Intercom alternative for small teams that just want AI on their support email

Quick context: I am Tommy, the founder of Trigli. Intercom is a great product. Their AI agent (Fin) is one of the better commercial AI agents out there. The reason this page exists is that the Intercom price model is built for a different kind of customer than us.

The short version

Intercom is a customer messaging platform. The AI lives inside that platform. To get Fin, you also adopt Intercom Messenger, Intercom Inbox, and Intercom seat licensing. If you want all of that, Intercom is excellent.

Trigli is just the AI piece. We connect to your Gmail and answer support emails using your docs. We give you an embeddable chat widget. That is the product. No second inbox, no second messaging channel, no per-resolution metering.

If "I just want AI to draft my support replies and run a chat widget" is a complete sentence that describes what you want, you are probably looking for Trigli.

The Fin pricing problem (for small teams)

Fin is priced per resolution, currently around $0.99 each. A "resolution" is when Fin answers a customer question without a human stepping in. That price is fine if you have an enterprise contract and Fin handles 5,000 questions a month for you. Cheap, even.

For a small team it inverts. If you do 500 AI resolutions a month, that is roughly $495 just for Fin, on top of your Intercom seat fees. If you do 1,000, it is around $990. The fee scales with success, which means the tool gets more expensive every time it works.

Trigli is flat $149/month for the Growth tier. That covers 2,500 emails, 1,000 chats, and 500 tickets. Whether the AI handles all of them or none of them, the cost does not change.

Where Intercom wins

• You want one tool for messaging, marketing, onboarding tours, product flows, and support all together. Intercom does all of that.
• You have a sales motion that runs through a Messenger widget on a marketing site, with chat-to-deal handoff. Intercom owns that workflow.
• You have the team to manage it. Help Center content, Fin training, conversation routing, audience segmentation. It is a serious product that benefits from a serious operator.
• You are already paying for Intercom and Fin is just an add-on. In that case, do not switch. Just add Fin.

Where Trigli wins

• You run your support out of Gmail and you want to keep doing that. Trigli does not move you off Gmail. We connect via OAuth and replies still come from your real email address.
• You want a flat monthly price. No per-resolution math. No surprise spike when a holiday sale doubles your support volume.
• You do not need the rest of the messaging platform. You just want AI on your support email and a simple chat widget.
• You want to be live in 5-10 minutes, not next quarter.

How the AI is different

Fin and Trigli both ground their answers in content you provide. The behavioral difference is mostly in defaults and surface area.

Fin defaults to autonomous resolution. The customer talks to Fin in your Messenger and Fin tries to close it out. You set guardrails and review behavior, but the philosophy is "Fin handles it unless it cannot."

Trigli defaults to draft-and-approve. Every reply gets a confidence score. You decide which categories auto-send and which sit in your inbox as drafts for your team to review. We start in safe mode and you raise the threshold as you build trust. You can absolutely run Trigli in full auto-send mode for the easy stuff once you are comfortable. We just do not push you there on day one.

Neither approach is right for everyone. If you want hands-off AI from minute one, Fin is built for that. If you want to verify the model is actually using your docs correctly before letting it loose, Trigli is built for that.

When AI is not confident

Trigli has a hard floor below which the AI never auto-sends. Below the floor, the message becomes a ticket. The AI still drafts a suggested reply on that ticket, but a human has to send it.

You set the auto-send threshold above that floor. Anything between draft-only and auto-send threshold lands in your inbox as a Gmail draft you can edit and send. Anything above auto-send goes out automatically.

Most teams I have talked to start with auto-send off entirely for the first few days. After they see drafts going out without edits, they raise the threshold. The pace is whatever you are comfortable with.

What Trigli does not do

• No outbound marketing campaigns, audience segmentation, or product tours. We do not do any of the marketing/CRM side of Intercom.
• No deep CSAT or NPS reporting dashboards. We track approve/reject signal on every reply, which is enough to tune the AI, but it is not a full CX analytics suite.
• No phone, no SMS, no Instagram DMs, no WhatsApp. Email, chat, tickets.
• No Messenger SDK that lives inside your product. Just an embeddable widget for your marketing site or storefront.
• Outlook is planned but not shipped. Gmail only today.

How to actually compare them

Both products have free trials. The cleanest test:

1. Pull your last 30 days of support email volume.
2. Estimate how many of those are repetitive ("WISMO", "what is your return policy", "do you ship to X", "how do I cancel"). Call that number R.
3. For Fin: R times $0.99 plus your Intercom seat fees. That is your monthly cost if Fin handles all of them.
4. For Trigli: pick a tier above R/month. That is your monthly cost flat.
5. Compare. Pick the model that matches your volume and your appetite for variable spend.

The honest summary

If you are an enterprise running Intercom across the entire customer lifecycle, do not switch to us. Add Fin. We are not trying to compete in that lane.

If you are a 5-30 person team running on Gmail and the only reason you have been looking at Intercom is "we need AI on our support email", you are probably overshopping. Trigli is the smaller, cheaper, faster-to-set-up version of just that piece.