# Clanker Support

> An AI-powered support agent for your site — install it with one script tag or one React Server Component (@clankersupport/widget-rsc on npm). It answers from your docs and sources, then escalates to your team. Open source (MIT) and self-hostable (bring your own keys); the hosted version has flat monthly plans from $19/mo (50% off right now) with no per-seat fees.

Official ways to install:

- Script tag: paste one `<script>` before `</body>` — the widget mounts in an isolated shadow DOM, inherits your brand color, and needs no build step.
- React / Next.js SDK: `npm install @clankersupport/widget-rsc` (React 19 — Next.js 15+ App Router or any RSC framework), then render one `<ClankerSupport apiKey="pk_…" />` Server Component in your root layout; no script tag. Restyle the default UI with its `.clanker-*` classes and `--clanker-*` CSS variables, or build a fully custom UI with the headless primitives and `useClankerSupport()` hook from `@clankersupport/widget-rsc/headless` — which also ships a client-rendered `ClankerSupportWidget` for non-RSC React apps.
- Backend packages: `clankersupport` on PyPI (Python — `script_tag()` for FastAPI, Django, Flask) and on RubyGems (Ruby, with a Rails `clanker_support_tag` view helper), plus `clankersupport/clankersupport-php` on Packagist (PHP, with a Laravel `@clankerSupport` Blade directive) — each renders the same script tag server-side from your project key.

The agent answers from a per-project knowledge base (page URLs, text snippets, and Q&A pairs) with your own system prompt and per-project model choice. Visitors introduce themselves by name (email optional). When the visitor asks for a human (the widget offers this after a configurable number of messages, or immediately on an explicit request), the conversation escalates: your team is notified by email and optionally Slack, the visitor sees a recap of the handoff right in the chat, and the agent stands down — fully silent once a human replies. Replies from the team inbox appear in the widget and go out by email when the visitor shared an address; email replies from the visitor thread back into the same conversation, and visitors can mark their conversation resolved. Quality is tracked with per-message thumbs up/down ratings plus a 1–5 CSAT score.

## Product
- [Overview](https://clankersupport.com/): What Clanker Support is and how the drop-in agent works.
- [Docs](https://docs.clankersupport.com): The product docs and knowledge base — getting started plus a how-to guide for every dashboard page.
- [React / Next.js SDK](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@clankersupport/widget-rsc): @clankersupport/widget-rsc on npm — the widget as one Server Component in your root layout, with a headless entry for custom UIs.
- [Backend SDKs](https://docs.clankersupport.com/sdks): Official packages for Python (PyPI), Ruby (RubyGems), and PHP (Packagist) — render the embed snippet from your backend.
- [GitHub](https://github.com/theopenco/llmchat): The open-source (MIT) codebase — self-host the full stack with your own keys.
- [Live demo](https://showcase.clankersupport.com): The real widget running on a first-party demo page — try it before installing.
- [Templates](https://clankersupport.com/templates): One-click deploy starters — Next.js, TanStack Start, React Router, Laravel, and FastAPI — with the support agent pre-wired.
- [Compare](https://clankersupport.com/compare): How Clanker Support compares to other AI support tools.
- [Pricing](https://clankersupport.com/pricing.md): Machine-readable plans — self-host free; hosted Starter $19/mo, Growth $89/mo, Scale $299/mo (50% off right now) (annual = two months free).

## Features
- [Drop-in widget](https://clankersupport.com/features/drop-in-widget): One script tag. Loads in a shadow DOM so your styles never leak — and theirs never leak into you.
- [Answers from your docs](https://clankersupport.com/features/answers-from-your-docs): Paste your knowledge base or system prompt. The agent stays on-topic and admits when it doesn't know.
- [Escalates to humans](https://clankersupport.com/features/escalates-to-humans): Customers reach a human in one tap — the conversation lands in your inbox with full context. No lost threads.
- [Email threading](https://clankersupport.com/features/email-threading): Replies go out as email and customer responses thread back into the same conversation automatically.
- [Your model, any time](https://clankersupport.com/features/any-model-any-time): Built on LLM Gateway. Pick from a curated catalog of web-search-capable models per project — a config change, not a rewrite.
- [Self-hostable](https://clankersupport.com/features/self-hostable): Open architecture on serverless edge infra. Run the whole stack on your own account. No surprise vendors.

