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Comment by erikrothoff | Hacker News Reader

We actually had to stop using Intercom because of their pricing. We had a custom plan for years that accommodated our needs greatly. We were very happy and sang their praises all the time. A couple of months back they announced that they would be changing their pricing, so our $300/month price would become $2000/month. We started a long discussion with a sales person back and forth and they just wouldn't help us. We got copy and pasted responses that were not at all answers to our concerns.

It ended with them charging us $1800 even though we explicitly said we just wanted the "Chat" option for $100 per month a couple of times. After a stressful evening they refunded us. It really did leave a bitter taste in our mouth.

I agree completely with the article. Intercom was a crutch for us to deal with the failings of our own product.

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Is this with their current pricing? We had huge bills for a while but their last pricing change ended up saving us a ton. Our bill went from about $2k/mo to about $300/mo. Before that we had implemented a custom job that kept our user count down, but we don't need to run that anymore.

Really curious, what is/was your active user count? Our problem is that we are a freemium product with 150k+ registered users, and maybe 60k active (and a fraction of that paying), of which we only have ~5k in an active campaign pipeline at a given time. So to be able to use Intercom we’d have to create a job to continuously archive a large portion every day to not have our bills skyrocket to bankrupt land (we’re not VC funded).

Similar situation here – large increase in price for offering the same thing. In the past they’d jacked up the price saying ‘they’ve built new stuff so should charge more’ but have no option to remain using only the old stuff. IMO they completely abuse their customers, and at the same time I don’t blame them one but as customers like us are so locked in that it’s too much hassle to move.

We could have written this exact paragraph. Terrible experience, terrible service.

I have used one of the smaller and cheaper competitor products just for chat support, Tawk. We do try to review the incoming messages once in a while. If more than 2 customers asked the same question, then we should probably fix that on the website.

More often than not though, some customers just don't like digging through FAQ and KBs. They just prefer to get personal help.

Could they be as bad as NewRelic sales people?

Do tell.

Heh, I tried getting started with New Relic. I didn’t want to give up my name (over chat mind you, not a signup form) and phone number so I never got that account.

Completely agree. Basically what we use is only drip marketing and chat, however I have seen their price go up x3.5 in our case, without any significant increase in our user base, and no change in features.

We recently saw our price got from $375/mo to over $1000/mo for no new benefits. We are looking to consolidate users or find alternatives. We mainly just use it for support.

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