Help desks & live chat: the tech stack of 26 real products
Ticketing, shared inboxes, live chat and AI support agents for websites.
The typical stack
The leading pick where at least 8 of them show the decision and the leader has at least a quarter of it.
| Decision | Most common pick | Share | At default usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frontend Framework | 14 of 21 · 67% | — | |
| Database | 6 of 16 · 38% | — | |
| Payments | 10 of 15 · 67% | fees on revenue · $410 on $10,000/mo | |
| LLM API | 14 of 14 · 100% | $10/mo · GPT-6 Luna | |
| Transactional Email | 7 of 14 · 50% | $20/mo · Essentials 50k | |
| Hosting | 5 of 13 · 38% | $12/mo · Workers Paid | |
| Product Analytics | 6 of 8 · 75% | $0/mo · Pay-as-you-go | |
| Web Analytics | Google Analytics | 5 of 8 · 63% | $0/mo · Standard |
Monthly bills add up to about $42 at the calculators' default usage, list prices; fees on revenue (Stripe) come on top. Set your own usage →
What they chose, decision by decision
Among the help desks & live chat that show each choice, from makers' products and open-source code alike.
Small samples, fewer than 8 products: Authentication (Clerk 2, Auth.js 2) · Error Monitoring (Sentry 5) · Image & Video Hosting (sharp 3, Cloudinary 1) · Backend Framework (Express 2, Hono 1) · Background Jobs & Cron (Temporal 2, Inngest 1) · Database Access & ORMs (Prisma 3, Drizzle ORM 1) · File Storage (Amazon S3 2, Vercel Blob 1) · AI SDK & Agent Framework (AI SDK 3) · Newsletter (Kit 2, Ghost 1) · Vector Database (Pinecone 2, pgvector 1)
Help desks & live chat we track
22 makers' products and 4 open-source projects. Makers' products first.