
Launch HN: Papercups (YC S20) – Open-Core Intercom Alternative - cheeseblubber
Hi HN!<p>Kam and Alex here. We’re founders of Papercups (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papercups.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papercups.io</a>), a live customer chat app written in Elixir. We offer an open-core self-hosted alternative to Intercom for companies that are security and privacy conscientious.<p>Alex and I met in SF around 6 years ago, and have been hacking on small projects together for the past couple years. Before covid, we would spend many Sunday afternoons in coffee shops building prototypes of whatever our latest and greatest idea was… most of these fizzled out after a few weeks or so<p>For 2020, we wanted to take the idea of “building something people want” a bit more seriously. We started off trying to build SaaS tools for ocean freight logistics companies. That failed, but we learned a ton in the process.<p>After our experience in freight we wanted to work on tools that are a little closer to home and tried a completely new idea: a web app that makes it super easy to manage and deploy simple cron jobs and other recurring&#x2F;scheduled tasks.<p>One thing we learned from the feedback on this product was how difficult it can be to set up and schedule email campaigns. This definitely resonated with us since we&#x27;ve both had this pain professionally. While working at Stripe, one particularly painful project Alex worked on was setting up email campaigns to notify their customers of new regulations. I had a similar experience at Pivotal where I worked on a project to email users about security updates.<p>So we started tackling this particular pain point: setting up and managing email campaigns. A few companies already do this pretty well. Intercom is one, but it can be prohibitively expensive. And for companies that have concerns about sending their customer data to 3rd party services, these products aren’t an option.<p>At this point we figured, why not be more ambitious? Instead of just building an email campaign tool, let’s build an open core alternative to Intercom!<p>So here we are. We’re starting off with chat but we plan on expanding into email campaigns and push notifications. We chose chat to start off with because we wanted something that we could use immediately. For a lot of our previous projects, we had set up chat on our sites to engage with customers.<p>We’ve launched this repo under MIT license so any developer can use the tool. The goal is to not charge individual developers. Features like chat, canned responses, private notes, and auto assignments will stay free and open source. Right now we plan on making money by providing things like a hosted version and support contracts. We eventually plan on making a licensed version where we charge for features that large companies care about like Active Directory support, Okta integration, and compliance exports.<p>Finally we decided to build Papercups on top of Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix because it seemed like the best tool for a job that requires a lot of “realtime” functionality and first class support for websockets&#x2F;channels. It’s been great so far! The frontend uses React&#x2F;TypeScript. We may explore using LiveView in the future, but we wanted to start off with a frontend stack that we were familiar with.<p>You can check out our repo at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;papercups-io&#x2F;papercups" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;papercups-io&#x2F;papercups</a> we have a ton of features in mind would love your feedback and any feature requests!<p>P.S. This is our first time working in Elixir so would love any feedback there too!
======
jedberg
This looks great! Can't wait to try it out.

Question for you. The other day there was an article here on HN where someone
got rid of their chat bubble in exchange for a Chat/Help link in their top
nav. [0]

This gave them a 62% increase in chat engagements.

Curious if you have any thoughts on this, since you're deeply in the space.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059438)

~~~
areichert
We definitely want to make our chat widget as unobtrusive and customizable as
possible, so that our users can choose exactly where it shows up... I can
sympathize with how annoying it is when these chat bubbles get "aggressive"
e.g. by automatically opening and then sending me a bunch of messages from a
bot.

I really like the idea of just adding a nav item/link that goes to a page
dedicated to messaging. Perhaps at some point we'll create a hosted page that
does exactly that (e.g. maybe a custom "contact" or "FAQ" page where customers
can ask questions, etc)

In the meantime, our users should technically be able to set up a dedicated
page for this, and just embed our chat widget on that specific page :) but we
are going to keep thinking about how we can improve the UX for this kinda
thing!

~~~
efreak
As someone who detests these chats opening up, you may want to consider
preventing any embedded chats from opening on the landing page; require a
minimum number of page visits on the site and/or clicks and/or time spent per
page. The fastest way to get me off a website is to pop up a chat box, and I
have the domains for most of those services in my hosts file. If you can
enforce good standards on the use of your chat function, it'll make us cranky
people like me happier.

