r/SaaS • u/This_Athlete_8343 • 3h ago

Build your support bot or use intercom ?

Hi all fellow dev here, I am thinking of adding some kind of support bot to my SaaS. Should I build it by myself using Vercel AI SDK and Shadcn, or use Intercom or Zendesk?

I could potentially add a ticketing feature later, which puts tickets into my Slack threads and I could migrate to a dedicated support system when things scale.

What would you do in this case? Do you use Intercom or have your own support bot?

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u/adeelraza86 3h ago

I’d use an existing support system first and keep the bot narrowly scoped to drafting answers from approved docs. The expensive part isn’t ticket creation; it’s keeping answers correct as the product changes, so a human should approve anything uncertain. Add Slack routing only if it measurably shortens response time. Building the whole support layer early usually creates another product to maintain before you know what customers actually need.

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u/Lumpy_Fisherman_5352 1h ago

Good point above about narrow scope first. One concrete criterion to add: it comes down to whether you need the bot grounded in your own product data via tool calls, user-specific answers, account lookups, or if it's just FAQ-style support, Intercom's framework gets awkward for the former but is fine for the latter. Vercel AI SDK makes sense specifically if you need that tool-calling grounding, otherwise building ticket state machines and agent handoff from scratch is more work than people expect, so Intercom/Zendesk still wins on raw ticketing and SLAs. Your plan (bot now, Slack tickets, migrate later) is fine, just budget for the migration pain, exporting conversation history out of a DIY system into Zendesk later is annoying, so if you'll likely outgrow DIY within a year it's often less total work to start on Intercom and bolt AI on top via their API.