Show HN: Helpful – Community-built support software | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Helpful – Community-built support software

helpful.io

34 pointschrislloyd10 comments

For people who are wondering what sets Helpful apart from all the other support tools out there, do note that this is built entirely on Assembly. This means, its ownership is split between the people developing it. Hopefully, this will lead to new open-source business models, which we can all agree on, are a healthy alternative.

For anyone who only knows assembly as a low level programming language and was really confused by this comment, Assembly [0].

[0]: https://assembly.com/

Is the conversation pricing based on monthly conversations or "forever"?

The conversation limits are for new conversations received per month. So for the Growing plan you can receive up to 1,000 conversations per month. Oh and don't worry too much about hitting the limit. We'll always accept your incoming messages and send you a friendly reminder to upgrade once you start going over. Does that answer everything?

Seems to be broken after signing up and logging in.

JS console shows websocket errors from your Pusher account being over quota:

  Error: Invariant Violation: unmountComponent(): Can only unmount a mounted component. application-2f12875292642440acb371cf86b33623.js:16
  Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at wss://ws.pusherapp.com/app/91e530f27b964fcff907?protocol=7&client=js&version=2.1.6&flash=false. pusher.min.js:71
  "Pusher : Error : {"type":"WebSocketError","error":{"type":"PusherError","data":{"code":4004,"message":"Account over quota"}}}"

It's probably not a good idea to depend on an active Websocket connection for reading the customer messages/inbox. Plain XMLHTTP requests may work better (more compatible with firewalls/browsers).

So, essentially this is just a hosted 'contact us' form, which sends emails?

It is actually a shared inbox that a team can use to offer customer support for their product/business. There is an embeddable "contact us" form but having your customers send support requests to your support email address seems to be more popular.

The link to "Assembly" in the page footer is broken.

Just fixed it. Thanks.

Here's the link: https://assembly.com

This is beautiful in its simplicity. Kudos! As I mentioned on the thread on your medium post, we believe like you in the need for simplicity around support.

Check out http://supportkit.io - we're building it to be a completely free solution for support of mobile apps.

Happy to talk about how Helpful might fit into this.

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