Show HN: TalkJS – Integrated messaging for web and mobile products | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TalkJS – Integrated messaging for web and mobile products

talkjs.com

44 pointsjoshschoen24 comments

That pricing seems insane :o. Even on the lite setup, each conversation would need to have $2 in value, on the standard plan it would need $2.50 in value (I know there is an increase in features but an increase in price per conversation as well?). Although I am not quite sure what a conversation consists of -- it could be a chat between two people over any timespan, in which case it really isn't terrible?

Hey there, it's Egbert from TalkJS.

Thanks for the feedback! While I disagree that the pricing is insane, you and other commenters here made me realize that maybe we presented it badly.

TalkJS is 10 cents per conversation per month, plus a fixed monthly fee.

I think our mistake has been that we made the fixed monthly fee also include a small number of conversations, which is where all the confusion comes from. It makes it seem like a single conversation costs $2.

The idea behind our pricing is that with a small app you can go live with TalkJS with pretty much the fixed monthly $49 or $249. Once your traffic increases, the price-per-conversation takes over and it's really just 10 cents per conversation, period.

Note that we also offer large bulk discounts for large sites - do get in touch!

I think you need more features to be competitive. In the span of a week by using socket.io I accomplished live chat on our site plus sending the mouse position and changing the current page a user visits on our site. It's not worth using something paid when building it yourself can be so easy.

Hey there, a little update: we changed our pricing section to be more clear that TalkJS isn't $2 per conversation but 10¢. Thanks for your feedback!

Also, I forgot to answer your question. Indeed the 10 cents is per conversation. A conversation can last as long as you want and is only counted once (we charge for a conversation when the first message is sent in it).

Irks me slightly that they use a 3rd-party°° FrontDoor[0] (chat via Slack) integration to talk to potential customers, instead of a proprietary implementation of their own platform.

Yes, it's technically a different thing (user->company instead of user->user) — but if they're advertising an expensive JS chat service, I would expect them to be showing that off front-and-center as a way to communicate with their support.

[0] - https://frontdoor.im

°° EDIT -- The creator responded below, showing that I am incorrect.

Hey, thanks. That's ours too; uses a big chunk of the same technology :)

Epic! I take it back in that case.

Perhaps making it more clear that you're the creators in that case? Unless I'm being my ignorant self again :)

No, excellent point, thanks. Will think of an elegant way to do that :)

This looks really nice and something I'd be interested in, but I'm wondering how you arrived at the pricing model. $49 for 100 conversations seems steep to me and not something I could afford for smaller projects.

So if I have 100 users who each have one conversation, is that considered 100 conversations? If I have two users talking with each other, is that one conversation? I looked through the FAQ but can't quite understand the pricing model.

Also, when I click on "We can't afford TalkJS" in your FAQ, it expands the answer for the question.

You can read the last FAQ answer in the page source:

We love open source and community projects, so we have decided to make TalkJS entirely free for non-commercial purposes.

When you go live, there's a button you can click to let us know you're using TalkJS non-commercially, and you'll be able to go live without paying.

Note: The non-commercial TalkJS license includes no support. If need want the certainty of access to our great customer support, please become a paying customer.

That was more feedback that the site's not working correctly. Since we're talking page source, I guess we might as well tell them the offending line is anchor tag referencing the wrong div `#question6-a` instead of `#question7-a`.

Hey! Joshua here, co-founder of TalkJS. Thanks for your feedback, you're right! Will fix asap.

Thank you! To answer the user/conversation question:

> two users talking with each other, is that one conversation?

Yes.

And thanks for asking, this means it's not clear and we will have to add this.

I echo this. It's too ambitious exactly what constitutes a single conversation (and what doesn't). Gifts define it right by the pricing or use something that people would understand

Why did NSFW (porn) content come up when I clicked view demo?

Because other people are using the same demo.

Aw, we feared that would happen on our HN launch already :-)

We're actually working on a new demo which among other things, fixes this. It'll allow you to chat with your friends or colleauges instead of random strangers.

Thanks for the notification, we've removed the offending pictures.

From https://talkjs.com/hello/terms_and_privacy/

>> We do not promise that our software works or is good for anything at all.

Is this a joke?

Hi, Egbert from TalkJS here.

Not a joke. It's just an attempt to summarize the usual fullcaps NO FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE legalese in a human readable way.

Love this idea, but the price is just way too expensive. Anyone know of an open source alternative?

XMPP and Jappix Mini, for example.

Congrats on launching, but why should I use you guys over https://smooch.io or https://sendbird.com

Please and thanks

Hi, Egbert from TalkJS here.

The core difference is that TalkJS includes a full fledged messaging UI and well-designed email/sms/push fallback*. In working on earlier startups, we noticed that reliable realtime data transfer was the least of our problems. Having a good cross-browser messaging UI, for mobile and for desktop, that loads fast, works everywhere (including, say, IE9) and makes people happy was a lot more work.

TalkJS came to be when we realized that many companies spend a lot of effort in reinventing this wheel over and over again, and that all of them ended up building very similar UIs.

Think of TalkJS more like a user-to-user Intercom than a Sendbird.

Is that wine offer still open?

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