
Show HN: TalkJS – Integrated messaging for web and mobile products - joshschoen
https://talkjs.com
======
dvcc
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?

~~~
skrebbel
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!

~~~
zackify
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.

------
sarreph
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](https://frontdoor.im)

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

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

~~~
sarreph
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 :)

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

------
pdxandi
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.

~~~
cf21
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._

~~~
pdxandi
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`.

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

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

~~~
skrebbel
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.

------
the_cap_theorem
From
[https://talkjs.com/hello/terms_and_privacy/](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?

~~~
skrebbel
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.

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

~~~
Grom_PE
XMPP and Jappix Mini, for example.

------
thedangler
Congrats on launching, but why should I use you guys over
[https://smooch.io](https://smooch.io) or
[https://sendbird.com](https://sendbird.com)

Please and thanks

~~~
skrebbel
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.

------
dylz
Is that wine offer still open?

