Why doesn’t Dialogflow CX support more 1-click integrations?

A reader recently asked me if Dialogflow CX supports the Dialogflow Messenger integration.

Answer: It doesn’t. Update : Now it does support Dialogflow Messenger. Most of the other 1-click integrations from Dialogflow ES are still not available. The essential point I am making in this article is still true.

But more importantly, CX supports almost no integrations out of the box. I think it is important to understand why that might be the case.

Unlike ES, there is no free tier in CX

I wrote about this in my article comparing Dialogflow ES and CX, and while my initial pricing calculation was off by quite a bit (and was duly corrected by a commenter), the main point is that there is no free tier in CX as of this writing. (There is now a free trial for new Google Cloud users).

This might not be obvious to people who are new to Dialogflow, but every 1-click integration in Dialogflow ES uses the Dialogflow API under the hood. And when the Dialogflow team creates 1-click integrations for Dialogflow CX (and if there is still no free tier at that point), this means you will be billed 20c per conversation even while testing out your bot.

In Dialogflow ES bots, there is a very generous free tier which allows you to experiment a lot with your bot integrations before you ever hit the scale where you will be charged for usage.

So I can see this going in one of two ways:

1 Either Dialogflow CX gets a free tier

2 Or all Dialogflow CX integrations will remain code heavy, and not likely to be 1-click integrations like the ones you see in Dialogflow ES right now.

This is yet another reason why I recommend folks wait and watch before jumping in to Dialogflow CX.