Crisp

Overview

Crisp is a shared inbox platform built for founders and small support teams who can't afford to lose a customer message in Slack, email, and three chat tabs. The core problem it solves: your first customer support hire is drowning. They're checking live chat, then email, then your social DMs, then Slack, then back to chat. Every context switch costs 5 minutes. By day three, they've lost a customer escalation in the noise. Crisp consolidates live chat widgets, email, SMS, social messaging (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), and internal team notes into one chronological feed. You assign conversations to team members, set response-time targets, and see who's bottlenecked. No more "did someone reply to this?" meetings. Who actually uses this: early-stage SaaS founders running support solo or with one contractor. E-commerce teams handling Shopify chat + email during launch week. Service businesses (agencies, consultants, coaches) who need to look organized without hiring a support manager. Product teams running beta launches who need to capture user feedback in real time without building a custom Slack bot. The workflow looks like this: customer submits a chat question → Crisp assigns it to the available team member → they reply in the Crisp UI (or via email, if they prefer) → the response goes back to the customer through the original channel → internal notes stay in Crisp, not scattered across Slack threads. When you hire your second support person, you can see exactly which conversations are piling up and who needs help. Pricing is typically per-agent-per-month, with a free tier for single-user testing. Most founders start on the free plan, upgrade when they hire their first contractor. Check the vendor site for current tiers—pricing changes frequently for early-stage tools. Honest tradeoffs: Crisp is not Zendesk. It doesn't have advanced reporting, SLA automation, or AI-powered ticket categorization. If you're managing 50+ support conversations daily, you'll outgrow it. If you're managing 5–20, it's overkill to pay for enterprise ticketing software. Crisp sits in the middle. Alternatives: Intercom (more expensive, includes product tours and in-app messaging), Zendesk (overkill for small teams, better for scale), Help Scout (email-first, lighter on chat), Slack (free but not designed for customer-facing conversations). Most founders choose Crisp because it's cheaper than Intercom and simpler than Zendesk, with live chat built in instead of bolted on. Common failure mode: teams set it up, route all channels into Crisp, then stop checking it because they're still getting Slack notifications from somewhere else. The win only happens if you commit to Crisp as the single source of truth and turn off email notifications to your personal inbox.