Updating our pricing model

We are updating our pricing model to better align our pricing with the value our customers get from Customerly. We don’t make changes like this lightly, and transparency is one of our core values, so we wanted to share our thinking behind the update and outline what’s changing for you.

• We are adding an Essential plan to let tiny teams enjoy essential features like canned responses, chat triggers, and email marketing.
• Enjoy unlimited contacts on any plan. We are switching our pricing from contact based into interaction based. This means you are paying when you are doing business with your contacts (like sending emails, answering new conversations, and survey replies). No more contact deleting! You can keep your customer’s history for as long as needed without worrying about being overcharged.
• The Startup, Pro, and Enterprise plans can be configured with additional teammates and interactions. No need to upgrade if you don’t need more features.
• The updated pricing model will apply to newly-created Customerly projects from May 18, 2023, and will take effect for existing Customerly accounts from June 18, 2023.

What’s changing and how you will benefit from it:

1. You can have unlimited contacts in any plan! We are switching our pricing from contact based into interaction based. This means you are paying when you are doing business with your contacts (aka sending emails, receiving conversations, sending surveys). No more contact deleting! You can keep your customer’s history for as long as needed without worrying about being overcharged.
2. The Startup, Pro, and Enterprise Plans come with a generous number of included interactions and teammates. However, if you require more teammates or interactions, you have the flexibility to customise these plans accordingly. There is no obligation to upgrade if you do not require additional features.
3. In the event that you surpass your monthly allowance, which is already generous in every plan, any additional interactions will be charged as on-demand interactions at the end of the month. The cost per interaction decreases as you include more interactions on your plan, ranging from $0.001188 to $0.006 per interaction. Rest assured that your recurring monthly price will revert back to your original plan price in the following month.
4. We introduced an Essential plan at only $9 with essential chat benefits.

We’re astonished by the great community we have created since Customerly was created in 2015.

Since then, 34,605 accounts have signed up, with a total of 29,984 projects worldwide.

Nothing makes us happier than hearing the success stories our customers share with us about how they use Customerly to better help their users and provide a better experience through tailored communication.

We have evolved a lot since our start-up idea back in 2015. Even if we are fully bootstrapped, we work hard daily to serve you better.

Keeping Customerly bootstrapped means more affordable pricing for you.

We are still rejecting VC investment proposals to keep you our main investor and offer you fair pricing.

Only in the last 12 months have we released a new live chat, web app, 100x faster workflows, and many more cool benefits for you and your team.

Of course, that work is never-ending, and we thank you all for bringing us where we are. We have been nominated as Noteworthy best live chat software in 2021 and 2022 by Capterra out of 546 products.

And this could happen only thanks to you. 🙏🏻

Even though our customers have been telling us for years how much Customerly helps them better communicate with their customers, we have been struggling to evolve our pricing to reflect our product improvements.

From day one, we offered as much value as possible in our free basic plan (it’s not going anywhere, don’t worry), like an inbox with one teammate, mobile apps, chat and help center.

Initially, this approach allowed us to gather as much feedback as possible and iterate fast on the product without worrying about the complexities of pricing matching the value we were providing.

We always told ourselves we’d revisit our pricing model “someday”.

We did it once in 2019, but nothing has changed except for the incredible new features and improvements we brought to you.

We’ve realized that this lack of pricing evolution in how we charge for our services is an issue for our business and our customers because it prevents us from making the investments necessary to achieve our mission.

So, we started behaving like any good team would do. We started interviewing our customers, analyzed millions of data, and checked out our competition.

We had 2 epiphanies.

First Epiphany: Contact limits

The first epiphany happened every time some of our customers reached the limits of their contacts and asked to either delete some contacts or add additional allowances to their plans.

Deleting contacts only because you will pay more for a subscription is not feeling good.

Also, we have got a lot of complaints from people switching from competitors (like Intercom or Hubspot) charging by contacts.

The truth is that none of the businesses we know is doing business with 100% of their contact list.

So charging by contact count is not aligned with the value you perceive. Our pricing and the value provided are completely misaligned because of this.

