Optlo: the Drift alternative

01Status

How Drift got here

Salesloft announced its acquisition of Drift on 13 February 2024, pitching the combination as the first AI-powered revenue orchestration platform. Financial terms were never disclosed, whatever the round numbers floating around the internet claim. Vista Equity Partners held a majority stake in both companies, so this was less a courtship than a reshuffle inside one portfolio.

Then came the breach of August 2025. Attackers took OAuth tokens belonging to the Drift integration and used them to pull Salesforce data out of hundreds of companies over about ten days. Salesforce removed Drift from its AppExchange and the tokens were revoked on August 20.

700+organizations had Salesforce data accessed through Drift's OAuth tokens in August 2025

Seven months later the sunset landed. Existing customers get referred to 1mind, a company most of them had never heard of, under an exclusive agreement. A referral isn't a migration path: nobody moves your account, and nobody promises the replacement costs what Drift did.

02Pricing

$2,500 a month before the AI even turned on

Drift only ever published one price, and since its pricing page went down with the domain, these are the last rates it listed. Premium, the plan sold to small businesses, started at $2,500 a month billed annually, which is $30,000 a year committed up front. Advanced was a conversation with sales, and Enterprise was custom.

Premium bought you live chat, meetings, custom chatbots, intel, notifications, and landing pages. The AI-powered chatbots were listed under Enterprise, so the cheapest plan that included real AI was the one with no published price at all. On top of that sat the add-ons: seats were sold separately as Pro and Lite, and intent scoring was a separate product called Drift Engage.

$30,000a year to start on Drift's cheapest published plan, versus $192 a year on Optlo's, plus whatever your own AI provider charges for tokens

Optlo splits the bill in two and shows you both halves. You pay a plan from $16/mo billed annually, and your AI provider bills you for the tokens the agent used, at their prices, on your account. There's no resolution meter, no session pack, and no minimum year.

03Ownership

Who owns the account

Drift's customers didn't do anything wrong. They picked a well-regarded product, and over five years it got bought, folded into a bigger platform, and retired with a successor chosen on their behalf. At no point in that sequence did the customer get a vote.

That's a normal risk of buying software, and no vendor can promise you otherwise. What a vendor can change is how much of your setup walks out the door with them. The provider key belongs to you: you create it in your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google account, you pay those providers directly, and the usage shows up in a dashboard we don't control. You pick which model runs which step and swap it the day something better ships. Your source content is your website and your docs, which you already owned before you met us.

04Trade-offs

Prebuilt in Drift, assembled in Optlo

The sales side of Drift arrived configured. You turned on a playbook, connected Salesforce, and the routing and the calendar handoff worked that afternoon. Optlo can do those jobs through workflow steps that call your own APIs, which is more flexible and more work, so if your Drift playbooks were mostly sales rather than support, price in an engineering week before you commit.

The flip side is that support was never really Drift's center of gravity, so the bar it set on answering questions accurately from your own documentation is one a modern agent clears comfortably.

05Switching

Moving off Drift before the wind-down does it for you

You've got an unusual luxury here, which is time and a reason. Nobody has to justify the project internally when the vendor has announced the sunset themselves, so this is the cheapest moment you'll ever get to re-examine what that widget was actually for.