Thanks for the feedback! While I disagree that the pricing is insane, you and other commenters here made me realize that maybe we presented it badly.
TalkJS is 10 cents per conversation per month, plus a fixed monthly fee.
I think our mistake has been that we made the fixed monthly fee also include a small number of conversations, which is where all the confusion comes from. It makes it seem like a single conversation costs $2.
The idea behind our pricing is that with a small app you can go live with TalkJS with pretty much the fixed monthly $49 or $249. Once your traffic increases, the price-per-conversation takes over and it's really just 10 cents per conversation, period.
Note that we also offer large bulk discounts for large sites - do get in touch!
Also, I forgot to answer your question. Indeed the 10 cents is per conversation. A conversation can last as long as you want and is only counted once (we charge for a conversation when the first message is sent in it).
Yes, it's technically a different thing (user->company instead of user->user) — but if they're advertising an expensive JS chat service, I would expect them to be showing that off front-and-center as a way to communicate with their support.
[0] - https://frontdoor.im
°° EDIT -- The creator responded below, showing that I am incorrect.
Perhaps making it more clear that you're the creators in that case? Unless I'm being my ignorant self again :)
So if I have 100 users who each have one conversation, is that considered 100 conversations? If I have two users talking with each other, is that one conversation? I looked through the FAQ but can't quite understand the pricing model.
Also, when I click on "We can't afford TalkJS" in your FAQ, it expands the answer for the question.
We love open source and community projects, so we have decided to make TalkJS entirely free for non-commercial purposes.
When you go live, there's a button you can click to let us know you're using TalkJS non-commercially, and you'll be able to go live without paying.
Note: The non-commercial TalkJS license includes no support. If need want the certainty of access to our great customer support, please become a paying customer.
> two users talking with each other, is that one conversation?
Yes.
And thanks for asking, this means it's not clear and we will have to add this.
We're actually working on a new demo which among other things, fixes this. It'll allow you to chat with your friends or colleauges instead of random strangers.
Thanks for the notification, we've removed the offending pictures.
>> We do not promise that our software works or is good for anything at all.
Is this a joke?
Not a joke. It's just an attempt to summarize the usual fullcaps NO FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE legalese in a human readable way.
Please and thanks
The core difference is that TalkJS includes a full fledged messaging UI and well-designed email/sms/push fallback*. In working on earlier startups, we noticed that reliable realtime data transfer was the least of our problems. Having a good cross-browser messaging UI, for mobile and for desktop, that loads fast, works everywhere (including, say, IE9) and makes people happy was a lot more work.
TalkJS came to be when we realized that many companies spend a lot of effort in reinventing this wheel over and over again, and that all of them ended up building very similar UIs.
Think of TalkJS more like a user-to-user Intercom than a Sendbird.