We know that our best customers perceive a huge amount of value from three things:

• Inbound conversations
• Email newsletters & automated marketing
• Feedback from surveys

This is when we come up with the idea to charge per interaction.

What is an interaction?

An Interaction is something that is bringing you more business (by retaining or converting more customers or helping you out with AI), such as:

• A new individual conversation which you replied to
• A reply email was sent via inbox
• An email is sent automatically with workflows
• An email sent within a one-shot campaign
• An NPS survey email sent
• An in-chat survey was sent and seen

We are adding AI capabilities to help your customer service and success teams to improve their performance by 10X.

You can check how many interactions (and which kind) you have used in the previous months by visiting your Project Settings -> Billing -> Interactions.

For most of our customers, the plans included interactions are more than enough to enjoy the new Customerly plans without adding more interactions.

Second Epiphany: Plan customization

The second epiphany we had is that most of our customers prefer to stick with their plan and get more allowances.

For example, with our old pricing model, you needed to upgrade from Startup to Pro when you are adding a new teammate on top of the 5 free ones you have.

Or, again, you need to upgrade to Enterprise from Startup if you suddenly want to send a newsletter to 10K contacts.

Many of you felt friction because the value was not aligned with your needs.

And just for that occasion, you didn’t want to stick with the Enterprise pricing.

We decided to let you customize the number of additional teammates and interactions for each plan.

Last but not least, we decided to let your plan expand when you need more allowances and shrink when you don’t.

So if you need full power to send a newsletter during Black Friday, you will get charged only for the extra usage that month.

The next month your plan will be back to your allowance and price.

By running different analyses on our customers, from a one-man band to 100+ employee businesses, we have discovered that they were perfectly aligned with the new pricing structure and fit their current perceived value.

These changes come into effect for new accounts created from May 18, 2023, and for existing accounts from June 18, 2023. Customerly customers can then pick the right plan (Basic, Essential, Startup, Pro, or Enterprise) to match their usage of each Customerly product.

• The Basic plan is still available to solopreneurs and is perfect for supporting customers on websites and help center. It includes for FREE:
  • 1 included teammate
  • 100 included interactions
  • live chat
  • inboxes
  • help center
  • the mobile app

• The new Essential plan is great for small teams that need to support customers with more professional tools and want to centralize newsletters. It includes at only $9/mo:
  • Everything in basic
  • 3 included teammates
  • 1.000 included interactions
  • 2 canned responses
  • 1 Chat trigger (new)
  • Chat attachments
  • Teams
  • Search Contact
  • Chat transcripts
  • Email Marketing
• The new Startup plan is perfect for a growing team needing marketing automation and more advanced support capabilities. It includes at $49/mo:
  • Everything in basic and essential
  • 6 included teammates (+1 teammate)
  • 10.000 included interactions
  • 5 canned responses (before only on Pro plans)
  • 3 Chat triggers (new)
  • AI Support for Email Marketing (new)
  • Marketing Automation
  • Conversation Tags (new)
  • Private Notes
  • Typing Previews
  • Schedule Messages (new)
  • Teammate mentions (new)
  • Forwarding Emails
  • Reorganize Help Center (new)
  • Pre-chat questions
  • Premium Templates (new)
  • CRM
  • Rest API
  • Custom lists
• The new Pro plan is the best fit for growing startups needing more advanced support automation tools and gathering customer feedback at scale. It includes a $99/mo:
  • Everything in startup
  • 10 included teammates
  • 20.000 included interactions
  • Unlimited canned responses
  • Unlimited chat triggers (new)
  • Video Live chat
  • Autoreply
  • Help Center Reports (new)
  • Custom domain Help Center
  • Email click heatmap (new)
  • Track companies
  • In-app Surveys
  • NPS survey
• The new Enterprise plan has everything a more structured company will need, from team insights to translate and localization. It includes the following features starting at $249/mo:
  • 15 included teammates
  • 50.000 included interactions
  • Everything in Pro
  • Team insights
  • Translate and localization (new)
  • Promoter redirection (new)

We always listen to our customers and develop what people ask through our public roadmap. Since our last pricing update, the number of new things we released has been incredible. Here you can find a complete list.