## Use cases
- [AI support for E-commerce stores](https://clankersupport.com/use-cases/ecommerce): Answer shipping, returns, and sizing questions instantly — and hand the tricky orders to your team.
- [AI support for SaaS & startups](https://clankersupport.com/use-cases/saas-startups): Deflect setup, billing, and how-to tickets from your docs so a small team can focus on shipping.
- [AI support for Documentation & dev tools](https://clankersupport.com/use-cases/documentation): Turn your docs into a conversational assistant that answers technical questions in context.
- [AI support for Car rental & mobility](https://clankersupport.com/use-cases/car-rental): Answer rental requirements, insurance, and policy questions — and route real bookings to staff.
- [AI support for Real estate](https://clankersupport.com/use-cases/real-estate): Answer listing and process questions 24/7, then route serious leads to an agent.
- [AI support for Hotels & hospitality](https://clankersupport.com/use-cases/hospitality): Answer check-in, amenity, and local questions any hour, and hand real requests to your staff.

## Free tools
- [AI support savings calculator](https://clankersupport.com/tools/support-roi-calculator): See how many hours and dollars AI support would save your team each month.
- [CSAT calculator](https://clankersupport.com/tools/csat-calculator): Turn survey responses into a CSAT score and see how you rank against benchmarks.
- [Canned response generator](https://clankersupport.com/tools/canned-response-generator): Build polished, personal support replies for refunds, bugs, outages, and more.
- [llms.txt generator](https://clankersupport.com/tools/llms-txt-generator): Generate a spec-correct llms.txt so AI assistants can navigate your site.

## Comparisons
- [Clanker Support vs Chatbase](https://clankersupport.com/vs/chatbase): Clanker Support installs with a single script tag — or one React Server Component — goes live in minutes, and lets you swap underlying AI models without touching your code. Chatbase is a full platform with stronger multi-channel support. Choose Clanker Support if you want simplicity and model flexibility. Choose Chatbase if you need WhatsApp, Slack, or Messenger support today.
- [Clanker Support vs Chatwoot](https://clankersupport.com/vs/chatwoot): Both Clanker Support and Chatwoot are MIT-licensed and self-hostable. The difference is scope and stack: Chatwoot is a full multi-channel platform running on Rails + PostgreSQL; Clanker Support is a focused widget running serverless on workerd via Ploy. Choose Chatwoot for multi-channel coverage and the larger OSS community. Choose Clanker Support for a lighter setup and model flexibility.
- [Clanker Support vs Crisp](https://clankersupport.com/vs/crisp): Crisp is an all-in-one support + CRM platform with flat pricing and European hosting. Clanker Support is a focused drop-in widget with model-agnostic AI and self-hosting. Choose Crisp if you need CRM features, omnichannel, or EU data residency. Choose Clanker Support if you want the simplest possible setup and model flexibility.
- [Clanker Support vs Fin](https://clankersupport.com/vs/fin): Fin charges per resolved outcome and runs on proprietary AI models with deep enterprise integrations. Clanker Support uses flat monthly pricing, is model-agnostic, and is self-hostable. Choose Fin if you have high resolution volume and need deep helpdesk integrations. Choose Clanker Support if you want predictable pricing and model flexibility.
- [Clanker Support vs Intercom](https://clankersupport.com/vs/intercom): Intercom is a full customer communication platform — support, sales, and marketing in one. If you need all three, it's a powerful investment. If you only need a support widget, you're paying for a lot you won't use. Clanker Support is purpose-built for support and costs significantly less.

## Migration guides
- [Migrate from Chatbase to Clanker Support](https://clankersupport.com/docs/migrate/chatbase): From the Chatbase embed to a single Clanker Support script tag
- [Migrate from Chatwoot to Clanker Support](https://clankersupport.com/docs/migrate/chatwoot): From a self-hosted Rails stack to serverless Clanker Support
- [Migrate from Crisp to Clanker Support](https://clankersupport.com/docs/migrate/crisp): From the all-in-one Crisp platform to a focused Clanker Support widget
- [Migrate from Fin to Clanker Support](https://clankersupport.com/docs/migrate/fin): From Fin (inside Intercom) to a standalone Clanker Support widget
- [Migrate from Intercom to Clanker Support](https://clankersupport.com/docs/migrate/intercom): From the Intercom platform to a focused Clanker Support widget

