Apify based chatbot
Case study
Chatbots are becoming increasingly common. Messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and (soon) WhatsApp let businesses develop chatbots on their platforms as an extra tool to engage and communicate with customers.
Eventually, these chatbots could be an alternative to a website or even a native app, for the following reasons:
Easy to develop
API clients and wrappers for all common programming languages
Cross-platform
Messaging apps have already built clients for almost every platform
Location services
Users can share their live location with the bot
Free
App stores charge fees and review every app, but developing a chatbot is (currently) free.
One of our users developed a Telegram-based chatbot that helps scooter chargers be more efficient, by sending them push notifications according to their live location. Check it out at chasers.io and maybe you'll be inspired to roll out your own chatbot using Apify.
The chatbot is powered by an infinitely-running Apify actor with a Node.js web server based on Express that exposes an API on the Container URL. The service runs continuously and requires high availability.
I was looking for a hosting solution with Git integration, easy to bootstrap, inexpensive and with solid support. For a lightweight NodeJS project like this and considering my requirements, I can say without a doubt that Apify is my go-to, with just a few clicks needed to have a chatbot up and running on the Apify cloud at a fair price and with 24/7 support.
Tomer Balan
Chasers founder