Chatwoot vs Intercom Fin: What Each Actually Costs

chatwoot, intercom, fin, vendor-evaluation, ai-support

Chatwoot does not dodge the Salesforce-Fin deal just by being open source. That is the pitch teams reach for the moment they hear "Salesforce is buying Fin" — move to the self-hosted alternative, and no acquirer ever gets to touch your support stack again. Read Chatwoot's own self-hosted pricing page, not its landing page, and the pitch gets narrower: Captain, Chatwoot's AI agent, is not in the free Community edition at all. It ships on a paid tier, metered in credits, with its own overage pricing. Open source protects you from one specific risk — a buyer changing the roadmap. It does not protect you from the others, and Chatwoot's documentation is honest enough to say so, if you read the pricing page instead of the tagline.

What actually changed, and what didn't

Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin — the company formerly known as Intercom — for approximately $3.6 billion on 15 June 2026. Closing is expected in Salesforce's fourth fiscal quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval, and Salesforce has said it intends to fold Fin's team and technology into Agentforce (TechCrunch, CNBC). Around 30,000 customer companies, mostly SMB and mid-market, come with it (Salesforce Ben). Nothing about the product has changed yet — we wrote up what to ask any vendor's documentation while the deal is still just signed, not closed.

What has changed is the calculus for anyone currently evaluating alternatives, and Chatwoot is the name that comes up first: the only mainstream competitor you can self-host, architecturally the closest thing to Fin among the tools with public documentation. So it is worth taking the comparison as far as the docs go, on both sides, rather than stopping at "open source" and "proprietary."

What Captain actually costs, by Chatwoot's own docs

Chatwoot's Community edition is MIT-licensed and free, and that much of the pitch is true. What is not in Community is Captain, the AI agent — it requires a paid self-hosted tier, and Chatwoot's own guide to enabling Captain on self-hosted installations says so directly: you configure Captain globally in the Super Admin Console, then switch it on per account under Premium Features — a screen that does not exist until you are on a paid license.

That paid tier is self-hosted Premium Support, and it starts at $19 per agent per month; Enterprise, the tier above it, runs $99 per agent per month and adds SSO/SAML on top of what Premium Support already includes. Captain is billed on top of that per-agent price, metered in credits rather than included flat — Chatwoot's cloud plans show the same credit-and-overage shape (a monthly allowance, then paid overage per block of credits, no rollover), and we could not independently confirm the exact allowance and overage numbers on the self-hosted page specifically, so we're not printing a figure we can't stand behind.

So "self-hosted and open source" gets you the inbox, the channels, and the team workspace for free. It does not get you the AI agent for free: Captain sits behind a $19-or-$99-per-agent license, metered separately on top of it. The two vendors priced their AI differently in the details — Fin per resolved conversation, Chatwoot per unit of model usage — but neither ships an AI agent that is simply included once you've paid for the product.

What Fin actually costs, briefly

We dissected Fin's own billing model in a separate piece, so this is the short version. Fin bills $0.99 per outcome — a resolution, a procedure handoff, or a disqualification — and $9.99 per lead qualification. A resolution counts whether the customer said the answer helped or simply went quiet for 24 hours, and both count the same on the invoice. Standalone Fin, the version that plugs into Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot or Freshdesk instead of Intercom, carries a 50-outcome monthly minimum, a floor of about $49.50. Inside Intercom, outcome charges sit on top of seats that start at $29 per seat per month on annual billing.

Neither vendor's AI pricing is the free option. The question the acquisition actually raises is not "which AI is cheaper" — it's who is exposed to what, once you've picked one.

Who carries the infrastructure risk

Self-hosting trades an acquisition risk you can't control for an operations burden you can. That is a real trade, not a fake one — but it's a trade, not an exemption, and Chatwoot's own credit-and-overage pricing for Captain shows the AI half of the product was never part of what "free and open source" was covering.

Six questions worth asking any vendor after this deal

The Salesforce-Fin deal is useful mainly as a prompt to re-check assumptions, and the same six questions apply whether the vendor on the other side is Chatwoot, Fin, or somebody neither of us has mentioned yet.

1. What's actually in the free tier, and what silently isn't? "Open source" describes the base product. Check whether the AI agent, SSO, or audit logs are in that same license or a separate one.
2. What's the billable unit for the AI specifically, and does it have a floor, a ceiling, or an expiry? Credits, resolutions and seats all fail differently under load.
3. What happens to unused capacity at the end of the month? Chatwoot's Captain overage is non-refundable and credits don't roll over; ask the same question of whoever you're evaluating.
4. Who can acquire this vendor, and what happens to your contract if they do? You can't answer this for certain about anyone, but you can check whether the vendor is independent, VC-backed with a defined runway, or already inside a larger company's product line.
5. If you self-host, what's the actual operational headcount? Docker Compose for a proof of concept and Postgres-with-backups-and-upgrades-forever in production are different jobs; price the second one, not the first.
6. What do you lose if you leave? Export format, article URLs, conversation history — ask before you need the answer, not after.

Where Replium stands on this

Applying that list to ourselves, starting with the parts that aren't in our favor:

Do we ship an AI agent with metered credits, like Captain? No — we haven't connected an LLM provider to the product at all. There's no agent to meter, which also means there's nothing here that resolves a conversation for you.

Is self-hosting an option, the way it is with Chatwoot Community? No. Replium is hosted by us, in one region, on one shared instance that serves every tenant by subdomain. If your requirement is running the software on your own infrastructure, we're not that product.

Can we be acquired and re-pointed at somebody else's roadmap, the way Fin now can? We can't promise never — no company can — but there's no signed deal, and nothing to disclose beyond that.

What do we bill, and what would you lose leaving? Nothing yet: there's no billing in the product today, and no export either. Both are genuine gaps, not modesty.

That's four absences before anything else, and they're the honest read: if you need an AI agent now, or you need to self-host, this article's own method says look elsewhere — at Chatwoot, at Fin, at whoever else answers those first four questions the way you need. What we do have is a multi-tenant help desk — shared inbox, embeddable chat widget, a knowledge base that server-renders so search engines read the actual text — in English and Russian, live today.

The one place a vendor our size is actually ahead: distance. A request doesn't queue behind Chatwoot's self-hosted install base or Fin's 30,000 accounts inside a $3.6bn product line — it reaches whoever wrote the code, and small changes ship in days because there's no larger roadmap to get in line behind. That's the entire pitch, and it's worth exactly what it sounds like: not a reason to pick us over either of them if what you need is the AI agent or the self-hosted install, but a reason to if what you need is someone who answers.

If that's the trade you're after, start a workspace — self-serve, an email confirmation, and since there's no billing yet, nothing to cancel either.