I had a Crisp invoice on my desk in January. $79 per seat, six seats. Two of those seats answered fewer than five conversations the entire previous quarter. One of them was an intern who'd left in October and we'd just forgotten to remove.
It was 2am. I was about to log a refund request. Instead I opened a blank Notion page and typed: what would the chat product I actually want look like?
The two principles
The product had to obey two rules. The pricing should never punish hiring more humans. And the install should be one paste — no SDK, no provider, no React component.
What we removed
- →Per-seat pricing — replaced with flat $12 / $24 / $49 / $99
- →AI add-ons that double the bill at quarter-end
- →A 2 MB widget — ours is 28 KB gzipped
- →A "talk to sales" button — you can buy any plan with a card
- →Email-based account ownership — workspaces are first class
What stays
The boring stuff that has to work: GDPR-compliant EU hosting, signed DPA, audit logs, two-way email forwarding, a real REST API, webhooks, a usable mobile app. The widget loads after first paint so your Lighthouse score doesn't notice.
If you read this and thought "yes, exactly," the trial is 14 days, no card up front, and we refund within 14 days of payment with no support ticket. We mean it.
“We had a Crisp seat for an intern who answered three messages in summer. We kept paying for him through winter, spring, and the next intern.”