Launch HN: Chatwoot (YC W21) – Open-Source Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk
Hello everyone,<p>We are a 3 founder team. Myself Pranav. Sojan and Nithin are my co-founders. We are building Chatwoot (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chatwoot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chatwoot.com</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chatwoot&#x2F;chatwoot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chatwoot&#x2F;chatwoot</a>). With Chatwoot, businesses can connect channels like website live chat, email, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc and talk to the customers from one place.<p>Chatwoot is an open-source alternative to Intercom, Zendesk etc.<p>We help companies in regulated industries to manage customer data without sharing it with third-party providers. Since the software is open-source, it is easier to build custom workflows that suit your business on top of Chatwoot.<p>We started building Chatwoot as proprietary software in 2017, but the startup failed. Seeing the data privacy regulations and people taking interest in self-hosted alternatives, we open-sourced the product in 2019, we got a lot of love from the HN community. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21559139" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21559139</a>).<p>Over the last year, we have been working with the community to build the software. Seeing the interest from the open-source world, we decided to quit our jobs and work full time on Chatwoot. We introduced support plans to validate the need for self-hosted solutions and it worked out well. We applied to YC and got into the W21 batch.<p>Right now, there are 1000+ companies using Chatwoot. We have around 7.2k stars and more than 100 contributors in our repository. The software can be used in more than 25+ regional languages.<p>Apart from the omnichannel support desk, we are adding more features like a self-service portal, marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, workflows etc.<p>We make money by charging a license fee of $99 per user per month for features like customisable dashboards, SLA Management, Agent scheduling software, IP blocklisting etc which are suited for large enterprises.<p>We will continue to work with the community to build Chatwoot. We would love to hear your experiences, thoughts and ideas!