Intercom Pricing Overview

The UI allowing to construct auto-messages

Intercom is an overpriced scam. They lure you in with nice looking features and then take advantage of the difficulty to later migrate to another product to extract ridiculous prices. Their new pricing pages are so opaque that it's impractical for you to get a good idea of the insanely high price you will have to pay as you grow. Intercom is a grandmaster in fooling customers into drastically underestimating both the actual costs they'll end up paying as well as the costs of migrating away to another solution. In other words, setting up an expensive, painful trap for you. BE CAREFUL and don't make the mistake that we've done. Even if the new pricing they introduced recently somehow seems reasonable for your use case, keep in mind that they DO NOT GRANDFATHER PLANS. This means they can at any time give you a short notice before jacking up the prices in any way they want -- like they've done for us with a 5x (!!) increase over our previous costs. We had to face the hard choice between spending a lot of engineering resources to migrate to another service, or succumb and enrich an evil company. And this came after a couple years using intercom with numerous billing errors, all of them (surprise..) significant overcharges, and all of them followed by heel dragging by their contemptuous customer support for months (before finally admitting their errors and providing the required refund...) We think it's one of the most unethical companies around, pretending to care about their customers but actually blind to anything but their own revenue. Which isn't that surprising given the pressure of their VCs and their plans to IPO.. but the steep price of such pressure will be paid by YOU. Do not believe any of their marketing gimmicks -- make sure you fully understand their opaque, convoluted pricing structure, and if you're willing to pay the true (extremely high) price, insist that they guarantee you no pricing increases, ever. Alternatively, make sure you fully understand the extreme cost and disruption to your business that will be caused when a year or two down the road you won't want to be their exorbitant prices but will already be deeply integrated with their API etc. Other customer engagement platform are gaining up speed quickly and my recommendation to you, especially in these Covid-19 days when minimizing expenses is vital, is to go with the far lower cost solutions out there, those who don't have such a horrendous record of trickery and contempt for their customers.

Customer engagement

Slick user interface, easy to setup. Powerful integrations.

The pricing is not transparent at all, difficult to understand, and engineered to trick you. They attracted us with their "Started" plan, which was a bit more expenive than our existing service. At some point during our migration, we discovered we might need an additional feature that is only available in their next tier, called "Conversational Support". To our surprise, this would multiply our monthly bill by a factor of *5*, and require us to go to a yearly engagement. Since we were just looking to automatically assign incoming chats from a specific part of the world to an employee, we decided this was not worth it and that we would simply assign chats manually as they come -- the volume is very low, sometimes just 2-3 per week. More recently we started looking at another feature, bots, which is not available in the Start package. We thought that this might justify us moving to their "Pro" tier, so I circled back with the Intercom sales team to get an updated price quote -- just like last time, I couldn't get pricing from their web site and had to schedule a call with the account manager. That took a few days to get scheduled, and a few minutes before the call, the account manager reached out to let me know she would only have 15 minutes available instead of the time we had scheduled so we were in a rush. The only thing that was accomplished during this call was to make me even more confused about the pricing structure and available options and to prompt me to write this review. I learned about a new feature, Resolution Bots, which unlike Custom bots are sold and priced separately. I also learned that even though Custom bots are free, but that you need a "Proactive Support" seat for them. How much does that cost? I have NO idea, because I need to reschedule another call with their account manager. I still don't have any pricing, but one thing is sure at this point: it will be even more expensive than the previous quote, which was already more than 5 times higher than our ZenDesk bill. Thankfully for us, we don't do marketing or outbound messaging -- or else we'd get sucked into the per-conversation pricing that others on G2 have been talking about and which seems just as hard to comprehend. I am a technical guy and i've been building software my entire life, but I am absolutely unable to understand how their pricing works, and have no idea what to expect or budget in terms of cost increase -- I am genuinely worried that we hit some threshold in the near future or that a change in their pricing structure means we need to start paying 10x what we're paying today. This is making us re-evaluate our decision to switch to Intercom, and I went from being a promoter to a vocal detractor of the company, despite the fact that I like the product itself. I feel like I have fallen for a scam and I regret moving so quickly to Intercom without doing more research. Transparency is king in this day and age, but Intercom is clearly not on that path.

