Why would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin?
This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.
This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.
I built an AI support agent in one week. It hooks into our knowledge base, app API, runs tests, and then finally sends a Yes|No|Other option to a real human to send back to the customer. It was surprisingly easy to build. The hardest part was the knowledge of how to help the customer, which Fin can't do for me anyway.
I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. There is no model training needed. It's all context. Anyone who is training a Qwen model for their customer support is doing it wrong. Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there. The technical stuff is really easy to build.
"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there"
You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop.
Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend suite to help you build out areas where Fin is failing. It shows you questions it couldn't resolve, looks at the answers your human team gave, and suggests updates to help articles to
You're correct this could all be build by a skilled engineer, but that's not the point. It's built for non-techincal users to use and implement. A person who rose through the support ranks and shows some technical competency can learn the system without any software knowledge.
The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it.
You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days.
Maybe you've done this yourself. I'm honestly jealous if solving customer support was as easy as your describe.
In my case, I've spent the past 12 months running implementations at multiple companies. I've engaged directly with smart engineering teams to assist. It was not that easy.
What you outlined might work for a simple ecom business. It probably does 95% of the job for a simple case where you're delivering information. But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data.
That leads to the exact issue people here complain about... an LLM that doesn't actually answer the question, can't solve the problem, and is worse than talking to a human
But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data.
And why would Fin be better here? It's very easy to give your agent context on the customer.
In 2026, every time I've tried to build a custom tool to replace a SaaS, I've succeeded. The biggest problem with SaaS is that they build a one size fits all. When you build a custom tool, you control everything from data to UI and it works for your business.
Many, many people do not have the capacity to build and maintain custom solutions (whether in-house skills, or simply bandwidth) and therefore outsource to vendors.
It's an incredibly common aspect of business. Enterprise level contracts often include the sort of white glove service to help fill in these sort of gaps. On simpler plans, having the tooling provided frees up just enough capacity to handle the exceptions to keep the process running smoothly (since one doesn't have to build and run simultaneously).
Sometimes people want to minimize the hassle with stuff. It's why car washes and oil change places and coffee shops exist.
I agree with you 100%. Fin and products like this simply do NOT solve the hard part of providing support in 2026. Basically, the hard parts are (1) coming up with the tools for agents to use, like searching for data, making updates, etc. (2) reviewing the logs of actual usage and adjusting prompts, docs, tools based on the real feedback. (3) tuning human escalation procedures.
This process is an ongoing effort, with an upfront engineering commitment which depends entirely on the product, but can be months of work. But if you have your own backend, I would argue this hard works is made HARDER by implementing something like Salesforce/Fin, because you have to now pipe a bunch of data and structure over to them, which is a pain.
LLM models capable of doing this are a commodity, the UI for customers and support teams is pretty trivial, the database/backend is trivial.
Outside of some cases, if you have your own app, and you have a given support volume, build your own.
A recent example is that we replaced our support ticket system with an in-house built one. The new system lives in the same database as our app. Every ticket now has real live customer data. You can't get this kind of integration easily using a 3rd party tool.
It was surprisingly easy to build. Just took 2-3 days for us. Massive improvement in productivity. Took about $100 in tokens to build. Maybe an hour of maintenance work per week.
Doing this would've be seen as crazy in 2023. But in 2026, it's often an advantage. Better, more integrated, cheaper, faster.
I'm happy to buy if it's something I know we don't have the expertise to build. For example, you'll never catch me saying we need to build our own database. But for something like Fin, I know exactly how to build it for my company and I think I can build a better agent with better context, faster iteration, cheaper, and more tailored to my company's business.
I hear you -- you and other teams are capable of building internal versions that just work.
I'm equally excited -- I've spent much of my career building janky internal versions of popular SaaS out of necessity since we didn't have the budget to buy. To be able to do a better job with less effort is enticing.
