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.
I know of other companies that will now leave due the price changes. I'm sure they'll run the figures, but my guess is that not truly grandfathering in the existing prices for existing customers will bring in less revenue due to the number leaving.
Plus is it worth upsetting existing customers and advocates for the sake of a few dollars?
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
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.
Love the product, and the founders are (from what I hear) awesome people.
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.
never thought I'd say that out loud.
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.