The chat box should not be allowed to pop up anywhere in the page on its own--
without user interaction with the chat itself, it should be limited to the
borders of the window; without a certain amount of interaction with the
page/site, it should be _entirely invisible_ , whether it blends into the
menus or stays off-screen.

If your widget is front and center on a user-hostile website, then they get
linked together in my mind, even if it's just an embedded service.

------
a13n
Go hang out in the SaaS Growth Hacks group on Facebook and let people know you
have a free / open source Intercom alternative. Every week people in that
group are asking for cheaper alternatives, and usually they just care about
the live chat portion of the product.

I feel like one of the biggest pain points of Intercom is their pricing, and
you should ride that wave as much as possible (in addition to "companies that
are security and privacy conscientious").

~~~
areichert
We'll definitely check it out! And yeah, one of the top complaints we heard
from people when doing user research was how expensive Intercom is, so
definitely going to try to ride that wave as much as possible like you said :P

------
gmays
Congrats! Looks great, will keep an eye on this. Any plans to support mobile
via Expo? That's one of the big drawbacks of Intercom right now:

* [https://expo.canny.io/feature-requests/p/add-intercom-suppor...](https://expo.canny.io/feature-requests/p/add-intercom-support)

* [https://community.intercom.com/t/intercom-widget-dont-want-t...](https://community.intercom.com/t/intercom-widget-dont-want-to-work-inside-react-native-webview-android-only/2077/8)

* [https://github.com/expo/expo/issues/335](https://github.com/expo/expo/issues/335)

* [https://forums.expo.io/t/intercom-integration/761](https://forums.expo.io/t/intercom-integration/761)

* [https://forums.expo.io/t/integrating-intercoms-js-snippet-as...](https://forums.expo.io/t/integrating-intercoms-js-snippet-as-part-of-an-expo-mobile-app/12510)

* [https://forums.expo.io/t/is-anyone-using-intercom-and-having...](https://forums.expo.io/t/is-anyone-using-intercom-and-having-issues/8813)

~~~
fortydegrees
Yep, no react native support is maddening to me with intercom. A dealbreaker.

~~~
stevenpetryk
Intercom employee here. Do you mean embedding the Messenger in a React Native
app?

I'll pass this convo along to the Messenger team. It sounds like a worthwhile
thing to look into since RN is becoming so popular.

~~~
gmays
Thanks for chiming in and passing our feedback along--much appreciated.

In addition Messenger I'd also add Mobile Carousels. A pure JS Expo SDK is
needed to support these. I think you'd be surprised how many apps are mobile
only these days and would love to use Intercom, but are turning to other
options like this instead.

------
sandGorgon
This is a brilliant product and something that needs to be built.

Gitlab for Intercom.

One feedback though - the whole value here is the product. I would suggest not
building your transport at this point and making Pusher/Pubnub/Firebase/Ably
pluggable as transport.

99% of your tickets will be "my message wasn't delivered" otherwise and it
will take you years to perfect this ...which is something that has been
reasonably solved at very cheap cost.

~~~
areichert
Great feedback, we're definitely planning on taking that advice :)

~~~
ninenines
[https://supabase.io/](https://supabase.io/) is a YC backed open source
realtime db. You may find it relavent for the transport layer

Congratulations on the launch :)

~~~
areichert
We're big fans of supabase :D

------
tehalex
We use intercom where I work, it's so expensive and tries to do a bunch of
different things but is mediocre at most of them. Congrats and excited to see
more.

------
bredren
Congrats on launch and thanks for the story.

It seems like there is convergence between instrumentation (analytics events)
and messaging.

Do you think this is the case? If so, do you plan to tackle this as well? If
not, how would this slot in alongside Mixpanel or Amplitude?

~~~
cheeseblubber
Yes we see that trend as well. For messaging existing customer its super nice
to have messaging and analytics in one place. One common example is you wanna
send deals or coupons for people that meet some threshold.

