Readit Newssojanofficial commented on Show HN: Open-Source Intercom with Help Center github.com/chatwoot/chatw... · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
I've been using it for about two years now and it really made support easier. Sojan and the team do an amazing job with Chatwoot!
happy to have you onboard !!
sojanofficial commented on Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
thx. really didnt like paying hundreds of dollars for something so trivial. let me know how to donate please
You could sponsor us on
https://github.com/sponsors/chatwoot
sojanofficial commented on Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
I'm starting to feel some sorta way about open-core model as more of a marketing mechanism for lead gen. I can't put my finger on it and I'm not saying it's bad. It just kind of feels like it's like a free-trial that appeals to engineers, that helps jumpstart your marketing funnel top-end.
I'd love to hear Richard Stallman rant about this...he'd probably find a way to articulate, more elegantly, what I'm feeling.
In our case, open-sourcing Chatwoot was pretty accidental.
You could read the story behind how we ended up doing that over here
https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-o...
sojanofficial commented on Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
Please consider adding Sparkpost support too.
We will definitely take a look if there is enough community interest. Feel free to raise issues on our Github if you have feature requests.
sojanofficial commented on Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
Hope MIT core/features will continue to be improved, not abandoned.
Adding new large features as enterprise only makes sense.
The community edition remains a core part of our vision and is also the base on which the enterprise features are build. So rest assured that we will keep working on improving them.
sojanofficial commented on Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
We use Intercom for support and sales, but also for email (drip style), mass emails like product updates and in-app notifications.
Any plans for that?
Right now Chatwoot is suited primarily for support and sales use cases where its one on one conversations with the customer.
But we do have our eyes on marketing use cases(campaigns) in our future roadmap.
sojanofficial commented on Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk · Posted by u/pranav_rajs
You know what I don't get about website live chat buttons like Intercom? The fact that you need to stay on the website to continue the conversation. Why not just provide a link to open a conversation in existing channels, like email, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.? That way the customer can choose whichever channel they already have or prefer, and the conversation continues seamlessly after they've left your website.
Yes, I know Intercom offers the option to seamlessly switch to email, but at that point you could just build a simple 1990's email contact form in a fancy JS popup and it's effectively the same thing.
I understand Intercom made a billion dollar company out of their chat widget because businesses want to look savvy, but that doesn't mean it's actually a good experience for users. As a startup founder myself, I care more about a seamless experience for my customers than for me.
What we have seen is some customers prefer chat buttons especially when they prefer not to give out their personal information.
In Chatwoot the channels like email, twitter, Whatsapp etc are also considered primary conversation channels. So its helpful even when your primary support channel isn't chat.
Hosted on Heroku, using Sentry for error tracking, New Relic for performance monitoring, Sendgrid for email. Recently ditched Google Analytics in favor of Plausible for general analytics and Ahoy (Rails middleware) for deeper in-house analytics. Using Intercom for support/chat widget, but planning to switch to Chatwoot. Considering moving off Heroku, but the most obvious contender, Render, doesn't yet have high availability postgres with automatic failover.
Deployment is set up so any push to the master branch on GitHub is automatically deployed to production. Merging to the master branch can only be done via a PR, and needs green status from both linter (Rubocop), tests (Rspec run on CircleCI, both unit and integration) and coverage (100% test coverage required, verified by codecov.io).
UI is Bootstrap (but feeling long in the tooth), and server side rendering with a sprinkling of javascript. Still mulling over hotwire/turbo vs alpine vs stimulus vs react for some upcoming UI that requires more interactivity.