Live Chat

A brand new up to 100% faster chat with:

• Help Center
• Autoreply with AI
• Book a meeting
• Chat Triggers
• Customizable icons
• Callbacks

If you haven’t upgraded your live chat, we suggest you switch to our new live chat by following this tutorial.

Web App

A brand new, faster, and simpler web app with:

• New Inboxes with:
  • Scheduled messages
  • Team and Teammate Mentions
  • Sortable contact details
  • Inline help center
  • Shortcuts
  • Conversation tags and inbox filtering by tags
  • Add canned responses from sent messages
  • Inline translation from and to any language
  • New Search by contact, content, or conversations contacts
  • Contact rating
  • Block domains
  • Add inline contact properties
  • Canned Responses with shortcuts
  • Private / Shared canned responses
  • Canned Response manager
• New Help Center manager with
  • Sortable collections/article
  • Reports about support cases avoided, missed searches
  • GA4/GTM inclusion
  • Multi-language (Coming soon)
• New faster than ever Team insights report with
  • New conversation / Replies / Mark as done
  • Average replies, Average Time to reply, Average Time to mark as done
  • Teammate performances
  • Business reports with new users / new leads
• New outbound section with:
  • New Chat triggers to engage with visitors and users based on their behavior.
  • New Email marketing view, creation, and reporting
  • New Email Template builder with AI suggestions and unlimited capabilities.
  • Improved email marketing campaign reporting with click heatmap, top clicks, and engages.
  • Unified one-shot and workflow email for quicker finding and reusing.
  • Manage email templates
  • Chat / Email Templates ready to use
  • New Workflow editor and reporting
• New Feedback section with:
  • Survey templates ready to use
  • Improved survey builder
  • Improved survey reporting detail
  • NPS score filtering
  • NPS feedback filtering
  • Promoter automatic redirection to gather more reviews
• New list section with:
  • Improved filtering
  • Improved table column order and selection
  • Multiple selections of contacts
  • Companies list
  • Company filtering
  • Company lists creation
  • Add contact manually
  • Improved list import, tagging, and matching

Help Center

The help center has been recently updated to provide faster results and experience.

You now have the fastest help center platform on the market.

The new help center is also ready to accommodate multi-language articles, which will be released in the following days.

Additional improvements

Not all the improvements we made could be seen.

In fact, we have been delivering infrastructure updates to keep up with the demand for speed for marketing automation and email sending.

The Workflows are now faster than ever, calculating every step in seconds instead of up to 5 minutes.

The Email sending infrastructure has been improved with 10 additional machines to send huge email marketing campaigns 10X faster.

We have released Zapier integration, Live chat callbacks, and Elementor form addon on WordPress.

The products you use daily are now performing better and faster thanks to a complete tech redesign using the latest technologies.

This will help us also deliver faster updates and new features for you.

The documentation of all our services has been revised completely from Victoria with new step-by-step tutorials to make it easier to understand the platform.

We are now releasing at least 5 valuable articles per month on our blog to help you deliver the best customer service, improve your marketing automation activities and make your customer satisfied.

As mentioned, this is never-ending work, and we are prepared to improve even further.

We hear you and are prepared for another round of incredible features rollout.

You can always find what we focus on next on our public roadmap.

The three main areas of focus this year will be:

• Improving Customer Service automation and reporting with Chatflows and AI
• Improving huge data filtering
• Adding more AI features to help you out with time-consuming tasks.

Plus, we’ll put more effort into creating tutorials and video courses with the best practices to adopt in your business.

We believe you are now more in control of your spending for all your customer service and marketing activities than ever before.

We wanted to bring you more flexibility and alignment with what you actually use.

We believe you have the most competitive pricing options on the market.

Some of our customers were begging us to release this pricing because it is more convenient for them and aligned with their values.

As usual, we are thankful for all your support to make us improve every day. Each of you made our offering stronger and more complete every day.

And I wanted to thank our team for our incredible progress over the last few years. It’s what makes me proud of this whole journey.

We hope you will like the new pricing updates. Please contact us via chat if you have any questions regarding your plan.

Go ahead and choose from one of the new plans and customize it based on the estimated interactions or past usage.