Hi 👋 ProductHunt!
There are a lot of great chat platforms out there. Smallchat is different in one way: we built it for the little guys. The freelancer. The local business. The small team launching a side project here on ProductHunt.
That means Smallchat has a free tier with no limits on the number of visitors, conversations, contacts, or operators. Your bill shouldn't go up if your site gets a wave of traffic (i.e. from ProductHunt) or a new member joins your team.
We use Slack's new threads feature to keep all your conversations in one channel, so Smallchat doesn’t clutter up your Slack team with a bunch of new channels.
Smallchat's just getting started, so leave a comment if you have any feedback or advice on what features should be highest priority on our roadmap.
I've been beta testing Smallchat on my site (timothybuck.me) for a few weeks now. It's super simple to add in Squarespace (just copy/paste the snippet into the code injection header textbox), and I was able to customize it to look nice with my site.
Full Disclosure: I was involved with the launch and marketing of Smallchat.
@robertgonzal_ Love the concept of integrating this into Slack. My question is whether you offer support for multiple channels? In the pro tier it says "multiple sites". Does that allow me to customize the channel each site sends messages to?
@krynsky@robertgonzal_ Hi Mark, Aeryk here. The Pro Tier does allow for multiple channels. So if you wanted one channel for `pricing` and another for `support` you could :)
@krynsky@robertgonzal_ sort of, any time you create a new channel smallchat will generate a unique embed script for you. So you'd just add that script to whatever pages you'd want that channel to chat with.
@buditanrim The widget is pretty flexible - you can add it anywhere inside the body of your Wordpress theme, probably in the footer.php file. Or, if you’d rather not edit the theme code, there are Wordpress plugins for adding Javascript to your site.
We're working on getting specific documentation ready for a bunch of common CMS platforms.
Really like this, especially compared to some of the alternatives I've tried. Very simple, sleek and customizable. On-boarding is fast, and pricing is fair! I'll definitely be replacing drift with this later tonight.
I've been looking for a product like this for supporting the online courses I build in Blackboard Learn. I can't believe how robust the free tier is! Super cool of you. Also, really loving the design and branding 👌 👩🎨 💆♂️
Unfortunately, it looks like the embed code doesn't work inside Blackboard Learn. Which is totally fine, I know it's a real niche use case. A lot of platforms don't work in Bb Learn, like Smooch's messenger. We're piloting Drift now, which does work in Bb Learn, but I think Smallchat would suit our needs better since we're support-oriented and not sales-oriented. We don't deal with leads, and while the company info Drift supplies is great, since I work at a university, all the users that contact us are from the same "company," the university. Drift's integration with Slack is nice, but so far Smallchat seems more tightly integrated with Slack. It looks like there's less need to leave Slack for the support work with Smallchat.
I'm excited to follow the progress of Smallchat. Congrats on the launch, and thank you for looking out for the little guys!
@barnabybones Hey Jeremy, thanks checking it out! We'll take a look at Blackboard Learn and see if we can't get the embed to integrate correctly.
Having a generous free tier is a bit of a gamble for us, but we think making the product accessible is more important (and better for users) than pricing tiers that make you guess at your usage.
@jhartist Awesome, thank you! Yeah, I understand the free tier being a gamble, and I appreciate you taking the risk. I completely understand why companies make their free tiers limited, but I really appreciate a robust free tier that lets me get a fairly comprehensive use out of a product (🙌 Asana, Slack, Drift, others I'm forgetting). It's really helpful for me in piloting software too, as I'm better able to make a case for a departmental purchase at my university if me and my team have been able to use the product a lot. It also helps when I want to evangelize a product to faculty or colleagues at other departments on campus. They're more likely to try it out when the free tier is substantial. But maybe that goes without saying ☺️
This is incredible. You've just replaced Drift for me, and I'll be singing your praises to everyone I know. As long as your plans stay the same, this is tough to beat. Can I please lock in my pro plan for life?!
@fqure Thanks! We tried to make the initial onboarding as fast as possible. No choosing a username or password, no initial configuration. Just add it to Slack, make a channel, and paste the embed code into your site.
This looks excellent! I've been playing around with a few ideas in this space but you've nailed it with the Threads feature in Slack.
I pinged a small error I found while setting this up with a site already using babel-polyfill but other than this, a very well executed idea.
Keep up the great work! I can't wait to talk to our first customer!
@notrab Thanks! We're working on that babel-polyfill issue, and we'll push a fix for that as soon as possible.
We actually started building Smallchat the day that Slack announced the new threads feature. It seemed like such a natural use case for threads to keep all your conversations in a single support channel.
This is great! We've been looking for something simple and elegant. We just put it on our website and it works seamlessly (roscafinance.com). Keep up the good work :)
When will you guys be available to answer questions on your own site? I've tried chatting since yesterday and it always says "We're away right now — be right back in a few minutes"
@neurohacked Hey Patrick, sorry about that - we set our widget status offline while out at lunch and forgot to switch it back. Should be fixed now - go chat with us, or shoot us an email at support@small.chat.
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