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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 co
by jmuguy 4mo 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.
- nerder92 4mo agoThis is extremely naive and I’ll invite to try and built something like this and compare it with Fin performance
- margalabargala 4mo agoThey 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.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo agoWhy 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.
- jmuguy 4mo agoWell 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.
- runako 4mo agoThe 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?
- aurareturn 4mo agoThe 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. $0.99 could be the profit margin of small ecommerce businesses too so it might not make sense for small businesses.
- sdd2 4mo agoMan you are delusional. You clearly have never ran a business and don't understand the dynamics of the make vs buy decision.
- aurareturn 4mo agoThe dynamics have changed completely in 2026.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- runako 4mo agoLet's say the small e-commerce business does 500 of these outcomes per month. ~$500 all-in cost at Fin. I'm curious how you would calculate the other side of the ledger, the in-house approach. Assume the e-commerce business does not employ any AI/ML experts or programmers or anyone whose workday has ever been interrupted by a Github outage (this is the normal case for most businesses, not an artificial handicap). I'm curious how you would structure things to make an in-house more efficient than the $500/mo all-in.
- aurareturn 4mo agoThis 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. 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.
- spwa4 4mo ago> 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.
- aurareturn 4mo agoYes. I agree. When I look at Fin's home page and marketing, I think to myself that this stuff can mostly just be text documentation given to an LLM. It's a tool built for MBAs but most of the work is done by a software engineer to give Fin that context in the first place. So all Fin is is a UI on top of the context engineering done by a software engineer who integrated with Fin. It's extremely easy to duplicate Fin's UI and get rid of the $250k fee.
- spwa4 4mo agoWell, it's a few weeks of work, systems integration, and you'll need an SRE too if you're hoping to run it on any scale. But yes, I agree.
- y2244 4mo agoSaas is cheap for a small company but once you want large volume or per seat pricing for a large amount of users it gets expensive. But rolling out your own allows you to then scale at minimal incremental cost
- saos 4mo agoCorrect. Seen this first hand.
- whyage 4mo agoAWS has zero value because you can just buy a bunch of servers and rack them. And on and on.
- spwa4 4mo agoBut 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!
- nitwit005 4mo agoIf all you are using on AWS is EC2, I agree that it has no value. You should switch to a much cheaper option.
- bearjaws 4mo agoI 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"
- vanuatu 4mo agoits 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