I’ve been looking at this AppSumo Re:Plain deal for quite a while and it looks unique and interesting. Not perfect, perhaps, but I can see its usefulness at a glance, so perhaps it is worth taking a thorough look.
As always, this is a Preview, meaning we have NOT purchased the AppSumo deal yet. We are looking at the website description and the deal description. After that we will decide whether we want to take it for a spin and what are our expectations. So, one big question at a time: Shall We Take it For a Spin?
What’s The Deal
Where to find it: Re:Plain AppSumo Deal | Re:Plain Website
What is it? Live Chat for Websites with limited automated responses and unique social integration for operators as well as users
Who is it for? Any Website owner aiming to provide a live chat for any reason
What do we get? Up to 3 stacks – 3 stacks means unlimited everything.
Looking through Re:Plain
Re:Plain is a chat widget you can add on any website, nothing fancy here. What is fancy is that Re:Plain’s chat is directed by bots that transfer messages to any operator that has been added to that particular website, with a back and forth between operators and website users, all through this chat-bot and via normal social networks.
That seems odd, right? Sure, at first glance it’s not something that has been done before, and that is the uniqueness. The usefulness and beauty I can see is that it allows any chat operator to use their regular social accounts, and they answer with that while maintaining complete privacy.
I understand it may sound a bit confusing, but going through the documentation (which is very well written and explained, kudos to that) it is not very difficult to setup nor is it difficult to operate. It only takes a bit to get into the right mindset, as it is not common.
There are no website control panels, no backend for you to log into. Everything is done through Telegram, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp (they’re still finishing out on WhatsApp as of this writing it seems, but it does work mostly already).
Sometimes that may not be optimal, but it gives you a very amazing portability and that is why the deal can be generous with users and operator, I guess. Most of the infrastructure is not theirs to maintain and it is very efficient and robust, so it is a good backbone to have.
Also, since multiple social networks are available, there is not a very huge risk of these networks all together shutting it down, making it somewhat safe even if it is not all their infrastructure.
We can see from this picture taken from their website an example of how it works.
- Website Visitor sees a Widget (White-Labeled for 3 stacks!)
- Website Visitor (WV) sends a message on the chat
- Replain bot relays that message to operators for that website
- One operator presses the little pencil emoji, thus engaging the WV
- Operator writes and Replain bot relays the message to WV
Additional operations are available via Power-Ups
Re:Plain’s Pricing
According to their Pricing Page as of the 26th of April 2020, Re:Plain is completely Free to use, you only pay for the Power-Ups you want, either as a subscription for each feature you want or as a comprehensive subscription that gets you everything they offer.
Whereas here is what you get from AppSumo’s Re:Plain Deal:
By looking at this Pricing, what looks really good to me is the 3-stacks plan, which gives unlimited everything (and future plan updates are part of the deal, of course).
Re:Plain’s PowerUps
The basic chat widget works but it seems to be barebone, as features beyond basic capabilities are delivered as single power-ups from what I can see on Re:Plain’s Add-Ons page.
That is alright since they are added to unlimited plans as well, so it gives the chance for people on a budget to pick what they actually need, and if you can get an unlimited subscription you can just use anything as the product keeps evolving (and it seems to be evolving – Since their launch on AppSumo, they’ve added WhatsApp for operators, that’s really a huge deal!)
I currently see 13 Power-Ups available on their website:
- Conversation Ratings
- My Messengers (direct Social Networks Links)
- Custom Forms
- Schedule
- Automate Support (very basic questions/answers, not an actual bot)
- Chat History
- Black List
- Click-to Chat link
- Video Welcome Message
- Active Invitation
- Zapier Integration
- Banners
- Analytics
I can see some of these features as situational but quite a few would be very important to have in most cases. Fortunately, with AppSumo’s deal, we can get all of those if we go for 3 stacks.
White-Labeling is available ONLY for the end-user, Operators will always talk through Replain bot, so that cannot be removed.
Re:Plain Preview Final Thoughts
From what I have been reading there is only one possible con and one doubt I have, to be seen:
- With BIG websites it may be difficult to handle all the operations from within just that one chat tab. We’re talking about 10+ active chats at the same time. It could get.. difficult for the operators.
They are aware of this issue when scaling operations and I believe they’re considering how to tackle the issue, if it’s possible at all. - The Question/Response Add-On seems rather limited for now.
Considering the back-end they are using and the fact that it is a bot already, there are HUGE possibilities there to add proper bot-flows, with back-end flow creation.
That would make this skyrocket with tons of possibilities, but it’d be quite a huge undertaking which I do not believe is a focus.
Catch our Re:Plain Review to read more about Re:Plain
Re:Plain Preview Card
Name: Re:Plain
Description: Re:Plain is a chat widget for your website that uses bots to allow operators to use their social media messengers (Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger) to interact with their website visitors.
Offer price: 49+
Currency: USD
Application Category: Live Chat
Summary
Re:Plain looks very useful, with active development and plenty use-cases. AppSumo’s deal also seems great both with capabilities and pricing.
We will try Re:Plain out and we also have an immediate use-case which will help us test it in a live environment.
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