But this is:
a) a step-change that hasn't had a full year to bake; we should all anticipate the pain associated in the medium term after a few iterations, inevitable feature add-ons, etc.
b) beside the point.
Yes, many teams can also build internally, but it doesn't change the fact that others find value in outsourcing. Just because it's much easier, or rather __because__ it's easier to stand stuff up, it's imperative we prioritize what gets built.
If [Anthropic](https://fin.ai/customers/anthropic) themselves are willing to vouch for the value-add, I think it's silly to suggest that teams with budget and higher priorities should trade the time and focus to roll their own.
the bulk of the context engineering for users of these ai support platforms is done in the platform
and the amount of context needed to automate f500 is non trivial, plus you usually cant use reasoning because latency would blow up and you get escalated on
if this was so easy as you claim theres many millions for you to be made selling it to enterprises, but you wont
F500 is exactly the kind of scale where I fully expect support agents to be developed in house. They'll try Fin. Then one day, a single dev inside the company demos a custom agent that outperforms Fin and cost almost nothing.
tech forward f500 is possible (but.. even anthropic used fin)
most f500s are going to outsource. i think sierra is already at 40% of the f50? and each of those deals they have to compete against teams of inhouse engineers and convince execs to buy instead of build
the reality is agents at scale is a hard problem and most f500 engineers are not equipped to solve it
Have fun sinking 100s of hours into improving and maintaing that. Someone who sells software for real estate probably doesnt want to get into building software for customer service agents. This makes no sense. There should be urgency to make the product your selling better, not wasting time building support tools. Just pay for it.
> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin.
Y'all really over indexing on the "AI"-ness of intercom. Intercom is a chat box and help pages. Those are nice to have and nice to not have to build yourself (you can build your own help pages... great, now you're managing content and have to have an admin to update the docs etc!)
People here really forgetting the notion of "core competency".
Rolling something yourself was a waste of time when SaaS was cheap and competitive.
Not they’re all getting incredibly expensive, even the last few startups I worked at were paying hundreds of thousands of euros for services that were total garbage.
Do I really need a crappy 20k/yr app to help me with my 1:1s? Do I really need a 100k/yr clicks counter that requires two devs to keep running and still heavily miscounts the clicks? Do I need another crappy app to manage my translation JSON files?
> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin.
The value, of course, is that there is a website with a chatbox that some MBA can type in "never give any refunds anymore for any reason", and it just updates the AI support agent and sends an automated "I deserve a promotion and a raise" to their boss.
Yes. I agree. When I look at Fin's home page and marketing, I think to myself that this stuff can mostly just be text documentation given to an LLM. It's a tool built for MBAs but most of the work is done by a software engineer to give Fin that context in the first place.
So all Fin is is a UI on top of the context engineering done by a software engineer who integrated with Fin. It's extremely easy to duplicate Fin's UI and get rid of the $250k fee.
You'll need an SRE for Fin too. How else can Fin get access to your customer's data?
It takes the same amount of time to build a custom agent as an agent on Fin. All Fin does is provide a fancy UI for non-technical people to create rules.
They can create the same rules in plain text. If they want a fancy UI like Fin to do it, just build one in a day.
They call it rules? Because of course one of the defining properties of LLMs is that they can decide to deviate, reinterpret, or ... rules. Which makes them more like guidelines, or so the meme goes.
Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors.
I think they mostly benefit from time in market and name recognition. The AI angle was a good bet to make when they made it, but is increasingly less of a differentiator.
I don't think SaaS is dead - but I think for a product like Intercom, that is very expensive, they get eaten alive by smaller SaaS + in-house AI agent.
The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house.
There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level where the economics could feasibly make in-house work?
The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house.
$0.99 could be the profit margin of small ecommerce businesses too so it might not make sense for small businesses.
Let's say the small e-commerce business does 500 of these outcomes per month. ~$500 all-in cost at Fin.
