to use, even for not so tech-savy people).

Unfortunately we didn't find what we looked for - so we build what we wanted. And since we are big fans (and customers) of Intercom, we made sure to integrate it where we saw fit. If you don't know Intercom yet, you should definitely check it out! (Right after you gave SlimFAQ a try :) )

Here's my feedback - I'm someone who actually has surprising amounts of pain maintaining my FAQ so your product is appealing:

- I want to see screenshots of your mobile presentation of the faq. I also want to understand that it'll be easy to integrate with my app. (Ideally native - I don't trust web based interactive elements on mobile)

- I want FAQ localization somehow.

- Customize FAQ based on parameters of the user (if they've indicated they want to use certain "slices" of my app, I either only want to show those slices, or at least to prioritize them so they show up first)

Neat idea!

Thanks! Great feedback! We plan to add native integration (for iOS) and localization, soon.

The "slices" feature sounds interesting, we'll investigate. For now we want to keep it as simple as possible. Thanks! (I'm an engineer on SlimFAQ)

This looks very useful. For the commenters who think this is a trivial service, I'd like to know how you handle the publishing step for your current FAQ pages. Most of our FAQ content comes from the product team, and much of the rest from other not-very-technical members of our team. Publishing FAQ updates always impacts our dev team. Being able to just give full control of the FAQ to our PM is definitely worth the $84/year.

But, DNS mapping is a must have for us - for most of our users, being directed off-site is mildly confusing, which is a particularly bad UX for someone who is already in state of incomplete information. DNS mapping also needs to come with customizable css.

If you had those two features already, we would be considering your product today.

A couple of other suggestions:

- Your FAQ itself does not address the question about custom domains, it probably should.

- As others have mentioned, not having a clear link to a pricing page creates the risk of potential customers thinking you are hiding it on purpose.

- It is a dark pattern to list the price as $7/month if you don't offer a monthly payment plan. Please either list the minimum transaction (currently $84), or offer a monthly plan.

- Is the editor exposed anywhere in the demo? I could not find it (just a screenshot on the homepage). Our content creators aren't that technical, so previewing the editor is important. WYSIWYG would be great, but markdown+preview mode would be just fine.

- Do you also provide media hosting? Some of your demo questions feature embedded pictures - and if I don't have to manage the file hosting for those assets, that's very appealing.

- What is your cross-platform support? Searching your demo for the terms "responsive", "mobile", or "tablet" returns zero results.

- Is there a way for me to follow the evolution of your product, e.g. mailing list or twitter? The product seems like a good fit for us once DNS mapping is in place, but not yet, so I would like to keep up-to-date.

Hi, Jan here from SlimFAQ. Custom domains are coming soon (I will add this to our FAQ). Pricing now on the landing page. We don't expose the editor in the demo but sign up for a free account and have a play. Media hosting is included. The resultant FAQs are totally responsive and look great on all devices (will also add to FAQ). Mailing list is a great suggestion, will get this set up :-)

Thanks for the really constructive feedback, very much appreciated.

I'm not sure why you would need this. Even if you don't have a CMS set up, it's fairly easy to show someone what parts of the HTML they need to copy and paste if you already have some FAQ's, or just write it up and assign a ticket to a dev and have them knock it out in a few minutes.

Who's the target market here? Most site owners usually have a tech person they can reach out to to help them with things like this.

That's what we thought at first, too. But then you'll want search and easy content creation that works without developer involvement. We've added customisation and a sleek Intercom integration on top.

Target market is anyone with a website or application that requires an FAQ and doesn't have the resources to "knock it out in a few minutes". :) You can start for free with up to 20 questions (20 questions will be free forever, including the Intercom integration). I'm one of the developers on the team - hope I could help!

There's always an opportunity cost to any work and developers often (always?) underestimate the time taken to do work.

$7 a month is practically free and allows you to offload the task from your expensive developers to someone better suited.

Some product feedback:

It's not clear from the marketing where my faq will go. Your demo points to slimfaq.com/faq which suggests my url should be mydomain.com/faq but I doubt you have DNS mapping or self-hosted installs yet.

I searched your faq for the answer to above question and was not able to find it. Any good faq page should have an "ask your question" button to submit new questions not already answered.

Thanks @guptaneil - that's some great feedback!

You are correct, we don't have DNS mapping in place, yet - but we plan to add that in the near future. Your FAQ will currently be hosted at slimfaq.com/your-company-name - you can change your company name (and path) at any time.

We are considering a "Ask your question" feature - currently we are using Intercom for this in our own FAQ. Thanks!

I'd think without the ability to do some sort of subdomain (faq.mydomain.com) I wouldn't use the product.

Hi, Jan from SlimFAQ here, custom domains are coming soon :-)

Oh look, another 'software as a service' platform offering what would have once been a normal script for a 'per month' payment model. Why even often this for a monthly fee instead of say, a single one off purchase price with optional renewals? Is the new trend 'don't host anything yourself any more'?

Honestly, as decent as the pictures look, I think this is the kind of thing you could do with a free script and a few theme changes, not a service.

