Smart Instinct is a helpdesk implementation and AI agent setup agency. This page lists the situations where we are the wrong call, who to use instead, and what it would cost you to hire us anyway. We publish it for the same reason we publish our prices: you will find all of it out eventually, and finding out on a scoping call is cheaper for both of us than finding out in week three.
We are not a HubSpot Solutions Partner. We configure Service Hub, and we are good at it, but there is one thing a certified partner can do that we cannot. HubSpot charges a required one-time onboarding fee: $1,500 on Professional and $3,500 on Enterprise. A certified Solutions Partner can waive HubSpot's onboarding and deliver it themselves.
So if you hire us, you pay HubSpot's onboarding and then our build. If you hire a certified partner, their onboarding replaces HubSpot's, and you are not paying for the same setup twice. When onboarding is a big line on your quote, that is a real difference. Take that deal.
Hire us for HubSpot when you are already past onboarding and the work is the configuration: pipelines, properties, workflow logic, knowledge base, and the reporting that ties support back to the customer record.
Zapier bills on tasks. A native integration between two platforms usually does not, and it usually survives vendor updates better than a scenario does.
Where the two platforms already talk to each other, the honest answer is to use the native integration and spend nothing with us. We will tell you that on the call.
Hire us for Zapier when there is no native path, when the logic spans three or more systems, or when the thing you have now fails silently and nobody notices until a customer does.
RingCentral, Talkdesk and Zoom Contact Center are contact centre platforms. They route calls. They are not ticketing systems, and their own documentation does not claim otherwise.
If you arrived looking for one tool to replace both your phone system and your helpdesk, that tool does not exist, and a quote that implies it does is a quote to be careful with. It is two systems and two budget lines.
Hire us for those three when you already have a helpdesk and the problem is that calls never reach it.
We hold seven partner badges: Zendesk Preferred Partner of six years, plus Gorgias, Intercom, Aircall, Tidio, Richpanel and Zapier.
We configure twenty-one platforms. That means fourteen of them carry no badge, including ServiceNow, Zoom Contact Center and HubSpot Service Hub. Every one of those pages says so.
What a badge buys, honestly: vendor escalation paths, early access to release information, and in some cases fee waivers like HubSpot's. What it does not buy: better configuration. Weigh it accordingly, and weigh it against a firm that has the badge but has seen your problem twice instead of forty times.
A competent in-house helpdesk admin runs somewhere between $90,000 and $175,000 fully loaded. Our Professional retainer is $2,400 a month, which is $28,800 a year for twenty hours a month across every certification on the team.
Those two numbers answer different questions. If you need someone in the instance every day, who knows your product and sits in your standups, hire the admin. We are not a substitute for that and we will say so.
We are the better buy when the work is spiky: a migration, a deadline, an AI agent that needs building once and tuning quarterly, or a configuration nobody has revisited in three years.
Across the Gorgias instances we have configured, we measured 26 to 56 percent containment. That is our own number, measured in our own builds.
Gorgias publishes a higher figure. We are not going to quote theirs as ours, and we are not going to average the two into something that sounds better. If you want a projection for your instance, the audit is where that number comes from, because it depends on your ticket mix and nothing else.
We publish tier prices, and the tier you land in depends on counted scope: platforms, brands, channels, integrations, migration volume, compliance. The scoping call sets the tier. Anyone quoting a final number before that is guessing, and the guess gets corrected later, on your invoice.
Projects run in weeks and we will tell you which weeks. Carrier-dependent work like number porting runs on the carrier's clock, not ours, and that clock is not ours to compress.
Then you are probably a fit, and you already know more about how we work than most people know about a vendor they have signed with.
Bring your worst tickets.
Smart Instinct helps provide various services to optimize your help desk or contact center.
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