Some analytic features we have on the near term roadmap are features like log
rocket where you can get better insight on what the user is doing at the
moment. The vision is definitely to become a centralized location for
messaging and marketing data. We're still trying to figure out the balance and
how much we wanna focus on analytics.

~~~
bredren
If you were to offer an adjacent product that did event logging and integrated
with your messaging product it would be interesting to me.

I’ve tried using amplitude and building my own messaging and it is too much
work.

Right now I use mixpanel and am prepared to pay for the product mix.

If you do this, and they are separate instances, I would want to see it have a
simple docker container-based Setup. For example, configure this app with just
some env variables and use our images.

I’d also recommend you focus on django at first and make setup on that
framework easy and well documented.

Good luck!

~~~
areichert
Have you looked at PostHog?
[https://github.com/posthog/posthog](https://github.com/posthog/posthog)

Seems very similar to what you're describing :)

~~~
bredren
Thanks for the link. Coincidentally a feature request to mash posthog with
messaging went into an issue 10 hours ago!

[https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1414](https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1414)

------
jjeaff
This looks great and an open source option in this field is needed.

From demos and docs, I'm only seeing the chat. Does papercups also have some
sort of customer database that is filterable and segmentable?

Because to me, that is more about what intercom is about.

~~~
riffic
ChatWoot is another open source alternative, unless I am fundamentally
misunderstanding what Intercom is.

~~~
areichert
Intercom also does a lot of things on top of chat like email campaigns, FAQs
("articles"), chat bots, and is somewhat evolving into a bit of a CRM.

Chatwoot focuses on chat as far as I can tell (and so do we at the moment!),
so it is certainly another viable alternative if that's what you need :)

------
ivan_ah
This is really well done. I signed up and used the sample code provided to set
up on my site. Founders were super helpful and gave me a few pointers when I
ran into problems (my version of react was old).

It works great.

~~~
areichert
<3

------
eggbrain
First off, very cool tool. README looks nice, demo looks nice, website looks
nice, code quality looks nice, and in general the whole "product" aspect of it
looks very good.

My main concern is that your competitive advantage seems to be that you are a
free /open core chat tool, but this advantage also attracts many bad
customers. They'll want a chat tool that features-wise rivals a competing
(paying) platform, but also with the added twist that, by being somewhat open-
source, they'll also want support for their weird edge case setup that you
didn't consider ("Why won't this work on a Raspberry PI?", "Can I use this on
my company's intranet?", "Do you work on Windows 3.1?", etc etc).

You'll add in more features and support for these things, only to find the
rabbit hole going deeper and deeper -- and identifying the customers that are
actually willing to pay becomes harder and harder as you have to filter out a
lot of the low-quality requests.

To help with filtering, you can push people to the hosted version where they
have to pay, but now you've lost the competitive advantage -- and have to
compete with the many other chat tools in the space.

I think there's still a lot of room here, in the same way that Gitlab carved
out a huge niche from Github, but those would be my main concerns.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Not that you're necessarily wrong, but you can 'fire' those 'customers' too.

The answer is not to not release as open-source.

I find it a tad hypocritical that 99% of people who post on HN consume tons
and tons of open-source every day and yes, they also want the edge cases to
work and yet, not only are they not actively participating to make the body of
free (as in freedom) software larger, they're actively discouraging people
from contributing.

