Founder stack playbook

Automate micro-SaaS customer support

A support inbox that answers repetitive questions from approved knowledge, enriches tickets with product context, and hands uncertain cases to the founder.

Who it's for

A micro-SaaS founder with recurring support volume but too little data, revenue, or risk tolerance for a fully autonomous enterprise support agent.

Constraints

Draft-first automation, cited internal sources, no refunds or account changes without approval, and every customer can reach a human.

Approximate monthly cost

US$0 at very low volume; commonly US$25-45/mo after a paid support inbox or automation tier, plus model usage and email volume.

How the stack works

Receive conversations in Crisp and trigger n8n only after basic routing and spam checks.
Retrieve approved help content and account-safe context from Postgres, excluding secrets and unrelated customer records.
Ask a low-cost model through OpenRouter to classify and draft; require sources and a confidence threshold.
Send low-risk answers or place drafts in the human queue, then use Resend for asynchronous follow-up.
Measure deflection and reopen rates in PostHog, while Sentry alerts on failed workflows and provider errors.

The stack

Support inbox

Crisp

A shared inbox, chat widget, help centre, and integrations cover a micro-SaaS without enterprise support-suite overhead.

Skip if: support already lives in Intercom, Zendesk, email-only workflows, or regulated ticketing with stricter controls.

Alternatives: Intercom, Help Scout, Plain shared email

Support workflow

n8n

Visible steps make classification, lookup, drafting, approval, and follow-up easier to inspect than a monolithic bot.

Skip if: Crisp's native automation handles the whole flow or support volume cannot justify another system to maintain.

Alternatives: Make, Zapier, Trigger.dev

Drafting model

OpenRouter

Cheap models can classify tickets while stronger models handle difficult drafts behind one governed endpoint.

Skip if: customer data policy permits only a directly contracted or self-hosted model provider.

Alternatives: Anthropic API, OpenAI API, Ollama

Knowledge and account context

Supabase Postgres

Support-safe views can join product state and approved help content while row-level security limits accidental leakage.

Skip if: the production database should never be queried by support automation; publish a separate read-only support index instead.

Alternatives: Read-only replica, Qdrant knowledge index, Intercom knowledge base

Follow-up email

Resend

Transactional follow-ups and resolution summaries can be sent from the product domain with explicit templates.

Skip if: the support inbox already sends and threads email reliably; duplicate senders create fragmented conversations.

Alternatives: Postmark, Crisp email, SendGrid

Support outcomes

PostHog

Deflection, escalation, reopen, and activation events show whether automation helps customers rather than merely reducing replies.

Skip if: support data cannot enter product analytics; use aggregate ticket metrics inside the support system instead.

Alternatives: Crisp analytics, Amplitude, Metabase

Workflow monitoring

Sentry

Errors in ticket ingestion, model calls, and follow-up jobs become actionable incidents rather than silent missed customers.

Skip if: n8n and the support platform already send reliable failure alerts with enough request context.

Alternatives: Better Stack, Axiom, n8n error workflows

Verification note: Pricing checked 12 July 2026. Begin in draft-only mode and audit outputs; automation that confidently sends a wrong refund, security, privacy, or account answer costs more than it saves.

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