Why We Built Taktik — An $800/Month Wake-Up Call
Our Intercom bill hit $800/month and we were using 20% of it. So we built Taktik — affordable customer support software for teams that are done overpaying.
The Intercom Bill That Started Everything
The invoice landed on a Tuesday. $847 for the month. I stared at it for longer than I'd like to admit.
We weren't a big team. We weren't running a sophisticated, multi-channel enterprise support operation. We had a handful of agents handling customer conversations, a modest ticket volume, and a genuine desire to give our customers a good experience. That was it. And we were paying nearly $900 a month for the privilege.
This is a story a lot of support leaders know. You sign up for Intercom or Zendesk when the team is small and the price feels reasonable. Then a seat gets added here. A feature tier gets bumped there. AI resolution credits show up as a line item you didn't ask for. The annual contract renews automatically. And somewhere between onboarding and today, you ended up paying $400 to $1,200 a month for software your team uses maybe 20% of.
That Tuesday morning was when I stopped accepting it as normal.
I'm Adam, founder of Zeron Studio. What followed that invoice was six months of research, a lot of honest conversations with support teams, and eventually the decision to build Taktik — a customer support platform priced for teams that are done overpaying.
This is that origin story.
The 20% Rule — What Support Teams Actually Use
After the invoice moment, I started asking support teams a blunt question: "Walk me through a typical day. What do you actually open?"
The answers were remarkably consistent, regardless of company size or industry.
Teams use live chat — the real-time conversation window on their website or app. They use a shared inbox so agents can see what their colleagues are handling and avoid duplicate replies. They write canned responses for the questions that come up every day. They set up a handful of basic automations: route this ticket type to this team, send this message when a customer has been waiting too long.
They check simple reporting — usually just: how many conversations this week, what was our response time, where are we backed up. And on better days, they add a few articles to a knowledge base so customers can find answers themselves.
That's the 20%. The features that actually get opened, day in and day out.
The other 80% — the customer journey orchestration, the product tours, the custom bots with branching logic, the Salesforce integrations, the CSAT surveys with sentiment analysis — sits unused. Not because support teams don't care about their customers. Because they're running lean, practical operations and they need tools that meet them where they are.
The problem isn't that Intercom or Zendesk built too much. The problem is that you pay for all of it whether you use it or not.
Why "Just Switch to a Cheaper Tool" Wasn't the Answer
The obvious response to an $847 bill is to find something cheaper. And there is no shortage of cheaper options. There always has been.
But here's what I kept running into: cheap tools feel cheap. Clunky interfaces that agents dread opening. Unreliable notifications that mean conversations get dropped. Ticket systems that look like they were designed in 2009. Features that almost work but require workarounds to function properly.
The experience gap wasn't just aesthetic. It was real and it was costly — in agent frustration, in slower response times, in customer conversations that fell through the cracks.
What I couldn't find was the middle. The tool that covered the 20% of features teams actually use, charged a fair price for them, and treated the product itself as something worth taking seriously. Not a stripped-down version of Intercom with the logo changed. Something built with genuine attention, for teams under 200 people, at a price that didn't require a quarterly budget negotiation.
That gap is why Taktik exists.
What We Decided Taktik Had to Be
Before writing a line of code, we wrote principles. Not a feature list — principles. Because feature lists drift. Principles hold.
Honest pricing. No usage-based AI surcharges. No features gated behind enterprise tiers that cost triple what you're paying now. No annual contracts required to get a reasonable rate. If you have five agents, you pay for five agents. That's it.
A focused feature set. Taktik covers the 20% well: live chat, shared inbox, canned responses, basic automation, simple reporting, and a knowledge base. We are not trying to be your CRM. We are not trying to replace your marketing stack. We're building the tool your support team actually opens.
Fast and reliable. This sounds obvious, but it's where cheap tools consistently fail. Conversations can't get lost. Notifications have to work. The interface has to feel like something your agents are glad to use.
Built for teams under 200. This is a deliberate constraint, not a limitation. When you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one particularly well. Taktik is built for growing companies with real support operations and no appetite for enterprise pricing.
You can learn more about what we're building at taktik.xyz.
And if you're curious why our costs are genuinely lower than what Intercom or Zendesk charge — not just marginally lower, but structurally lower — it comes down to how we build. We use AI agents to build our software, which means the engineering costs that would normally require millions in salaries cost us a fraction of that. Those savings go into fair pricing, not margin.
Who We Built It For (And Who We Didn't)
Being honest about this felt important from the start.
Taktik is built for the VP of Support or Head of Customer Experience at a company with 10 to 150 people. The person who owns the support operation, knows exactly how many tickets came in last week, and has a strong opinion about response time SLAs. The person who's had the Zendesk renewal conversation one too many times and knows there has to be a better way.
It's also built for the COO or operations lead at a growing company who inherited the support stack and is quietly questioning why it costs what it costs. The person who's trying to run a practical, efficient operation without compromising the customer experience their team works hard to deliver.
If you're managing a 10-person support team, handling a few hundred conversations a month, and looking for software that covers the essentials without the bloat or the bill — that's exactly who we had in mind.
Who Taktik is not for:
If you need enterprise-grade multi-product support across five brands with regional compliance requirements and a dedicated Salesforce integration, Taktik is probably not the right fit right now. We'd rather be honest about that than sell you something that won't serve you well.
Taktik is also not for teams that genuinely use the advanced features they're paying for. If you've built sophisticated customer journey workflows in Intercom and your team relies on them daily, the switching cost probably isn't worth it. We're here for the teams who are paying for that complexity but not using it.
The Founding Guild — How Real Teams Are Shaping It
Here's something we do differently: we don't scale before we're ready.
Before Taktik becomes a mainstream product with marketing behind it and a sales team, we're recruiting a Founding Guild — a small group of 5 to 10 companies who come in early, use the product in production, and tell us honestly what's working and what isn't.
Founding Guild members get six months free for their entire team at launch. In exchange, we get real feedback from real support operations. Not surveys or NPS scores — actual conversations about what the product needs to do better.
This is the opposite of the VC-funded "ship fast, fix later" model. We're building something worth using before we tell the world about it. The teams who join the Founding Guild aren't beta testers. They're collaborators. Their priorities become our roadmap.
It's a model rooted in the same belief that runs through everything we do at Zeron: that the best software gets built with the people who use it, not just for them.
If you're curious about the broader thinking behind this approach, the case for stopping the SaaS rent cycle gets into why we think this model — fair pricing, honest features, people-shaped roadmaps — is the right way to build.
If This Sounds Like Your Team
If you read the part about the $847 invoice and felt something — recognition, maybe, or the quiet frustration of a cost you've accepted for too long — that's who we built this for.
Taktik won't be the right fit for everyone. But for support teams at growing companies who want affordable customer support software that covers what they actually use, without the enterprise price tag or the bloated feature set they'll never touch, it's worth a conversation.
You can see where things stand at taktik.xyz.
And if you're interested in joining the Founding Guild — shaping the product before it scales, six months free — you can get in touch through our services page or reach out directly. We're a small operation built by a solo founder, and we talk to everyone who reaches out like a person.
That's the whole pitch. No urgency tactics, no limited-time offers. Just an honest product for teams that are done renting software they don't fully use.