Our main goal was to improve the user experience for support with chat.

The fact that marketing, CRM and support activities are integrated within one app. I like the UX design. I like Intercom’s marketing approach and been following its content marketing practices from a long time ago.

- Complicated pricing policy. - Product is becoming expensive over time and not affordable for small startups any more. - I think Intercom is best suited for SaaS services who charge their users every month. We are WordPress development company who works with one-off purchases and then offer their users 6-12 months of included support. We sell about 300-500 licenses every week. Many of our users are multiple license buyers so let’s say 1500 licenses can be sold in a month but only 500 users have bought them. Intercom’s API structure is a way that each license sold is considered a user and that’s why we are charged for 1500 users wheats we should be charged for 500 users. This is the main reasons we never consider completely moving to Intercom and we make it available only for our VIP customers (and it’s very difficult to manage and maintain btw) 1400 - We are using message and inbox products for now but not the articles as the price will simply be too much.

The fact that we can deliver product update announcements, marketing messages such as discount campaigns notices or survey requests and also support conversations all via one channel. User are also happy not to deal with different channels for each of them such as social media, email, live chat, etc.

I like the options to know exactly which page the client is viewing when they come to start a conversation, thus being able to skip all unnecessary questions like, where are you seeing this etc? I use Intercom daily not only to chat but also send inapp messages. Since our clients are all signed into our app, we have a very high open rate and a lot of the time, the messages spark very interesting conversations with clients. I really like being able to see when a user last logged in and the pages he visited. Our company tracks usage data in a number of databases but nothing beats the simplicity of Intercom, where everything is nicely listed and very easily understood. I am also using a number of integrations with other apps, including a most important integration with our CRM, Salesforce and our marketing tool, Hubspot. I have also taken advantage of a number of apps available to have clients share their screens during a chat, send Calendly links to easily and quickly arrange meetings, to ask clients to send recordings of their screens so that I can pass on the information to our engineers when they try to debug reported cases. I think one of the most valuable integrations is the Jira integration. We use Jira as our ticketing system and this integration very easily allows me to pass on client requests and comments to our engineering teams at the click of a button. They instanly have access to the conversation, so I do not have to worry whether I have passed on all information. I can then very easily monitor any updates to the ticket that the team makes through the integration, right on the relevant conversation so all I have to do is write a short message to update the client! I have to say, I also love the Interconnected community,I have been able to get answers right away from people facing the same little problems as myself!

I do not really like the fact that I have to wait so long before I get an answer when I reach out to your support team. For someone who understands how important it is to provide proper support, why should I have to wait a day or more to get an answer? Your pricing is a bit on the high side, too but not enough to deter me from using Intercom! The fact that most options are available as addons, to be charged separately, is also not useful. The pricing overall is complicated; if I were asked how much I am paying any given day and how much for each service, I would not be able to tell you. I do not like the fact that prices have changed without warning, increasing the cost of the service. It is not helpful at all, when rying to create a budget to work with.

Intercom is our primary communication tool. We use intercom to support our clients and have been complimented a number of times for our speedy service. I work in an industry that is not used to chatting for suport but when our clients realised that someone will always be there to provide fast and accurate support, they have all turned to using it. When collecting client feedback, one of the first things that clients mention is that they know they will always get help this way. Intercom allows us to do that in a very efficient and quick way and in the long run establish a brand of support, that puts clients first.

The chat widget has integrations with Calendly for remote scheduling of meetings.

