Solved

Thoughts on Fin Pricing?

N
  • Neil
  • New Participant
  • 1 reply

Hi all - 

I’m curious to know if Fin’s pricing is in line with the expectations that everyone had. Our thoughts are the following:

  • $1.90 per resolution is only slightly better than we achieve with current support stack (custom bots > offshore support > onshore support)
  • The fact that pricing doesn’t scale with volume doesn’t seem aligned with growth and increased adoption of the product.

Curious to know what others think, thanks!

icon

Best answer by Jacob Cox 20 May 2023, 20:00

View original

11 replies

C

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).

E

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.

N

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

Hey there @Neil !

Hopping in with a bit of inside info from the Intercom side of things, regarding the pricing of Fin!

 

We are pricing the Fin AI Answers feature at cost in order to empower Intercom customers to be first movers and leaders in AI customer service. We chose for Fin to be powered by GPT-4. While it isn’t the cheapest LLM (Large Language Model) in the market, it is by a margin the most accurate and far less prone to hallucinations compared with its predecessors. This was a conscious choice to choose accuracy, quality, and safety above all.

 

It should also be good to clarify that the $1.90 rate is per resolution. If the Bot delivers an answer that doesn't answer your customer’s question, then that $1.90 isn’t charged.

 

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.

 

One other great thing about Fin is that it knows your support content from the get go. There’s no training, no turnover, no downtime -- when compared with human support agents. All you have to do is toggle it on and it’s ready to get to work!

 

I hope the context above helps!

Jacob | Customer Support Engineer at Intercom
C

@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.

L

@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
 

User511

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.

E

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.

M

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 🙂

C

@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.

K

@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?

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings