Look forward to giving our customers free, unrestricted access to the number 1 live chat for eCommerce applications on the planet today.
[Learn more about tawk.to free live chat for eCommerce ]
Why tawk.to is free?
When we first launched in October of 2013, tawk.to would most certainly have been considered a late entrant.
The incumbents that came before us paved the way – through that didn’t scare us, as what was available in the market, simply didn’t fit our use-case, and more importantly, truly didn’t solve the problem(s) that businesses were actually facing.
We started this journey as unsatisfied live chat software customers subscribed to vendors that wouldn’t listen to our feedback.
“Never under estimate a late entrant – they get to start by learning from all of your mistakes.”
At the time, we figured that there were other companies out there that felt the same way we did :
- that the SaaS pricing our competitors charged wasn’t attractive for many use-cases.
- that the reliability and accountability of vendors just weren’t up to par for a tool as important as communicating with customers.
- that there were so many beneficial features missing, as competitor apps were built around revenue models of “charging per seat”, as opposed to an agent-centric model like tawk.to, which made more sense to us.
- that there were no multi-tenant chat applications in the market, that offered the ability to manage multiple separate customer bases with one login.
- that the cost of paying for the software itself is not the biggest barrier for businesses to offer live chat as a channel, but instead it is the cost of staffing to answer chats 24×7 that is so prohibitive.
- that just because there are hundreds of known competitors, it didn’t mean we had to target their customers to gain market share, we could enter and help to grow the size of the pie, not the size of our slice.
- that it was bizarre that when we visited the websites of many competitors, they were and still are – almost always offline. If you’re going to offer live chat as your core product, and not use it yourself, there’s clearly a problem.
tawk.to is now the #1 most widely used live chat application in the world, we’ve captured 20+% of the market, we’re the fastest-growing company in the space and 1.7+ Billion people interact with a tawk.to widget each and every month — that’s 1 in every 3 people online.
Considering we have never done a single press interview, never published a press release, spend almost nothing on advertising and never speak at public events or conferences.. that’s not too bad, right? So how did we achieve that you ask?
“If you’re focused on your competitors, then you’re not focused on your customer – commit to getting as close as possible to your customer, truly fall in love with the problem you solve for them, and you can’t lose.”
Very simple: We made you, our customer, our partner – and we made it our mission and our purpose to bring you closer to your customers – to help you grow your business, and evolve with you on your entrepreneurial journey.
The thing is.. you made us who and what we are.
How does tawk.to actually generate revenue?
So now you’re asking yourself.. how do we manage to ship a feature-packed product – in 27 different languages, to billions of consumers whilst providing 24×7–365 live support to millions of business users completely for free, and still manage to keep our lights on?
- If you would like to remove the tiny “Powered by tawk.to” branding from our products, we charge $15/month. Don’t remove it, and it is free for life.
- If you don’t want to have to sit and answer chats all day, we will do it for you for $1/hour. Yes, you read that right – $1/hr for professionally trained, incredibly talented, native-speaking live agents, who are thoroughly trained to answer chats on behalf of your business 24×7–365.
Now.. there are probably three things you’re thinking :
How can a 3rd party agent answer on behalf of my business?
They don’t know my business. It would take forever for them to learn everything.
That is a very common misconception. Let’s do a quick exercise to illustrate:
If I asked you:
How tall is the empire state building in New York?
You most probably can’t answer that question from memory. Though in about 5 seconds, you could provide me with a very accurate answer via Google.
See what you did there?
An agent doesn’t need to remember every possible answer, they just need to know where to find the answer.
See, by the sheer nature of our business, we simply had to invest heavily in building a chat system that focuses on the Agent Experience – as our entire business depends on our agents answering on behalf of hundreds of different customer use-cases, from all over the world 24×7–365.
This is why we truly believe, we have one of the best business messaging applications anywhere. In software development terms, that is called “eating your own dog food”.
By answering on behalf of different customers, of all shapes and sizes, we gain access and dive deep on many different use-cases that we really wouldn’t otherwise get exposure to. This has helped us to constantly iterate the software so that all of our free users benefit also. Which mind you, is 99% of all of our users.
We don’t sell chat software, we give the best, and most tried and tested software in a ‘real-world’, massive scale environment away completely free of charge.
Everybody wins.
[Learn more about tawk.to free live chat for eCommerce ]
