We've tested Orka, a live chat for SaaS founders that puts every product you run in one support inbox, with an AI that runs on your own API key.
Welcome to this Orka review ✨
If you run more than one product, you know how support usually goes. Each product ends up with its own chat widget, its own inbox, its own help center and its own monthly bill. You start the day by opening three tabs to check whether anyone wrote to you overnight, and the day you add AI to the mix, you discover that every tool bills it differently and always with a healthy margin on top.
I'm in exactly that situation: Uneed, Writizzy and a few side projects all have customers who need answers. So when Charles, Orka's founder, asked me to look at his live chat for SaaS, I tested it the way I would actually use it. I plugged in two of my products, imported Uneed's real help center, connected my own Anthropic key, and let the AI answer test visitors with real questions about Uneed.
Charles asked me to focus on five things: several projects in one place, bringing your own AI key, AI that helps without taking control away from you, switching between live chat and an email form, and migrating from another tool. Each one gets its own section below.
The onboarding is five short steps, and it does a surprising amount of work on its own. I typed Uneed's web address in the first field and Orka filled in the project name and pulled the logo from the site. A few seconds later, the installation step had already detected that Uneed runs on Vue and Nuxt and showed me the right snippet: the orka-web-sdk npm package with a one-line Orka.configure() call, or a plain script tag if you prefer. There is also a ready-made prompt to paste into Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Grok or Gemini so your coding assistant installs the widget for you, which is a nice touch for a tool aimed at founders who code with AI.
In between, you pick a widget design. The first screen shows six of them, with more than twenty in total, each with its own background colour, bubble colour and hover effect. The last step asks how you want to power the AI (your own key, Orka's AI, or no AI at all), then you land on the plan picker, where you can start free with no card.
This is the core idea behind Orka, so it's the first thing I tested properly. After Uneed, I created a second project for Writizzy, gave it a different widget design, and sent a test message from each widget.
Both conversations landed in the same list. Each one carries the small logo of the product it came from, so you know at a glance whether you're answering a Uneed founder or a Writizzy blogger. A filter at the top lets you switch between "All projects" and a single product when you want to focus.
What makes this more than a cosmetic feature is the pricing: every plan, including the free one, comes with unlimited projects. You pay for teammates, not for products. If you collect side projects the way I do, that changes the maths compared with tools that bill you per workspace or per website.
The chat itself is real-time and pleasant. While my test visitor was typing, I could see the message forming in the inbox before it was even sent. The sidebar shows the visitor's city, local time, current weather, browser and the last page they viewed, and you can push your own data there (plan, MRR, number of orders) with an Orka.update() call from your app. Private notes sit right inside the conversation, highlighted in yellow so you can't confuse them with a reply.
This is the part Charles insisted on, and I understand why. Orka gives you three ways to power its AI: none, Orka AI, or your own key from OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter.
I connected an Anthropic key. Orka checks the key, stores it encrypted, and from then on the page says it plainly: Anthropic bills you directly, and Orka bills nothing for it. The token estimates also switch from dollars to tokens, so you can do the maths with your provider's own rates (an automatic reply uses between 2,000 and 12,000 tokens, depending on how much of your knowledge it has to search).
If you'd rather not manage a key, Orka AI works out of the box and is billed per use on your Orka invoice, at the OpenAI price of the tokens multiplied by 2.5. Orka shows its own estimates for that option: around $0.013 per automatic reply, $0.0045 per drafted reply and $0.00037 per translated message, or roughly $13 for 1,000 automatic replies. That's honest and clearly displayed, and it makes the case for your own key very concrete: the more conversations you handle, the more that markup adds up.
One thing to know: the AI connection is set per project. When I tried to get a suggested reply on a Writizzy conversation, nothing happened, because only Uneed had a key. You need to add your key to each product you want the AI on.
Before letting the AI talk to anyone, you give it something to work with. Orka learns from your help center articles automatically once they're published, and you can add website pages, uploaded files and plain texts or FAQs. The "About your business" field has a "Suggest from website" button: it read Uneed's home page and wrote an accurate summary, down to the size of the community and the domain rating of our backlinks.
There's also a "Try Orky" chat on the same page to test the AI before going live (Orky is the AI's default name). I asked it what happens when a free launch only reaches a score of 8. The answer was exactly right: the product goes back to the dashboard and can't join the free line again, the two paid options with their correct prices, and a link to the relevant help article. I then asked for a refund on a launch I'd changed my mind about, and it followed Uneed's refund policy, asked for the email used for the purchase, and said the team would process it.
In the inbox, the "Suggest a reply" button writes a draft in the composer that you edit before sending. I sent a question in French from the widget, and the draft came back in French, with the right score thresholds and a nuance about vote multipliers that I would have forgotten myself. The composer also showed me the English version of the draft, so a teammate who doesn't speak French could still check it. It took around fifteen seconds to generate, with only a small spinner while you wait.
