

Customer Outreach Startup Intercom Raises $6M Round - dmarinoc
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/19/intercom-series-a/

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nhangen
Absolutely love Intercom. Started using it after I met the founders at
LessConf (Thanks for the T-Shirt guys!) back when it was free.

As a fellow founder, I'm very happy for them.

As a user, I'm afraid I'm going to have to find a replacement. We made the
transition from free to $50, and they were nice enough to provide a 50%
discount on that, which is great.

But the new pricing means we'll have to pay $149/month to get the same value
we're getting now. I haven't complained about the email garbling or the lack
of a spam feature, but if they're going to want $149/month, they'll need to
improve the service.

Perhaps they will reconsider and reward early adopters by grandfathering them
instead of punching them in the face with a price increase.

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eoghan
Hey Nathan. CEO of Intercom here. We mailed all our customers this morning
about a grandfathering deal we're giving you.

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tarr11
I guess I have 6 months to figure out what to do. This kind of sucks for me.

I really like intercom. But i guess I am not the target customer for my
startup because the economics don't make as much sense unless I can change my
conversion dynamics before January.

The new pricing punishes small, bootstrapped businesses who have a free tier
in their product, because of how they've defined an "active" user.

"An active user is defined as having used your product in the last 30 days"

[https://www.intercom.io/pricing](https://www.intercom.io/pricing)

Let's say you have 1% conversion from free to paid. Some larger percent use
your free tier.

Because these free users are "active users", you have to pay effectively 4.4
cents a month ($11 / 250) per user.

The problem here is that if you got a big push of "free tier" users who may
not be qualified, it can cost you a lot of money. Ie, 1000 users signup
because of some promotion, but let's say they came from TechCrunch and didn't
convert. You still have to pay $40 to intercom for the privilege of hosting
these free users.

This also happens with email announcements (new product features, content,
etc) that can drive some percentage of users back to the site. So, if I
activate a few hundred dormant users with an email (who use the site, but
don't upgrade), it will cost me a lot of money.

So, unless you have a big enough premium user base to subsidize the free
users, this is going to be prohibitive.

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aquark
Totally agree -- my pricing can't sustain the cost per-user in this model. Any
my site's usage is very seasonal, easily up to 10x at different times of year,
and it isn't clear how dynamic the plans are.

Possibly my pricing is wrong, but simply per-user seems like a very blunt
instrument. Not sure what a better way of measuring the 'value' here is
though. Ideally % of total hosting bill would seem 'fair', but if a service is
going to cost 30-50% of the hosting costs then it needs to provide an awful
lot.

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Shorrock
Love the product, and while the grandfather'd pricing is nice - it only lasts
for 6 months. If we were to continue using it past these 6 months Intercom
would cost, on a monthly basis, more than our servers and other add-on
services we already pay for combined. Pricing based on active users might make
sense if your ARPU is high enough, at which point it's just a question of
return, but at lower ARPU's it simply prices itself out of the equation - at
least for us.

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justinmares
Intercom is an amazing product that's boosted our revenue and retention more
than anything else we've done.

Love the product, and the founders are (from what I hear) awesome people.

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infinitone
Are there alternatives to Intercom? Their new pricing is quite pricy for the
value they provide.

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bdunn
Congrats guys! I've been a huge fan of Intercom and the team behind it since,
well, back before they started charging.

Most products are going to need some sort of custom dashboard, will also
eventually need a way to do in-app feature / maintenance notifications,
sending and tracking lifecycle emails, etc. Intercom saves tons of time by
distilling all of this into a simple JS include.

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sunsu
We at BetterVoicemail.com love Intercom. We'll probably continue to use it
with the new pricing, but we have a slightly odd way of doing things and might
have to change some things around. We currently create an Intercom user in the
first step of our sign-up process BEFORE he/she actually gives us their CC. We
do this so we can send them reminder a reminder email the next day to complete
the sign-up process. Unfortunately this counts toward the user quota now.

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nedwin
Fantastic product and team. If you get a chance definitely tune into their
webinars _. seminar.intercom.io

_ never thought I'd say that out loud.

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dylangs1030
This is awesome. It's a legitimately game changing idea and in an industry
that is still plagued by user dissatisfaction. They stand to change a lot.

I think if they make it a bit simpler to use with a less packed design it
would be even more popular. It's already backed by a few big tech names...if
they can get bigger, even more mainstream brands they'll be in a really good
place.