I'm curious how you would calculate the other side of the ledger, the in-house approach. Assume the e-commerce business does not employ any AI/ML experts or programmers or anyone whose workday has ever been interrupted by a Github outage (this is the normal case for most businesses, not an artificial handicap). I'm curious how you would structure things to make an in-house more efficient than the $500/mo all-in.
You are right. These outcomes also skew heavily towards the easy stuff for LLMs to get. So tickets that take a human 1 min to respond to now cost you $0.99 ($60+/hour) and you are stuck only doing the hard tickets.
All these people saying UI/UX is dead, then I see their designs and they're absolutely the worst (but they're always swearing by how incredible it is).
Sorry access to an LLM (even if it could center a div reliably and make a responsive designs, it can't) does not give you taste, intuition or make you good at building user interfaces. You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX.
Its insulting when you people say these things and Im not even a designer or frontend dev.
I actually think UI/UX designers and devs will be the last to fall. I will want beautiful products that were built by beautiful minds, thats how you will set yourself apart from the slop. And fortunately it will be even easier when 80% of everything is half assed cranked out UI by llm design tools. The contrast is already glaring.
> I actually think UI/UX designers and devs will be the last to fall. I will want beautiful products that were built by beautiful minds
as an aside, i do find it interesting how people around me are more reluctant to have an ai design the look of an app vs a human, yet having an ai design the more important parts (how it works) is totally fine to them...
> You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX.
i could say the same about code though... why is ui/ux some sacred cow but code isn't? its just as important no?
> Its insulting when you people say these things and Im not even a designer or frontend dev.
playing devils advocate, but again, why is code any different?
Internal projects can get done with less of either.
Nobody really cares about great UX or about how great someone can implement a CRUD app.
So there will be less need/fighting over such resources.
If I can just generate a usable UI for a hobby project I don't need to find some company to build it out. Sure, it will miss out on a lot of stuff but it's a trade off.
If someone else can build a product and needed a basic web shop / crud app, they don't need to find someone to implement that at a massive overcharge.
And it’s fulfilled my needs better than v0, lovable, playwright via LLM or just iterating in the coding LLM. I’ve worked with graphic designers my whole career and have also contracted design agencies to do style guides and collaborate on branding and layouts. I’ve gotten the output that I’m looking for with Claude Design
eventually you’ll see examples but its not in my purview to publicly link any of my projects as being vibe coded
They also committed genocide as well. Surprising that even after Israeli human rights organizations acknowledge it, it still remains stuck in the mind of capitalists to support profit at any cost.
Interesting question. Trotsky argued that the Nazis were essentially a middle-class phenomena, the forces of capital and labour being weakened to naught by the first world war; once the Nazis achieved power, they had to decide between them, that choice being made on the night of the long knives and the liquidation of the brownshirts.
Anyone can name themselves anything.
Would you say that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is indeed democratic?
I am going to guess not.
'Socialism' was rather popular in the early part of the 20th century and National Socialism was a right wing response to that, hence the marketing name.
It was very much corporatist/pro capitalist in its policies and suppressed anything remotely socialist within its borders.
It was also attempting a to create a centrally planned economy that would provide for all the populations needs and eliminate the concept of class. Which to me is socialism.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
I'm saying you leaving a comment taking the name "National Socialist" literally is a well trodden path of misinformation and a long standing part of the post-war revisionism, such as the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth and the Double Genocide myth. It is not worth discussing seriously with you in particular, and I am writing for those reading these comments.
The Nazi party purposefully used the term "Socialist" as a method to draw people away from the actual socialist workers groups of the time.
These talking points are intended to blur the line of the very real evils of Nazi Germany.
These same talking points are used by actual racists, anti-Semites, and modern fascists to distance themselves from the real historical example of what happens when their views gain traction. Similar to how people who participate in Holocaust denial would be rooting for the very same Holocaust.
Well this is surprising for a few reasons. And pretty offensive. For what it's worth I'm pretty much the reverse of an anti Semite.
