mkdev

We've moved all background jobs processing from ECS to Lambda, for the reasons I've described in details in the attached article, including cost comparison.

We moved from Intercom to Crisp this April because the price-value ratio of Intercom was not satisfying anymore.

We paid ~140eur for the very basic features of Intercom - Messages Essential and Inbox Essential. This is enough for a chat and API access, but that's all. The price would go up as mkdev grows.

Now there are some features we really would love to have: like a Help Center and Bots, for example. All various advanced routing of messages. Or any other features that Intercom actually has, but sells them separately.

Even though it's very hard to properly calculate the price by looking at Pricing page of Intercom, my guess is that with simple Answer bot and Help Center integration our bill for Intercom could easily double or triple.

After doing a bit of research and looking for a better price-value ration we found Crisp.

Crisp gives us the same Chat features we had from Intercom, but then it adds really cool bot builder, various marketing automation utilities, Help Center that supports multiple languages already today (feature still missing in Intercom) - https://help.mkdev.me/en/, fancy MagicBrowse and LiveAssist, direct integration with Telegram and many more. Price? 95eur for all the features and unlimited operators. And no dependency on number of active users (Crisp founders directly say that charging for active users is bullshit and I can only agree with them).

We've been using Crisp not for too long and even though it's been pretty smooth so far - from integrating with our backend systems to creating a Help Center from scratch - it might be a bit too early to do any conclusions. mkdev co-founder Leo has things to say about the UX of Crisp and I am not really satisfied with Crisp's mobile app. But this is something to get used to, or something that will be improved by Crisp over time. And some aspects of Crisp UX/UI are much nicer than Intercom - for example, custom fields on clients are on very top, so we can quickly jump to admin page of a client in mkdev.me. In Intercom we had to do two clicks and scroll a lot to find this link.

To sum it up, if you are looking for a change from Intercom, give Crisp a try. It's way cheaper and doesn't have any major downsides if you are used to Intercom.

Recently we finished long research on chat tool for our students and mentors. In the end we picked Mattermost Team Edition as the cheapest and most feature complete option. We did consider building everything from scratch and use something like Pusher or Twilio on a backend, but then we would have to implement all the desktop and mobile clients and all the features oursevles. Mattermost gave us flexible API, lots of built in or easy to install integrations and future-proof feature set. We are still integrating it with our main platform but so far the team, existing mentors and students are very happy.

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

We chose Vue.js as our new and primary JavaScript framework . We had spaghetti of jQuery code before and we needed something very simple to use, something that won't force us to start using too many new tools and something we could write small independent components with ease. Vue.js ticked all these boxes.