The automatic mode is where Orka is the most thoughtful. When a message arrives, the AI waits for a pause you choose (from 10 seconds to 5 minutes, 30 seconds by default) before answering, so a teammate has time to jump in. If nobody is online, it answers right away.
During that pause, the reply is visible in your composer with a countdown, a "Take Over" button and a "Send now" button. Watching an answer about Fast-track and Skip the Waiting Line count down from 23 seconds, with the option to grab it, is a very good way of keeping control without having to babysit every message.
You decide when the AI should hand over to a human: when the visitor asks for one, when they're upset, when it can't do what is asked (a refund, a bug, a complaint), when the question is outside its knowledge, when a keyword is mentioned, or when it isn't sure of its answer. The first three are on by default. A simulator next to the rules lets you try each situation without sending anything or spending tokens.
I tested it for real. I asked whether I could use the Uneed badge without finishing in the top 3, which isn't covered in our help center. The AI explained what it knew, said clearly what it couldn't confirm, and offered to pass the question on. When I replied that I'd rather talk to a human, it confirmed, stopped answering, and left a private note tagging me with a one-line summary of the request.
The only odd moment was in that last message: the AI told the visitor the team was away for the evening, while my status was set to available.
The contact form settings decide when the chat widget turns into a "Leave us a message" form. You can make it permanent, switch it on whenever no teammate is online, or set hours for each day of the week, in your project's time zone. Each form sent opens a conversation in your inbox, and the follow-up goes on by email. The AI doesn't answer forms, so those always reach a human.
The form fields are yours to build (text, dropdowns, choices, dates, file uploads), with the first email and name saved on the contact. I configured it but didn't switch it on for my test project, so I can't tell you how the switch feels from the visitor's side.
Orka imports help centers from GitBook, Intercom, Crisp, Help Scout, Gleap and Fernand, with Zendesk, tawk.to and Gorgias marked as coming soon. Uneed's help center runs on Fernand, so I pasted its public address during onboarding.
All 29 articles came across, in the right three collections with the right counts. They arrived as clean Markdown, and the links between articles were rewritten to point to their new addresses inside Orka. The onboarding imports them as drafts so you can review them first, while the import window in the settings has a toggle to publish them right away.
Once published, the articles live on a public help center with your logo, a search bar and a sidebar per collection. You can put it on your own domain, and from the Pro plan the articles are translated by AI into the languages you choose.
Two things to know if you're coming from Intercom or Crisp. The import covers help center articles only: your conversation history and inbox rules stay behind, and Orka says so on its migration page. And a few article addresses change on the way (one of mine went from "doesnt-get-10-upvotes" to "doesnt-reach-a-score-of-10"), so plan a few redirects if your old help center is indexed.
Every plan has unlimited projects, and the three paid plans come with a 14-day trial. Prices are shown in euros on the site and in dollars in the dashboard, with the same figures.
| Plan | Price | Team members | Main additions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 / month | 1 | Live chat, help center and imports, mobile apps |
| Light | 9 / month | 2 | Search, screenshots, analytics, contact form, banners |
| Pro | 29 / month | 3 | AI drafts and automatic replies, handoff, translation |
| Max | 99 / month | 12, then 8 per extra member | No Orka branding, custom AI name, reports, API |
AI usage is billed separately from the plan: directly by your provider if you bring your key, or on your Orka invoice if you use Orka AI. The free plan is genuinely usable for a solo founder, but it has no conversation search and no screenshots in the chat, so most people with real volume will end up on Light or Pro.
If you're looking for an Intercom alternative, the difference is mostly about scale and model. Intercom is built for support teams with dedicated agents and prices its AI on top of seats. Orka is built for a founder or a small team who answers customers themselves, and lets you pay your AI provider directly.
As a Crisp alternative, the two are closer in spirit: both are affordable live chats with a help center. Where Orka stands out is the multi-product inbox at no extra cost, and the care put into AI control (the countdown, the handoff rules, the simulator).
If you need a full ticketing system with SLAs, complex routing and a large team of agents, Orka isn't trying to be that. And if your history of past conversations matters to you, keep in mind that it won't follow you.
Orka does what it promises, and the multi-product inbox is the real reason to choose it over the usual live chat for startups. The AI is the other strong point, not because it writes good answers (it did, every time I tested it on Uneed's content), but because it's designed so you stay in charge: drafts you review, automatic replies you can grab before they're sent, and a handoff that leaves you a clear note. Add the option to bring your own key with no markup, and it's one of the most founder-friendly support tools I've tried.
What I liked:
Things to keep in mind:
If you run several products and want one calm place to answer your customers, give Orka a try: the free plan is enough to see if the inbox works for you.
