ShowHN: Insta DM and Website inquiries handler AI bot
so recently i setup a customer inquiry / sales ai agent for Mero Style, a print on demand business platform.
AI chatbots are probably not so much of a big deal these days however what's interesting is the cost of deploying this is so cheap!
I created a PDF which has lots of information about the business and potential questions customers might ask. I uploaded this doc in Open AI and setup an assistant. I created an Edge function in Supabase which connects with Open AI assistant and also stores historical conversations for a user session in db. For handling website inquiries, this setup is enough. For Instagram DMs, I have additionally ManyChat setup to receive and send messages.
Supabase has a big generous free plan. ManyChat has $15/month and Open AI assistant is also quite cheap for text inquiries.
So I have a great Sales Agent for less than $20 a month!
If anyone is interested in this setup and need help, feel free to ask :) Hi I am also doing the same thing but with OpenRouter(model provider) and a database on AWS through a Lambda Function! Now I'm finding a way to plug the bot into Insta, Whatsapp and Facebook. I was thinking of directly plugging into Meta but I see everyone mentioning ManyChat. Im quite new to this so can I ask why do people use a third party like ManyChat instead of directly using Meta?