Pointing out that the Nazi party called themselves national socialists and had socialist policies does not make me a holocaust denier, Nazi apologist or anything else that you are attempting to label me as.
Your reaction to what I said is genuinely baffling to me. I'm a liberal through and through. The common enemy of communists and Nazis was liberals. In my view Nazis and communists are both sides of the same brutal coin.
I don't think you can be authoritarian and socialist. The structures of strict hierarchy necessary to be authoritarian necessarily oppose the egalitarian goals of socialism.
Many, many socialists condemn the Soviets, and even fought against them. Very few socialists believe that forcing the populace at gunpoint to be communist is a good plan.
Apart from the Socialist roots of the Nazi party (hence the name) and Fascism (Mussolini) , they have practiced a state planned economy which was far closer to Stalin's Soviet Union than to the United States
This doesn't mean the Nazis were not very much anti-communist, but subscribing Nazism to Capitalism is an extremely flat ideology-driven version of history
The libertarian / Randite strand of American hyper-capitalist ideology is ascendant and somewhat hegemonic in North American political education in schools and the like and it defines as "socialist" anything which involves "the government." To the point that we have people complaining in earnest that things Trump is doing that don't fit their Milton Friedman vibes are "socialist."
It deliberately strips the "social" part out of the ideological framing and replaces it with the state.
Which is also helped by the fact that "actual existing socialism" in the USSR etc did the same.
Also doesn't help that there has been effectively no organized socialist political presence in American politics (apart from the DSA pushing on the Democrats left wing, and Sanders I guess). This means that American politics reduces completely to a false "liberal" ("left" somehow) vs "conservative" dichotomy, both labels which don't describe anything about what they are anymore.
I've watched so many Americans get squirrely online when I've tried to draw a line on my own political viewpoint; no, I'm not liberal, I'm a socialist. This breaks their brains. Does not compute. Increasingly unfortunately here in Canada as well, partially as the NDP's unfortunate willingness to prop up Trudeau's Liberals when they were a minority.
I sometimes feel like we just need new, untainted, words.
National Socialists were capitalists.. You known that right? Not everything with socialsts in the name begets communism, they served Industry and Capital to the fullest and sought to crush any leftist cause.
Hitler explicitly adopted socialist & anti-capitalist rhetoric early on had heavy state control of industry and price controls in place.
Political extremist always pander to control the people who will listen to them, selling lies at worst or at best hope that depends on a lack of understanding of human behavior and economics to follow things to their natural conclusions. Nazis, Socialists, Marxists, and Communists are all authoritarian extremist who share the same values.
Apart from other mentions, they also did cutting edge research on nuclear power and weapons. Some of the scientists understood how massive an undertaking that was, however the political leadership apparently did not, or the world would look different today.
The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse in 1938, and completed in 1941. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. [c] Wikipedia
Most of that stuff was just torture for the sake of cruelty. It lacked the scientific rigor needed to classify it as even remotely close to research, so most of the "data" collected is completely worthless.
Turns out you can't do proper experiments when the subjects are also being starved and worked to death, when you lack a proper control group, or when you interpret all the results from a heavily racist perspective. And that doesn't even touch the completely nonsensical hypotheses yet.
How big are those projects.. I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health. Problem solving keeps your brain strong. The laziness in us is inclined to take shortcuts, don't do it. Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer.
You absolutely can have the LLM write maintainable code. A few tricks I use are to ask it to plan out features in phases, and then do a branch and a PR for each focused piece of work. It makes it a lot easier to review and understand what's happening.
I also ended up making a tool which lets the LLM get a high level perspective of the codebase, and then see parts that are structurally gnarly. I've been using it to do refactors and clean things up periodically. It helped a lot with keeping the architecture clean.
Define big I guess. They're non-trivial, mix of internal enterprise tools, a multiplatform app (android/ios/mac/windows/web currently headbutting its way through review), including a billing system for my small telecommunications business.
