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Comparison

Intercom alternative for indie apps

What the usual support stack costs a one-person team, what Offload does instead, and the cases where Intercom is genuinely the right answer.

Last updated: 5 August 2026.

Who this page is for

You ship an app on your own, or with one or two other people. Support arrives from an in-app widget and a support address, it is a few dozen conversations a week, and most of it is already answered somewhere in your docs. You looked at Intercom, priced the AI on top, priced a feedback board on top of that, and closed the tab.

Intercom is a serious product built for support organisations — teams with rotas, tiers and volume targets. If that is you, it is the better tool and this page will not change your mind. Offload is built for the other shape: one person who would rather be writing code at 2 a.m. than answering the same question for the twentieth time.

The stack, priced

The usual indie setup is three products: a seat to talk to customers, an AI agent to deflect the easy questions, and a public board so feature requests stop living in a text file.

LineTypical stackOffload
Inbox seatIntercom, $39 / seat / monthincluded
AI answersFin, $0.99 per resolution — about $99 for 100 resolutions300 resolutions included, then $0.08 each
Feedback boardCanny, from $79 / monthincluded
Monthly totalabout $217$29 per app

Worked example: one seat, 300 conversations a month of which roughly a third are resolved by AI, one board. Vendor list prices at the time of writing — check theirs, they move.

What is actually different

OffloadIntercom + Fin + Canny
Built forOne-person teams and small SaaSSupport teams, from small to enterprise
Pricing unitPer app, flatPer seat, plus per-resolution AI, plus board
Feature gatingEvery plan has every feature; plans differ by volumeFeatures unlock by tier
Feedback boardBuilt in, fed automatically from conversationsSeparate product, fed manually
Answer sourcesYour docs, your site, a synced GitHub repo, your corrections — nothing elseHelp centre and connected content
When nothing is groundedRefuses, escalates, tells the customer a human will replyConfigurable hand-off
Auto-send controlA confidence floor you set, calibrated on your own outcomesPer-topic configuration
After a wrong answerThread frozen out of auto-send, correction becomes a regression testManual correction of the source content
Setup ownerThe developer, in about ten minutesUsually an onboarding process

The row that matters most is the third from the bottom. Every AI support tool will answer whatever it is asked; the useful question is what it does when your documentation has no answer. Offload treats refusing as a normal outcome, hands you the thread, and tells the customer a human is coming.

Where Intercom is the better choice

  • You have a support team with shifts, assignment rules, SLAs and reporting on all of it.
  • You need outbound product tours, in-app messaging campaigns or lifecycle marketing in the same tool.
  • You depend on a large app ecosystem, or on a specific CRM integration Offload does not have.
  • You need phone or social channels alongside chat and email.

Offload does one loop well — answer from your own material, hold back what it is not sure of, turn the rest into a roadmap. Everything outside that loop is somebody else's product.

Moving over

  • Point Offload at your docs, your site, or a GitHub repo. That knowledge base is the only place answers can come from.
  • Test it in the widget, correct what is wrong, and set the floor you are comfortable with. Most people start at 95 and walk it down.
  • Drop the widget into your app — web, or the React Native SDK — and connect the Gmail behind your support address. No DNS change, no downtime, reversible in one click.
  • Intercom conversation import is on the roadmap; docs, site crawl and GitHub sync work today.

Intercom, Fin and Canny are trademarks of their respective owners. This comparison is written by Offload, uses each vendor's published list prices, and is not endorsed by any of them.

One tool, $29 a month, every feature on every plan.

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