From my perspective, it seems to have been a great choice to go open as far as
increasing adoption/buy in for GitLab, why not this?

~~~
eggbrain
> Not that you're necessarily wrong, but you can 'fire' those 'customers' too.

For sure -- and you should! But in my mind, the goals of FOSS can differ
wildly from a company wanting to release a great open source product, but also
turn some of those users into paying customers. If your goal is simply the
betterment of free software for developers, you take any and all
contributions, as long as the code is of good quality and solves someones
needs. If your goal is to figure out what features are needed by people who
might be willing to pay if they were solved, you then have to figure out a way
to filter the contributions and what you're willing to contribute back. It's
just a trade off.

> I find it a tad hypocritical that 99% of people who post on HN consume tons
> and tons of open-source every day and yes, they also want the edge cases to
> work and yet, not only are they not actively participating to make the body
> of free (as in freedom) software larger, they're actively discouraging
> people from contributing.

Working in open source is tough -- it's many times a thankless job. I was one
of the team members of Kandan
([https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan](https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan)),
which was a Slack clone with ~2.5k stars, and as much as we helped people,
sometimes it also felt like it never was enough.

One of the few helpful things that came from being true FOSS was that most
people had an understanding that we did this as volunteer work, so they
weren't upset when features or changes took long, or weren't merged into the
app. But if the goal is to eventually move customers into other products, or
onto a premium tier, it becomes a different game with different rules.

------
ethanwillis
One thing I'm very unhappy about with Intercom is this:

I want to do a bunch of analysis on our Intercom support history to improve
some workflows, extract stuff for FAQs, etc.

Well even if I want to build that myself their API does not make it easy to
export the data and actually use it. I assume this is because Intercom wants
to build those products and then charge for it, even if their general solution
is not a good fit.

------
Implicated
Any plans for any 'chat-bot' like features to handle the common
questions/tasks that might be covered easily/in an automated fashion?

~~~
cheeseblubber
Yes! We're planning on releasing an open source bot sometime next 2 week. We
have it working just need to integrate it with our platform. If you are
curious of the details we're doing some fuzzy string matching with some neural
networks.

------
stopachka
Beautiful product! Set it up on my side project (journaltogether.com), and it
worked like a breeze!

Can’t wait to see all the cool tail plugins that get built

------
foobaw
Love this - Intercom is ridiculously expensive. One thing that we use Intercom
is for NPS campaigns and also the product tours. Although I'd love to replace
Intercom, not having these features means we can't switch easily. I wish we
only used the Chat, then this would be the obvious product to use.

~~~
areichert
Makes sense! Would love to learn more about how you're using Intercom if
you're ever down to chat :)

(Feel free to email me at alex@papercups.io if you're interested!)

------
lukevp
Congrats on the launch! Hope one day to need a chat solution for something I
build :)

Elixir is interesting for the resilience of BEAM and being FP oriented, and
LiveView is a neat concept for templating HTML, but if you are already
building a react/typescript front end you wouldn’t get much use out of
LiveView. My concern would be issues finding developers to work with that
stack and lack of tooling and support outside core libraries.

C# has a very mature product called SignalR that can be used for real time
communications with fallback to long polling / SSE for legacy browsers. It is
a perfect fit for chat apps. Not sure how far you are into the backend
development, but wanted to point out this competitor in case you hadn’t heard
of it. .Net is cross platform, has a good ORM, and a ton of industry support
as well. Kestrel performance is fantastic.

~~~
cpursley
The problem is not finding Elixir developers, it's finding Elixir jobs.

~~~
areichert
Sounds like a good problem, if we're one of the few shops offering Elixir jobs
:P

------
horizontech-dev
Very nice. Curious can you compare and contrast with
[https://www.chatwoot.com/](https://www.chatwoot.com/) (looks like they are
also similar)

~~~
cheeseblubber
Yep! One thing that we wanted was to make our more customizable and hackable.
So we have a React component you can install with
[https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget](https://github.com/papercups-
io/chat-widget). We want to make it highly hackable and a bit more developer
focused. But at the moment we are very similar to chatwoot and love the work
they are doing.

~~~
areichert
To add on a bit -- it ~seems like chatwoot is just focusing on chat (which is
exactly what we're starting with), but we do plan on expanding to other
products beyond chat :)

(chatwoot may be doing that as well, but just wanted to mention it!)

------
mrkurt
Oh wow, I've been waiting for a self hosted app like this (with chat!). It's
one of the few things I've missed since swearing off third party javascript.

------
dnautics
Looks great, I recommend looking into mix releases instead of calling mix in
your docker container. Also, are you hiring?

~~~
cheeseblubber
Thanks! Definitely plan on migrating to mix releases instead of calling mix in
the container. We aren't planning on hiring yet right now its just me and Alex
but definitely a possibility in the future!

------
cheeseblubber
Fun fact: The name comes from string papercup phones you play with as a kid

------
shyamady
How about [https://remotehour-embed.com](https://remotehour-embed.com) Your
website visitor can, with one click, connect with you on your website.

