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Comment by helpsite | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN,

I started HelpSite.io because I was tired of choosing between always reinventing the wheel when it came to building out a support center website manually, or having to use a bulky tool like Zendesk that focuses on a million different features, when all I care about is the hosted knowledge base software.

A few nice things:

- Really fast search, powered by Algolia

- An intelligent contact form that auto-suggests articles

- A generous free plan which even supports custom domains (via CNAME).

https://helpsite.io

I'd love to hear feedback and would be happy to answer any questions!

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I love the idea. I'll likely be using the site soon for some small sites I run but don't make enough money or traffic to warrant the "heavier" choices for support pages.

One thing you might want to add to encourage people to sign up is allow contact form submissions to be pushed to the slack API for paying users.

Since our contact form just sends regular email to whichever address you want, you can already achieve this! Slack has a "Send emails to Slack" feature [1] that should do what you want.

Naturally, I just created an FAQ article [2] to describe how to do it :)

[1] https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/206819278-Sending-e...

[2] https://help.helpsite.io/articles/1014-receive-contact-form-...

EDIT: We went ahead and removed the limit entirely.

It looks nice. Personally I worry about the contact form submission limit. What happens if I go over the limit? Users won't be able to contact me any more? Limits based on docs make sense to me much more.

Also just curious how this compares to helpscout docs?

The contact form submission limit is purely a soft limit for now and you'll know long before messages stop being delivered [1]. (To be honest, we might get rid of those limits completely since it doesn't seem to be a driver of upgrades compared other other features, and just introduces friction.)

[1] https://help.helpsite.io/articles/21-what-happens-if-i-hit-m...

Compared to Help Scout, we have a generous free plan, our paid plans are much cheaper ($15/mo compared to $100/mo for 5 users), and we focus exclusively on docs rather than having it be an add-on. We also have nice little features such as the auto-suggesting Contact Form, that I don't think they do.

Why not allow self-hosting?

Maybe one day, but our current target market is people who just want a very easy to use tool to get a job done well. So far we just haven't heard much demand for self-hosting.

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