> I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health
I find the experience of doing it without writing the code to be intellectually pretty similar. I still solve a lot of problems, the LLM couldn't, for example, one shot the event sourcing model I built for synching data between devices. It took quite a few iterations and I had to define a lot of the architecture, but I did it at a level that wasn't "here is a class, here is a module, this module does XYZ", more at the "whitepaper" level or describing how specific bits of the app needed to work in order to solve some problem.
It's also very similar to managing other developers.
> Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer
It's more similar to having staff rather than doing everything yourself. The problem solving just shifts to a different area, and you get more done.
Coding is not the sole problem solving skill. In fact, coding may be one of the easier skills much of the time. Deciding what to build, where to focus efforts, understanding a customer's needs, could all be just as if not more challenging than the coding part.
Also what the code should do and how it should do it. LLMs regularly cannot come up with the best way to approach something. Once those decisions are made, codifying them is kind of the least interesting part of the entire exercise.
A reasonable compromise in the face of frostbite and hookworm.
I suppose critical thinking skills are also as bad, making you question the state of the world. Problem solving is another one, deluding one into believing there are solutions to suffering.
I think this is false. New ideas are born every minute, and llms arent going to help people with those for the most part, they'll end up steering you back towards the gradient if you do.
Can you give us an example of a new idea that is not derivative of something that already exists? Should only take about a minute.
Snark aside (and apologies), there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "no new ideas" take and nobody should think there is. Humans tend to work collectively, try as we might to do or appear otherwise, and often come to the same conclusions through reasoning and logic. No one-person truly invented the light bulb, etc, when really all inventive thought is branches of derivative thought as we build our collective knowledgebase. A better question would be how many novel ideas are the logical conclusion of branches of derivative thought and how many are tangential brought about by the injection of our irrationally.
So I guess it was a dig on OP not just giving himself equal, but top billing somehow, over his girlfriend on creating a child.
Wow those 6 seconds you contributed were what made the difference, big guy. Not the 9 months of gestation, by any means. let's hear it for OP and his splooge everyone, and so on. You get the picture.
I'm not sure what's going on exactly with Gen Z males, it's an interesting phenomenon. I wouldn't expect that kind of dialog from GenX or Boomers even.
Forces me to rotate to get warning message to disappear (works fine on portrait, but regardless forces me to play with two hands..), when rotate doesnt even fit on phone.
fROnTEnD DeV Is DeAd
DeSiGN Is DeAD
Cool idea tho, could be a fun game if if the UX wasnt so hostile.
These things can't even center a div correctly half the time.
Not everything is code. Just because it generates a shitty SaaS clone for you and that seemed magical, it does not mean we are approaching "AGI".
An AGI could design an Oil tanker, manage the project from start to finish, handle all contract negotiations and purchasables, payroll, scheduling. Then it could do that 50x over and start a leading logistics firms.
In reality an LLM can't even complete upwork projects that are worth $20 an hour more than 4% or the time.
4% guys, 4%. It cannot complete entry level work on fucking Upwork 96% of the time. Stop falling for the marketing and sorry but an LLM will never be AGI.
Its literally just text autocomplete with some RLHF post training, holy shit im losing my mind. I want this hype to end so badly holy shit I need this to end.
These guys are working with the feds. This is a giant psyop from the start. Make Anthropic look like they're harnessing dangerous powers, portray them as counter to government.
They aren't counter to the government, this is all kayfabe to introduce precedence for the US government to be justified in putting controls on AI, expect that by the end of the month there are discussions to regulate Deepseek.
It could be the case that Anthropic created this whole situation on their own, I figured they'd release a "dangerous" model at some point then piggy back off of bad outcomes to dig their regulatory moat
It could also be the case that Altman has close ties to the white house and is using regulatory levers on his competion.
I stand by that its all Kayfabe to make AI look more dangerous than it is (it cant even center a div reliably) to justify controls on Open Source.
This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product.
SaaS is alive and well and will continue to be.
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