Chatwoot

Chatwoot is self-hosted Intercom — live chat, email, WhatsApp, social media, all unified in one inbox with an AI assistant (Captain) for automated responses. If Intercom's $39+/seat/month pricing makes your wallet hurt, Chatwoot gives you 90% of the features for the cost of a $10 VPS.

For indie hackers who need customer support without per-seat pricing, Chatwoot is the obvious choice. Self-host it and serve 5 or 500 agents for the same infrastructure cost. Crisp is a simpler hosted alternative. Zendesk is the enterprise option at $55/agent/month. Intercom is the gold standard you're trying to avoid paying for.

The catch: It's a Rails app, so self-hosting requires Ruby, Postgres, Redis, and Sidekiq — not a trivial stack. The license changed to a custom model, so check the terms. The AI features are basic compared to Intercom's Fin. And "WhatsApp integration" requires a Meta Business API setup that's its own adventure. Budget a weekend for the initial setup.