## Journal
- [Every hosted plan now starts with a 7-day free trial](https://clankersupport.com/blog/7-day-free-trial): New hosted Clanker Support subscriptions now begin with 7 free days — the full plan, every feature, applied automatically at checkout. Nothing is charged until the trial ends, you can cancel anytime, and a 14-day money-back guarantee backs it all up.
- [Add an AI support agent to Next.js, WordPress, Shopify, or any site](https://clankersupport.com/blog/add-ai-support-agent-any-stack): One hub for every install path we ship: the universal script tag, the React Server Components SDK, the WordPress plugin, the Shopify app embed, and the iframe. Working code for each, plus a candid guide to picking one.
- ['Additive columns are always safe' is wrong on Drizzle, Prisma, and preview deploys](https://clankersupport.com/blog/additive-migration-almost-broke-every-login): Everyone agrees an additive column is the one schema change that can't hurt you. Then a one-line ALTER TABLE on our user table turned out to be capable of 500ing every authenticated request — because Drizzle projects every mapped column, Better Auth reads the user table on every session check, and preview deploys skip migrations. Here is the two-PR discipline we ship our riskiest schema changes with, and the one column we keep out of the ORM entirely.
- [A 9-point AI SEO audit checklist, run on our own site first](https://clankersupport.com/blog/ai-seo-audit-checklist): Next.js merges route metadata shallowly, so every page built with our metadata helper — unless it passed a cover image of its own — shipped a Twitter card with no image for about a month. That was finding one of the SEO and AI-SEO audit we ran across our five domains this month, in two passes. Here is the whole audit as a checklist you can run on your own site, including the four findings that surprised us.
- [Our AI support agent doesn't use RAG — here's the math](https://clankersupport.com/blog/ai-support-agent-without-rag): Clanker Support has no vector database. We put the entire knowledge base into the system prompt on every request, and for KBs measured in kilobytes, the math says that's the right call.
- [The best AI support agents in 2026 (real pricing compared)](https://clankersupport.com/blog/best-ai-support-agents): The best AI support agents in 2026, compared on real pricing — per-resolution vs per-seat vs flat, which LLM each tool runs on, and open-source options.
- [Clanker Support is live — and we're on Product Hunt today](https://clankersupport.com/blog/clanker-support-is-live-on-product-hunt): Clanker Support is officially live and featured on Product Hunt. Here's what we built: an AI support agent that answers from your docs and hands off to a human the moment it can't.
- [We moved our SaaS backend to workerd and every Node SDK broke](https://clankersupport.com/blog/cloudflare-workers-every-node-sdk-broke): The Resend SDK, the Stripe Node SDK, and Better Auth's passkey plugin all got cut from our workerd build — each over something the package dragged in, not code we call. Here is each casualty, the fetch-and-crypto.subtle code that replaced it, and an honest accounting of whether it was worth it.
- [The best Intercom alternatives in 2026 (an honest comparison)](https://clankersupport.com/blog/intercom-alternatives): Ten Intercom alternatives compared by pricing model — per-seat, per-resolution, flat monthly, and self-hosted — with honest cons and when to stay put.
- [Intercom Fin pricing in 2026: the real math behind $0.99](https://clankersupport.com/blog/intercom-fin-pricing): A primary-source teardown of Intercom Fin's $0.99-per-resolution pricing: billable outcomes, assumed resolutions, seat costs, and the real monthly math.
- [Introducing Clanker Support: AI support that actually escalates](https://clankersupport.com/blog/introducing-llmchat): Today we're launching Clanker Support — a drop-in widget that answers from your docs and hands off to your team when the bot can't help.
- [We set a cache trap for our own support agent — in our own llms.txt headers](https://clankersupport.com/blog/knowledge-base-recrawl-cdn-cache): URL knowledge sources are snapshots, and everyone knows snapshots go stale. What we missed is that the refresh itself can be served by any CDN cache between the crawler and the origin — so "Recrawl → success" can silently re-store the pre-deploy content. The trap on our own site was set by our own cache headers.
- [Changelog: July 2026, so far — the platform month](https://clankersupport.com/blog/llmchat-changelog-july-2026): Two weeks in and July is already our densest month: an approved WordPress plugin, a Shopify app, agents that take actions, dark mode everywhere, and a smarter, chattier widget.