I don't think a service like this is targeting hackers who can easily replicate what this service is providing in an hour or two. Not everyone has the time/skill/resources/desire to find a free script, modify the logic, modify the "theme" to something that looks halfway presentable, etc. Some people will find a service like this entirely worth it – and that's who it's targeted to.

Download a script and download a theme for it? It works pretty well for things like WordPress and phpBB. And it's not like there aren't a lot of options out there.

That doesn't seem that complicated, especially not with basic shared hosting (which a company will likely have if they have any form of web presence whatsoever).

I also don't like the move towards trying to get 'average' users to walled gardens and managed solutions, since it usually ends up being about nickle and diming them.

> Download a script and download a theme for it? It works pretty well for things like WordPress and phpBB. And it's not like there aren't a lot of options out there.

Are there free, actively managed, themeable FAQ scripts out there that would compete with this?

> I also don't like the move towards trying to get 'average' users to walled gardens and managed solutions, since it usually ends up being about nickle and diming them.

I wouldn't use this particular product, but other users in this thread with genuine FAQ and knowledgebase management needs seem to think this is a worthwhile product. Not everything works effectively as a one-time-fee downloadable script. And at the end of the day, consumers have the choice in what they use. It's not like these folks have the monopoly on FAQ solutions.

Hi Jan here from SlimFAQ. Yep you hit the nail on the head, a lot of non-technical people and support staff want an easy way to manage their FAQs without setting up Wordpress, managing scripts, media etc.

This is appealing to me too. I was recently surprised to discover that there was no simple product to maintain a public FAQ and/or knowledge base. I'm using one of the lowest tiers of Zendesk and I'm not happy, but I don't feel the appeal to upgrade to another tier either.

My needs:

Template system for a seamless integration with my site's aspect. Custom domain name support. SSL WYSIWYG or MarkDown editor. Option to add my analytics (i.e. to include my own JS on my pages), or some analytics offered by you.

I'll be more than happy to pay for this, if you keep it simple :)

As an engineer on SlimFAQ: That's exactly why we build it!

Custom domain name support is coming, per-FAQ analytics is also in the pipeline. As for a template system: we've played around with some ideas but couldn't agree on a simple and nice integration yet - but we are planning to offer more customisation options to make it easier to fit your site's or application's style.

We are already providing a nifty WYSIWYG editor - you should give it a try! Thanks.

> you should give it a try!

I will :)

Thanks!

This is a really neat service. We've been working in the same area at UserDeck [1], but focused around an inline embedded widget. It's hard to tell your integration strategy if it is a subdomain hosting a la Zendesk or if it is mostly focused on the overlay with Intercom which is really slick too btw.

1: http://userdeck.com/guides

We also thought about the problem of explaining our product/service, but instead of a static FAQ page, we decided to use our own "Automated Chat" product. check it out: https://hellotars.com/convBot/demos/tars/

Using HelpScout's support documentation, I've been toying since with just making a wiki to accompany our company's site.

I love the interconnectedness within a wiki, where its essence is for you to post a page on a particular topic in as much depth as you need, and link to related concepts.

    - Landing pages -aaS
    - Pricing pages -aaS
    - FAQ pages -aaS
    - Status pages -aaS
    - Blog -aaS
    - Forum - aaS
    - Developer docs - aaS

anything else?

There was a company providing pricing pages as a service, but I can't find them now.

I've seen:

Authentication -aaS Image hosting -aaS Database -aaS

What's that old joke, FAQs are for when you know you need to tell your users something but don't know when or how.

I don't see the value in this product that justifies $7/month price. It's such a shallow effort.

It strikes me as either absurdly high or absurdly low.

Why high? Because $7/month buys you more than one DigitalOcean droplet, which equates to hosting a static site for you. Drop in a static site generator or just a single HTML page and you're right up to the same point as you are with this: all the hard work is generating the questions and writing the answers. If you aren't a for-profit business, this is way too much money. If you're a scrounging-for-pennies startup, you already have a website -- don't spend extra on this.

Why is the price low? Because anyone who is making money off their product or service can easily afford to hand you $84 a year to make their FAQ pretty and easy to edit. $7 isn't actually enough to make them take you seriously. Does it handle user management for a hundred users? Does it integrate with a single-sign-on system? Can you privilege users to edit certain topics and not others?

Hi, Jan here from SlimFAQ. We actually built this for ourselves initially to solve the problem of allowing non-tech support staff to build and maintain FAQ's for our other products and have it nicely integrated with Intercom. Sure, if you are a developer you could maintain a static FAQ and pay nothing, but for the price of a couple of beers you get a super easy to use CMS and a lot of people seem to want this (us included).

I also wanted to build such as service, but Zendeks's $1 price for FAQ stopped me at the time.

Seems weird that searching 'slim' yields no results. How exact do users have to be when searching?

How is this different from ZenDesk?

@con from SlimFAQ here, happy to answer your questions:

We make content creation super simple and include a seamless integration with Intercom. We are also free (forever) for up to 20 questions. You should give us a try and see for yourself!

how is this simplier than email and markdown?

:sigh:

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