from Hacker News

Customer Outreach Startup Intercom Raises $6M Round

by dmarinoc on 6/19/13, 4:18 PM with 17 comments

  • by nhangen on 6/19/13, 4:34 PM

    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.

  • by Shorrock on 6/19/13, 5:36 PM

    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.

  • by justinmares on 6/19/13, 4:57 PM

    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.

  • by infinitone on 6/19/13, 5:05 PM

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

  • by bdunn on 6/19/13, 4:29 PM

    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.

  • by sunsu on 6/19/13, 7:08 PM

    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.

  • by nedwin on 6/19/13, 8:53 PM

    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.

  • by dylangs1030 on 6/19/13, 4:35 PM

    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.