The Intercom alternative that doesn't bill you per outcome
Intercom charges you twice: once for the seat, then $0.99 every time Fin produces an outcome. Kerux charges a flat per-agent price and lets you connect your own AI key, so the AI half of your bill is paid to your provider at cost. If your ticket volume is growing, that's the difference between a bill that grows with it and one that doesn't.
| Dimension | Kerux | Intercom |
|---|---|---|
| AI pricing | Bring your own API key. Pay your AI provider directly, at cost | $0.99 per Fin outcome, on top of seats |
| What counts as billable | Nothing. Kerux never meters your AI | A resolution, a procedure handoff or a disqualification ($0.99 each); a lead qualification ($9.99) |
| Seat pricing | Flat per agent, from $29/month | $29–$132 per seat/mo across Essential, Advanced and Expert |
| AI reply control | Auto-resolves above your confidence threshold, hands everything below it to your team, on every plan | Fin answers customers directly |
| Bill predictability | Priced per agent only. AI volume never changes your bill | Moves with Fin volume. The more the AI works, the more you pay |
What it costs in practice
5 agents, 1,000 conversations a month resolved by AI
- 5 Essential seats × $29
- $145
- 1,000 Fin outcomes × $0.99
- $990
- 5 Growth seats × $49
- $245
- 1,000 AI replies on your own key
- ≈ $30 to your provider
- Intercom seats priced at Essential ($29), their cheapest tier; Advanced and Expert cost more.
- AI cost on your own key is measured at roughly 3¢ per reply on a small, fast model, and realistically runs 1–5¢ depending on your provider, model, ticket length and how much help-centre content the AI reads. A larger knowledge base means more context per reply. You pay that to your provider, never to Kerux.
- Intercom bills at most one outcome per conversation, and doesn't bill outcomes that didn't happen, so this is their realistic worst case, not an inflated one.
- Every figure verified on Intercom's own pricing pages; see the date at the foot of this page.
Which one should you actually pick?
We'd rather you chose correctly than chose us.
Stay with Intercom if…
Intercom's messenger, product tours, outbound campaigns and lead qualification are a genuinely broad product. Kerux is a support inbox and nothing else. If you're consolidating several tools, Intercom does more of them.
Fin has had years of tuning and handles complex resolution flows. Kerux's AI is good at answering from your help centre, but it isn't trying to be an autonomous agent that runs procedures.
Because Intercom bills at most one outcome per conversation and never bills failed ones, a team with few AI-handled conversations may pay very little on top of seats. Metered pricing only hurts once the AI is doing real work.
Switch to Kerux if…
Per-outcome pricing means the bill rises exactly as the AI gets more useful. On Kerux, resolving twice as many tickets costs you the same per agent and a few cents more to your AI provider.
Kerux connects to Groq, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You pick the model and switch whenever you like. With Fin, the model is Intercom's decision.
Kerux auto-resolves only above a confidence threshold you choose, and hands everything below it to your team with a note saying why. Set it high and almost everything comes to you first; lower it as you learn to trust the replies.
How switching actually works
- 1Point your existing support address at your Kerux forwarding address. No DNS changes needed to start.
- 2Import your Intercom history from Settings → Import tickets: conversations, customers and internal notes come across with their original dates. The AI never answers imported tickets.
- 3Import your help-centre articles as .md files, or write them in Kerux. That's what the AI answers from.
- 4Set your confidence threshold high to start, so the AI only sends what it's sure of and hands the rest to your team.
- 5Raise the threshold once you trust the replies. There's no contract and no cancellation fee.
Questions people ask
On seats alone, not always. Intercom Essential is $29 per seat and Kerux Basic is also $29. The difference is the AI: Intercom adds $0.99 per outcome on top, while Kerux lets you pay your own AI provider directly, which typically works out to a few cents per reply. The more your AI resolves, the wider that gap gets.
You connect an API key from your own provider. Kerux uses it to answer and resolve tickets, and your provider bills you directly under your own terms. Kerux never marks it up and never resells you AI usage. There is no built-in or default key, you choose the provider.
Yes. Settings → Import tickets connects to Intercom with an access token and copies your conversations, customers and internal notes with their original dates. Help-centre articles come over as Markdown files. Run it again later and it skips anything already imported.
No, and it isn't trying to. Kerux is a shared support inbox with AI answers, live chat for your website, a help centre and reporting. It has no product tours, outbound marketing campaigns or lead qualification. If you need those, Intercom is the better fit.
Try it on your own tickets
30 days free, no credit card. Forward one address and see how it does.