Intercom, Drift, and Zendesk AI get you started fast but lock you into their limitations. We break down when a custom AI agent delivers better ROI, deeper integrations, and a genuine competitive advantage over off-the-shelf chatbot platforms.
INR 2000
Per Hour
50+
AI Agents Built
4.9/5
Client Rating
<2 Weeks
MVP Delivery
Trusted by businesses worldwide
See what changes when you move from a constrained chatbot platform to a purpose-built AI agent
Deflection Rate
30-45%
CSAT on Bot
3.2/5
Vendor Lock-in
High
Deflection Rate
70-85%
CSAT on Bot
4.5/5
Vendor Lock-in
Zero
Results seen within 30 days
Six scenarios where building a custom AI agent delivers significantly more value than subscribing to a chatbot platform
Your customer interactions involve domain-specific logic, multi-step processes, or conditional workflows that chatbot platform templates cannot express. Custom agents encode your exact business rules.
You need your AI agent to read from and write to internal databases, CRMs, ERPs, or legacy systems in real time. Custom agents connect to any API or data source without marketplace limitations.
Your industry or compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR) demand that conversation data stays within your infrastructure. Custom agents deploy on-premise or in your private cloud.
At high conversation volumes, per-conversation or per-seat SaaS pricing becomes prohibitively expensive. Custom agents have near-zero marginal cost, making them dramatically cheaper at scale.
Your AI-powered customer experience is a competitive advantage, not a commodity. Custom agents let you create unique interactions that competitors using the same SaaS platform cannot replicate.
You need specialized agents that collaborate - a triage agent routing to domain experts, a research agent gathering context, an action agent executing tasks. Platforms offer single-bot experiences only.
Custom AI agent development at a fraction of what chatbot platform costs compound to over time
"We were paying $1,200/month for Intercom's AI features and still routing 60% of conversations to human agents. Edesy built a custom agent with RAG over our product docs that handles 80% of queries autonomously. It paid for itself in 3 months."
HO
Head of Support
Customer Success at B2B SaaS Company
"Drift's chatbot could qualify leads but couldn't access our CRM or pricing engine in real time. Edesy's custom agent pulls live data from Salesforce, generates personalized quotes, and books demos directly. Our lead-to-demo conversion doubled."
VO
VP of Sales
Sales at Enterprise Software Firm
"We needed our AI agent to work with our proprietary medical knowledge base under strict HIPAA compliance. No chatbot platform could meet our data residency requirements. Edesy deployed a custom agent on our private cloud in 4 weeks."
C
CTO
Technology at HealthTech Startup
Resources to help you evaluate and implement
Stop paying monthly rent for a chatbot that cannot access your systems or reason over your data. Get a custom AI agent that integrates deeply, scales affordably, and belongs to you.