Comment by jmuguy
7 hours ago
Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.
7 hours ago
Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.
AWS has zero value because you can just buy a bunch of servers and rack them. And on and on.
If all you are using on AWS is EC2, I agree that it has no value. You should switch to a much cheaper option.
But how would you ever get the PhD-level mathematical riddle that AWS sends you every month? The one they call the "bill". You can't just get that level off difficulty anywhere!
Once you’ve cracked that one, you can get billing tenure by working out how to explain the Azure invoice….
I do think people tend to over estimate how much staff care at all about the outcomes of new initiatives. Rolling out a new in house chatbot? More likely just going to fire everyone and give you more work.
So many companies have such failed cultures they are just getting by delegating all serious matters to younger companies with people who actually care. If your staff never benefit from any of their work, nobody has any reason to care about how well you build your own in house Support / CRM / Chatbot / SaaS.
Not sure if this has been coined as a term, but its some form of "effort arbitrage"
This is extremely naive and I’ll invite to try and built something like this and compare it with Fin performance
They didn't say Fin was valueless, they said it would become so in the future. 10 years from now i bet they're right.
Fin is a short term play and that's fine.
its very hard for most businesses, especially large ones, to build good agents (not the kind that does rag on a faq) that complete actions autonomously and cannot be jailbroken
demand for ai support vendors is going vertical this year
Correct. Seen this first hand.
Why would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin?
This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.
SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.
I built an AI support agent in one week. It hooks into our knowledge base, app API, runs tests, and then finally sends a Yes|No|Other option to a real human to send back to the customer. It was surprisingly easy to build. The hardest part was the knowledge of how to help the customer, which Fin can't do for me anyway.
I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. There is no model training needed. It's all context. Anyone who is training a Qwen model for their customer support is doing it wrong. Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there. The technical stuff is really easy to build.
"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there"
You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop.
Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend suite to help you build out areas where Fin is failing. It shows you questions it couldn't resolve, looks at the answers your human team gave, and suggests updates to help articles to
You're correct this could all be build by a skilled engineer, but that's not the point. It's built for non-techincal users to use and implement. A person who rose through the support ranks and shows some technical competency can learn the system without any software knowledge.
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Rolling something yourself was a waste of time when SaaS was cheap and competitive.
Not they’re all getting incredibly expensive, even the last few startups I worked at were paying hundreds of thousands of euros for services that were total garbage.
Do I really need a crappy 20k/yr app to help me with my 1:1s? Do I really need a 100k/yr clicks counter that requires two devs to keep running and still heavily miscounts the clicks? Do I need another crappy app to manage my translation JSON files?
> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin.
The value, of course, is that there is a website with a chatbox that some MBA can type in "never give any refunds anymore for any reason", and it just updates the AI support agent and sends an automated "I deserve a promotion and a raise" to their boss.
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Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors.
I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator.
I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.
The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house.
There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level where the economics could feasibly make in-house work?
6 replies →