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Looking at Olark's pricing model it would seem that it would have to scale to 1000 customers + prospects (estimated breakeven for a team of 4 at 20K/month divide by $30 as most popular plan yield 670 customers, assume 330 prospects in pipleline needed to counteract turnover and enable grown) just to get a reasonable breakeven point for a small team. What is the limit of this approach in your plan for growth?

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we haven't felt any limit to the Gmail inbox approach - even moving beyond breakeven - and chat actually tends to reduce our overall support traffic by making our conversations quick, and avoiding drawn-out support threads.

In general, I'd say support bandwidth is dedicated more to a "moving window" of how many new customers you have, rather than total customer base. Most customers tend to be pretty low-touch after the first month, where they get most of their questions answered.

(btw, just posted a more detailed reply to your comment on the article itself)

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