- [Changelog: June 2026 — launch month](https://clankersupport.com/blog/llmchat-changelog-june-2026): We launched on Product Hunt. Also: smarter escalation, a full dashboard restyle, workspace-wide search, annual plans, and a security hardening pass.
- [Changelog: May 2026 — knowledge base improvements and new model options](https://clankersupport.com/blog/llmchat-changelog-may-2026): Longer knowledge base support, model selection per project, and a handful of inbox quality-of-life improvements.
- [We diffed our marketing site against our codebase. Six claims didn't survive](https://clankersupport.com/blog/marketing-site-codebase-audit): We put the homepage in one tab and the repo in the other and checked every falsifiable sentence against the code that would have to make it true. Six claims failed, one page undersold us, and an adversarial re-pass caught overclaims we wrote during the honesty pass itself. Every fix shipped in one public pull request.
- [Your customers write in 12 languages. Your support agent answers in all of them.](https://clankersupport.com/blog/multilingual-ai-support-agent): I spent an hour throwing 12 languages at our support agent — Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, even Moroccan Darija in Arabizi. It answered every one in the customer's language. There's no language setting. And now it does it out loud.
- [Add AI customer support to your Next.js app with one Server Component](https://clankersupport.com/blog/nextjs-ai-support-widget-server-component): A step-by-step tutorial for @clankersupport/widget-rsc: install the SDK, drop one component into your root layout, then restyle it with CSS or rebuild the UI entirely with headless primitives.
- [6 open-source Intercom alternatives you can self-host in 2026](https://clankersupport.com/blog/open-source-intercom-alternatives): Six open-source Intercom alternatives you can self-host, compared on license, stack weight, built-in AI, and model choice — checked July 2026.
- [How to reduce support tickets by 60% with an AI first-response layer](https://clankersupport.com/blog/reducing-support-tickets-with-ai-first-response): A practical guide to deploying an AI first-responder that handles the repetitive stuff so your team can focus on the conversations that matter.
- [Salesforce buying Fin (Intercom): what it means for your support bill](https://clankersupport.com/blog/salesforce-fin-intercom-acquisition-support-bill): The deal is signed, not closed, and Fin's pricing hasn't moved. Here's Salesforce's dated post-acquisition track record — and what to check in your contract before renewal.
- [Setting up email threading for your support widget](https://clankersupport.com/blog/setting-up-email-threading): A step-by-step guide to configuring inbound email so customer replies thread back into the same conversation.
- [Everything that broke while shipping an embeddable AI widget](https://clankersupport.com/blog/shipping-an-embeddable-widget): A support widget runs inside a DOM you don't control. Here's every way host pages broke ours — :empty selectors, 62.5% root font-sizes, null currentScript — and the rule we extracted from each fix.
- [The case for self-hostable AI support](https://clankersupport.com/blog/the-case-for-self-hostable-ai-support): Why open architecture matters for tools that sit between you and your customers.
- [Two messages, one sequence number: the concurrency bug that never threw](https://clankersupport.com/blog/two-messages-same-sequence-number): An escalation marker and the AI reply it interrupted landed in the same conversation with the same sequence number. No exception, no log line, both inserts succeeded, and the thread quietly rendered out of order. This is the read-then-write bug that passes every test, the three-part fix whose deploy order is the point, and the five-second code search that tells you whether your codebase has it too.
- [Why we built on LLM Gateway instead of calling OpenAI directly](https://clankersupport.com/blog/why-we-built-on-llm-gateway): Our reasoning for using a model abstraction layer from day one — and why it's already paid off twice.
- [The Clanker Support WordPress plugin is approved — here's how it was built](https://clankersupport.com/blog/wordpress-ai-support-plugin): Clanker Support is now an approved WordPress.org plugin. The story of building it, getting through the plugin review (including the zip that was secretly a tar), and how to put an AI support agent on your WordPress site in under a minute.

## Optional
- [Full content](https://clankersupport.com/llms-full.txt): Every blog post from this site, in full, in one plain-text file.
- [Full documentation](https://docs.clankersupport.com/llms-full.txt): Every docs page, in full, in one plain-text file.
- [Privacy policy](https://clankersupport.com/privacy-policy): How visitor and customer data is handled.
- [Terms of use](https://clankersupport.com/terms-of-use): The terms for the hosted service.