Hey everyone!
My name is Peter and I'm a co-founder here at Vanilla. Vanilla is an idea that's been brewing for a couple of years now. As someone who built lots of small websites and businesses, I always got frustrated with the number of tools I needed to run things. On top of that, very rarely could I get by on the free plans. Therefore, I have the very ambitious goal of building a suite of apps that you can access through one account. We are starting off with Inbox, which is a customer support tool that allows you to add a live chat widget to your site as well as connect your email to receive emails as tickets into our inbox. Think of tools like Intercom & Helpscout but with way less features. We still have plenty of more features to add to Inbox but the basic idea will be that all these apps are pretty basic, no-frills, and affordable. We are currently working on a CRM & a project management tool as well with plans for many more apps like e-signature, knowledge base, a Notion-like tool, and more.
So, if you need some basic customer support software and live chat, come try us out for free! We hope you'll join us on this journey as we attempt to build this giant product!
@peter_gratale1 Congratulations on the launch! That looks amazing and it will be a no-brainer to use for my product, if it's really free forever (this is what you have on the landing page, but also says try for free? which is it?)
@ai_guitarist so the idea is that we will give you your first app for free. With out hopes being that we will entice you with all the other apps we are building to make you sign up for Premium which gives you access to all apps. But the idea is the first one will always be free. So if you come in and Inbox is the only thing that you want, you can have it for free. And then hopefully we convince you to pay $20-$30/month per users to get access to all the other apps :)
@chandula good point! we have it on the app side right now but not the marketing site. You can check it out once you get to the signup page: https://app.vanillaapps.com/signup
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I really like this idea. I just signed up and looks easy to integrate. I wonder - do you have plans to monetize? If so, would you care to expand on your strategy here?
@juston_berg thanks! And yeah, eventually we will offer a SaaS model. We aren't 100% sure what pricing will look like but we are thinking that we will always keep the first app for free. So one day when we have 10, 20, etc apps, you'll always be able to come in and choose one of the apps for free to activate. The hope will be that we have so many other enticing apps that you'll then upgrade to Premium so that you have access to all the apps.
@peter_gratale1 - congrats and great job launching Vanilla. I checked out your website which looks great (very clean) and I will be giving your product a try shortly!
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