The pricing is deliberately misleading and designed to trick users. I wish I had read more of the reviews covering this off before proceeding. They define 'active people' as people who are not active, archived, and bill you for that tier across all services. I got charged for 10,000 active tier on a service that sent 1 message. For a period with 662 chat conversations. Intercom charged me over $1000USD, doing research there are many comparable services that charge less than $100USD for the same thing. The support at Intercom (when you can reach them) are experts in pointing you to various definitions of how 'active' is defined by 'inactive' contact types. You have to deep dive into filters to actually find the data that they bill you on. If you use the platform for long enough, you will likely fall victim to one of the many traps where you can unintentionally triple your bill. So far there is zero interest from Intercom to resolve my concerns. Personally, I feel like I have fallen for a scam and I will be moving to another provider. It looks like I will save $300-500+ without much effort.

Chat widget for customer engagement

We are dependent on intercom because the majority of our user and customer interaction starts with chat. As a freemium, Saas company where more than 60% of our new customers purchase w/out a zoom call, being responsive on chat is critical to our sales and retention strategies. We have 2k+ chats every month. It is user-friendly for our support team and allows us to measure our response times very granularly. We also use Intercom's nurturing messages to initiate conversations with users.

We initially were paying about $1k/month. This was fair. Then, Intercom rolled out new pricing with minimal warning. We now pay $4k/month for the software, and our price has increased almost every month. Whether it's the number of active contacts, some feature or add-on we need to buy, or adding new users; Intercom has found way too many ways to increase their price. We've also had to spend a lot of time transitioning to their new chat nurturing system. At first, they gave us a deadline of switching over of a few months. We made it a priority for us to switch over, which was 10s of hours. Then, we found bugs in the new system. Ultimately, it took them six additional months to launch the new product, and we felt like we were their QA team during that time. After switching over, we recently had an issue with our targeting which they acknowledged was a bug. But, it took them a long time to get an engineer to look at it, which impacted our results. Of course, our cost increased in the process. We also have bounced around from account manager to account manager. None of them have ever dug into how we use the product or offered any suggestions unless it's to sell us something. Lastly, even the new nurturing process is dumb and Marketo circa 2010. It's almost impossible to set up targeted nurturing once you have more than one factor to use for targeting. At this point, nurturing should be smart enough to send the right message at the right time after we create messages and suggest targeting. Lastly, with the current system, if our users don't log in for a bit, they get a pile of messages all at once. I would think that the system could at least be setup to send only one message at a time until it's read or dismissed. We will be evaluating alternatives in the new year.

We are providing quick service to our customers with chat. We are encouraging users to use our product more with nurturing messages. We measure our team's responsiveness with their analytics. We are booking calls with our sales team via chat conversations.

Solves a variety of problems around customer engagement. For a growing company with small teams handling product, support, sales and success...intercom has the perfect feature set. It's easy to setup and everyone had no problem learning the tool.

The pricing changes often. Its not the fact that intercom is pricey...it's just that it is often unclear on which product costs what and why. Simplifying the pricing is something they should look into(I'm sure they are).

Product feedback Customer support In app messaging campaigns

the ability to get quickly in touch with your users. there is noithing better for a PM to have an easy way to talk to his users - in intercom empowers me to do this, in easy to use way. my engineers say the same: intercom is the best friend of an engineer.

the cost or better said the unflexible pricing model. its ok to have an approach that depends on how big your company is - model is ok for startups that grow. but it doesnt allow you to introduce intercom to a company that is already big, with many users, and where you at the beginning use intercom not much and then over time more and more. managers see only the costs and not the value. its superhard for me to justify the usage of intercom. i changed job and my new company i will probably fail to introduce intercom. i recommend that you introduce a much smarter pricing, maybe a combination of amount of users related with how many of those users really an interaction happens (*) and used intercom features. (*) in our case, with most of our users we dont have an interaction...

new features, migrations, user surveys, comm when malicious attacks (like phishing), support / help, user onboarding, communicating news/relesases etc