Intercom alternative

An Intercom alternative without per-seat live chat, AI meters, or lock-in

Intercom renamed itself Fin in May 2026, and Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin on 10 September 2026. Intercom is still the name of the helpdesk: a powerful hosted messaging platform, priced by seat with Fin AI billed per outcome on top. If what your team actually needs is a chat and email inbox, an AI assistant that defers to humans, and control of where customer data is stored, DChat delivers that as self-hosted software that runs on your own server.

Download Free See Pricing

Predictable cost, forever

Seat-plus-usage pricing means the bill moves every time your team or your AI volume grows. DChat's live chat is free however many agents you add, and AI answers are not metered by us at all - the assistant is part of Premium, $19 per covered seat per month, flat.

AI on your terms

DChat's AI agent answers from your own knowledge base, can call your own systems with agent approval or visitor confirmation, and hands off to a human with the conversation so far. You choose the brain: run Ollama locally so conversations never leave your network, or connect OpenAI or Anthropic with your own API keys and pay the provider directly.

Your data, literally

Conversations, visitor records, ratings, and analytics live in your SQL Server database. GDPR export and erasure are built in, and an audit log records admin actions. With a local AI model, no conversation goes to an AI provider; with OpenAI or Anthropic keys, the assistant's prompts go to that provider, and WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, SMS and voice traffic passes through Meta or Twilio.

Honest scoping

Is DChat the right Intercom replacement for you?

Intercom bundles email campaigns, product tours, and a large app marketplace. DChat covers the inbox side: web chat and email free, with a help center, contacts with segments and website campaigns; Premium adds the AI assistant, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, LINE and SMS inboxes, and Twilio voice. If your Intercom usage is mostly the messenger, the inbox, and the AI answers, and the invoice keeps growing anyway, that is what DChat replaces.

Great fit

Live visitor chat and an email inbox, AI first response with human handoff (Premium), departments and routing, a help center, transcripts, CSAT, webhooks into your CRM or ticketing.

Keep a hosted suite if you need

Outbound email marketing, in-app product tours, a large third-party app marketplace, a visual workflow builder that reaches beyond the chat bot (DChat's visual flows cover the bot conversation), or a native mobile app as core requirements.

DChat vs Intercom, at a glance

How free self-hosted live chat compares with a typical hosted plan.

Compare	DChat	Intercom
Hosting model	Self-hosted on your own server	Hosted SaaS (Intercom's cloud)
Pricing	Live chat free; Premium (AI and more) $19/agent/month	Per seat: $29, $85 or $132 a month billed annually ($39, $99, $139 monthly), plus Fin at $0.99 per outcome; SMS, WhatsApp and phone billed pay-as-you-go
Where conversations live	Your own SQL Server database	The vendor cloud
AI chatbot	Premium - local Ollama or your OpenAI/Anthropic keys, no per-answer fee. Since 2.0.8: answers from your website and documents with cited sources, a bot test bench and resolution metrics. Since 2.0.9: AI actions with agent approval or visitor confirmation, AI triage, and visual bot flows (free; AI steps on Premium)	Fin AI Agent on every plan, $0.99 per outcome
Channels	Web chat and email free; WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, LINE, SMS, API and Twilio voice on Premium	Chat and email; SMS, WhatsApp and phone billed pay-as-you-go
Mobile	Installable web app with push notifications; no native apps	A mobile app for agents (Intercom Conversations)
Remove vendor branding	Premium, $19/agent/month	Varies by plan

Checked 26 September 2026. Intercom seat prices, Fin's $0.99 per outcome on every plan and the pay-as-you-go channels are from intercom.com/pricing and Intercom's pricing guide in its learning center; the mobile app from Intercom's help center; the Salesforce acquisition from Salesforce's 10 September 2026 press release. Competitor pricing changes; check the current figures before you rely on this comparison.

How does DChat's AI compare to hosted AI agents?

The workflow is the same one customers expect: the bot answers common questions from your knowledge base, and when the conversation needs judgment the visitor is handed to a human agent with the AI transcript attached. The difference is control: you pick the model and provider, tune the prompts, and pay no per-outcome fee to DChat. The assistant is part of Premium, $19 per agent per month. Since 2.0.8 it answers from your website and documents with cited sources, tests saved questions on a test bench, and reports its resolution rate. Since 2.0.9 it can call your own systems through AI actions, with agent approval or visitor confirmation for anything that changes data, and run visual bot flows that mix scripted steps with AI steps. What DChat does not have is Fin's simulated customer conversations, and its flows and actions are not a copy of Fin's Procedures, so compare the two on your own multi-step tasks.

Can DChat talk to the rest of my stack?

Yes. HMAC-signed webhooks fire on conversation events with automatic retries and a durable outbox, with ready-made formatting for Slack, Teams, and Discord. There are public widget APIs, admin APIs, and direct SQL access to your own data for reporting.

What does migration actually involve?

Install the server (Windows or Linux), run the included SQL scripts, sign in to the dashboard, and swap the messenger snippet on your site for the DChat widget script. Most teams validate everything on localhost first; it is the full free product, with no licence file.

What happens after the first year?

Live chat is free and never expires. The AI assistant is part of Premium, $19 per agent per month; if you stop paying, the paid features stop and live chat keeps running.

Simple pricing

Live chat free, AI when you want it

Live chat, unlimited agents and domainsFree

Premium: AI assistant and more, per agent per month$19

Live chat is free in production with no seat limit. No AI usage fees from DChat - Premium is billed only for the agents you choose to cover, and Enterprise adds single sign-on at $49.

Compare Licenses

Self-hosted customer support software

Deploy live chat on your own terms, not on someone else's pricing model.

DChat gives you the installable server, web dashboard, website widget, and desktop agent tools in one self-hosted product, with live chat free to run, and an AI agent that answers, acts with the approvals you set and hands off to your team when you want one. Run it on infrastructure you trust, on the model you choose.

Download DChat See Product Demo

Deployment

Install on Windows or Linux, behind IIS or Nginx, in a VM, or in Docker if that fits your stack.

Commercial model

Live chat is free with unlimited agents. Premium, with the AI agent, is billed per agent per month, never per conversation.

AI Flexibility

Run the AI agent on a local Ollama model, or connect OpenAI and Anthropic with your own provider accounts.