Thoughts on Fin Pricing?

I was extremely dissapointed in the pricing model. Our support team is offshore and, at $12 per hour, is comparable to Fin. I was thinking the pricing would be less than 10 cents per resolution.
I’m going through the trial and have other issues. Posted that here (better support for providing answers when your company has multiple products).

I was shocked to see the price, it’s at least 10x what I thought it would be.

Here’s are my thoughts:

“AI Answers” is per resolution while “Custom Answers” (formerly Answer Bot) is a flat monthly fee. So, here is my plan:

1. Turn on both
2. Invest a lot of time creating really helpful Custom Answers to use as a filter, of sorts.
3. As questions make it through ($$$), constantly add more answers to Custom Answers to cut down on the repetitive questions.

Other options to reduce cost:

• Enable only outside office hours
• Enable only for English-speaking customers
• Enable only during periods of high volume
• Enable only for higher tiered customers
• … or, force customers to search help center first, which isn’t a great customer experience, but that is essentially what they are doing in chat form with AI Answers.

I know that GPT costs are high, but if 100 people ask the same question in one day, I’m surprised Intercom hasn’t figured out a way to “save” an answer and re-use it automatically without GPT usage. I suppose that is what I am doing manually with Custom Answers, but it would be really amazing if Intercom could tell me what my actual top questions are (I’ve never found the Suggested Answers in Answer Bot to be that accurate).

I realize we’re on the cutting edge of tech here, but $1.90 is a essentially a non-starter. We receive 250 convos a day, I can’t begin to imagine companies that receive 2500, or 25,000 per day.

My guess is that after the 14-day trial, I’ll keep Custom Answers on and turn AI Answers off.

Thanks @Chris C11 - I share your disappointment. For what it’s worth, our expectation was that pricing would be in the $0.10 - $0.20 range as well.

@Jacob Cox appreciate the follow up on the pricing. I want to clarify that the charge per resolution includes both those confirmed by the customers with a “thumbs up” as well as no response. Based on the evidence I have seen in my account 100% of the “no responses” in the trial period could be considered as not resolving the customer issue.

So for this to be truly priced at cost I can only assume OpenAI is charging Intercom $1.90 per resolution as well. That seems extremely high and I would recommend Intercom negotiate that price.

@Jacob Cox, can you please clarify what will happen to the resolution bot? I see that it’s now considered an extra option with a flat addon pricing.

I also saw that it will change name in “Custom Answers” and become a part of the “Fin AI Answers”.
What about the pricing?
Will it become “usage based” too, or will it remain separated from Fin and priced as an extra option?

Thanks
 

I absolutely think that the price of 1,90$ per resolution is completely out of the market. We could hire directly a human agent to solve issues manually at that price. I think that at this price, Fin will exclusively be used by extremely small and well budgeted companies.

I get that pricing is “at cost” but that doesn’t actually lower the price for me. I hope to see it get much, much cheaper - I can’t see this making financial sense for anything less than 25-50 cents.

I'm hoping to see the following:

• Lower cost over time (I understand that may not be able to budge now)
• I might be willing to pay (perhaps a cheaper price) if it continuously helped me save money by telling me what questions to add to Customer Answers and to my Help Center.
• Alternatively, could Fin learn the most common questions and just "save" the answer so that it didn't have to use the expensive computing cost for every single question.
• To help with the above, I'd like to have an easier way to train Custom Answers from the Inbox view, let me add questions that were asked to an existing Custom Answer (kind of the same way you can create a macro from the inbox view)

At this price, I will use the trial to help me find the gaps in my Help Center and Macros. Perhaps I”ll turn it on once a month for a day or two to learn new things about what customers are saying.

Hey @Eli & @User511 (And any other people reading this message!)

Mark from Intercom’s product team here 👋

Its very early in this wave of AI technology. As @Jacob Cox mentioned, Fin is currently priced at cost but we absolutely expect costs to come down in the not too distant future. We are determined to make great AI powered customer support accessible to all companies. Price shouldn’t be a prohibitive factor in most cases.

Would you be open to getting on a call to help me understand your POV better? My email is mark.nealon@intercom.io if you’re open to chatting. I can work around times that work for you 🙂

@Jacob Cox 

Any chance that we can put a cap on "Fin" for how many resolutions we want him to provide for us each month? If I want to spend $300/mo on Fin for example.