------
jaequery
One thing I couldn’t find is a live chat service that have React Native Expo
support. I was shocked to find Intercom, Drift, and livechat not support them.

Could this possibly support it?

~~~
cheeseblubber
Some other commenters mentioned this earlier we have a react component
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/@papercups-io/chat-
widget](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@papercups-io/chat-widget) I still have
to test it with expo but in theory it should work

------
aloukissas
+1 for Elixir. It's served us super well at AgentRisk.

~~~
areichert
Glad to hear it!

------
solidasparagus
Cool launch, it looks great! One thing I would say is that, while I love the
honesty, hearing that this is your third project in the past 8 months is not
exactly what I want to hear from my B2B provider.

From the product side: I hate chat bubbles due to my experience with the
existing ones. I like that yours is subtle but visible. However, I have found
it annoying to have the chat bubble in a fixed position and inevitably one of
my pages ends having content that clashes.

Like others have said it would be very interesting to me to instead have
Chat/Support be a link in the navbar that takes users to a chat page (or opens
the chat in the current page). But I am not really sure if that would reduce
the number of people who initiate chats. As you continue to work in this space
I would find it valuable if you were able to help people like me make a more
informed decision.

~~~
mfrye0
> hearing that this is your third project in the past 8 months is not exactly
> what I want to hear from my B2B provider.

Ironically one of the top live chat companies right now was project 7 or 8
within a year before settling on chat.

------
catsarebetter
Interesting, so the target customer is a developer?

------
CedarMills
Congrats on the launch. Intercom is stupid expensive and this is a welcomed
replacement, especially if all you use is the chat feature.

------
thecolorblue
Looks cool. There is a lot of demand for customer chat apps.

What would it take to integrate with something like Google Dialog Flow?

~~~
areichert
Integrating with Dialogflow is definitely on our roadmap! We were thinking of
starting off with a relatively simple bot that uses your FAQ to automatically
answer common questions that come in, as long as the NLP model has a
confidence score above a certain threshold. But certainly something like
Dialogflow would give our users a greater ability to customize their bots, so
we'd love to do that as well.

------
mceachen
Congrats on the launch, and best of luck to you and your team!

------
mschrage
Very cool! Congrats on the launch (site is super clean!).

------
Abishek_Muthian
Congratulations on the launch, Papercups.

I want to pick your minds on a tangential need gap - 'Customer Messaging on a
website without website owner's action'[1] i.e. Enabling anyone to chat with
other visitors of any website, unlike customer messaging this will be consumer
focussed and there seems to be some products addressing it but naturally
affected by _Chicken and Egg_ problem.

What's your take on that need gap?

[1][https://needgap.com/problems/141-youtube-like-public-chat-
fo...](https://needgap.com/problems/141-youtube-like-public-chat-for-
ecommerce-websites-chat-ecommerce) (Disclaimer: This need gap was posted on my
problem validation platform).

~~~
alooPotato
Maybe there is a way to utilize the website owner to bootstrap the chicken and
egg problem.

So i'm assuming 'Customer Messaging on a website without website owner's
action' would be a browser extension? If so, what if you made the pitch to
website owners that if they signup and just embed your chat on their site,
then they are allowed to moderate the content. Otherwise, users that have the
extension will be able to just chat about the website owners products without
moderation.

Once you get embedded on a bunch of websites, then you can offer an upgrade
path for those users to get the extension and chat on any website.

Just an idea!

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
OP of that need gap explicitly cited Amazon, chatting with amazon customers
when buying a product instead of relying upon reviews which are often fake.

Sites like Amazon wouldn't bother to enable such provision and hence the need
for 'without owner's action'.

~~~
alooPotato
Right, but imagine the product would work on any website and you got a bunch
of users (by bootstrapping with those website owners). Now those users can
visit amazon and chat with each other because they have the extension
installed.

Basically, imagine if Honey added realtime chat between users who were on the
same website. That would solve OP's need. Question becomes how do you get the
install base of Honey? If I had to do it, I'd try to get website owners to
embed my chat and have the embed promo users to download the extension.

