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Online and software businessesAI agent (tool not named)

Off the shelf support chat replaced with their own agent: $3,600 a year saved

Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, host of The Practical AI Show · Published

Result

self-reported

"At Dispute Buddy we saved $3600/year by building our own customer service agent." She says it's 100 times better than the off the shelf one they had.

Jenny Rudd runs Dispute Buddy, an app that helps people find patterns of coercive control in their texts. They replaced their paid off the shelf support chat with a customer service agent they built themselves, the one that opens when you click 'talk to us' on their site. She says it diagnoses and fixes the problems customers have while using the app, and talks to them in her voice, knowing they're going through a hard time. Next they're building their own internal chat tool and meeting pages.

Who did it

Jenny RuddDispute Buddy (app)Jenny Rudd, in a comment on LinkedIn · Oct 2026

Try it now

  1. Check what your support chat costs a year and what questions it gets most.
  2. Write down your top 10 customer problems and how you fix each one.
  3. Build a support agent that knows those fixes and your tone of voice.
  4. Test it on real past questions before it goes live.
  5. Have it hand any hard or sensitive conversation to a person.
Copy-paste prompt
Here are our 10 most common customer problems and how we fix each one, plus a few of my replies so you can learn my tone. Answer customers the way I would, walk them through the fix, and hand the chat to me if someone is upset or the fix doesn't work.

Make it run every week

A play works once. Turn it into a routine in three small steps:

  1. Run it once and check the result yourself.
  2. Give your AI a schedule. Tell it when to run this play (every week, or every month) and to message you with what it found before you act.
  3. Keep a log. One line per run: what was checked, anything flagged, what you did.

See how owners turn plays into systems →

What to watch out for

Self-reported in her own comment on another founder's post, with no setup details. Her customers can be in hard situations, so a person should be easy to reach. Safer version: set a clear handoff to a human for anything sensitive. Build it with Page: a help page with your top fixes that the agent can link to.

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