@Jacob Cox 

You mentioned earlier

Our Custom Answers feature is a great tool to use to help costs scale for your repetitive or more advanced questions as it's priced per seat versus being priced per resolution. You can set your Bot up so it will answer these repetitive questions before the AI Answers Bot kicks in, reducing the volume of questions that are going through that “per resolution” path.

How do you set custom answers up so they answer before AI? Does it default to custom answers already and only switches to AI answers if there isn’t a custom one set?

Hey @Karen F11 👋🏼  Shauna here from Support! Firstly, apologies for the long wait - your question seems to have slipped through.

You can turn on ‘Use Custom Answers’ within the Fin Bot Setup here. You can see this here 👇🏼

This means the Custom Answers will kick in & if these cannot answer the customers questions, then Fin will step in! I hope this helps!

Shauna | Customer Support Specialist at Intercom

Hey @Cary Melly 👋🏼 Shauna here from Support! Firstly, apologies for the long wait - your question seems to have slipped through.

Currently it’s not possible to put a cap on the cost of Fin. What I will do is flag this with our Team 🚀  Appreciate you sharing this with us and for providing a little bit of context too! 

Shauna | Customer Support Specialist at Intercom

@Jacob Cox @Shauna 
 

I see that the pricing for Fin was recently reduced by nearly 50%.

https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/7837512-fin-pricing

Can you please provide more context on how pricing was able to be reduced so substantially if it was already priced “at cost”? Thank you!

Can I plug my own openAI API key into Fin? 

Your pricing of $0.99 is too pricy for what's barely even a 500 token response.

For example, I can have my chatgpt 4.0 API give a 2,500 character response and that would only cost me $0.06 for a custom trained model.

Your current pricing of $0.99 per resolution would equate to roughly 41,250 characters, or roughly ~6,875 words (according to OpenAI’s Tokenizer). We can all agree, very rarely will any "resolution" take ~6,875 words.

With that in mind, Fins pricing model is definitly not "At Cost" as you claim here -  https://community.intercom.com/fin-tips-and-tricks-connect-with-the-intercom-team-54/thoughts-on-fin-pricing-4479

Until we can get the resolution cost to less than 0.25$ we are more tempted to plug our own OpenAI API key in and pay as we go.

It is worth mentioning, your pricing is so ridiculously high, even OpenAI themselves have opted NOT to use Fin with their instance of Intercom

Link to OpenAI’s Intercom instance - https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7127956-how-much-does-gpt-4-cost

Hi David,

Thanks for your comments.

No, we don’t support this, and have no plans to.

It would be quite complex, and difficult to support on an ongoing basis.

There’s a lot going on under the hood in Fin to deliver a high-quality experience.

We’ve got to embed the support content, retrieve it, manage many parts of the conversation not just the answer, try and run at professional standards of latency etc.

There’s really a lot more going on in Fin than just a single 500 token response.

As just some examples - sometimes it takes multiple responses to resolve a users query, and we’ve to pay for each of them; or sometimes Fin gives the best answer that’s in the help center, but it doesn’t fully resolve the users issue, and so we don’t bill; sometimes Fin does a great job but the user has a second query they need to talk to human support for, and that isn’t counted as a Resolution, etc.

These and other factors also vary across our customers!

So, we’ve got to take all of those into account in our modelling. I think if those are taken into account, with the factors I mentioned above, its not as expensive as it might seem from a more simple calculation.

In addition to trying to deliver great value, I also feel that it compares very favourably in terms of the overall cost:quality ratio to most alternatives, including human support; obviously there might be unusual cases though, and while we believe its a very fairly priced product, while we don’t provide a ‘bring your own API key’, there’s our API and app store for customers who want to do something different.

For us - I was glad to see the 1.99 dropped to .99 per resolution

If our team is away, then a .99 cent per customer that states “this helped” is fair price (again for us, may not be for everyone) but we see this as, .99 cent VS paying our live support team member hourly cost. 

Albeit we just started with Intercom, we are pleased with the Value Proposition from Intercom (as a whole) for our customer facing tech.stack.

Dave / Paragon Netology 

I love Fin, and it has delivered great results, but I still feel the lack of a pricing package.

Whether we use 10 responses per month or 1,000, the unit cost remains the same. It would be great to have an incentive with reduced unit prices for larger packages.