Show HN: Jelly – A simpler shared inbox for small teams

Quite a few comments now about how you can use forwarding or mailing lists to achieve something similar. There are definitely plenty of relatively-simple ways to _distribute_ incoming emails to multiple recipients.

But once the messages end up in your personal inbox, it's pretty hard for the other people you are collaborating with (or your family in the scenario here) to participate in the rest of conversation, unless you're willing to be extremely diligent with Cc/Bcc-ing.

It's also certainly possible to use things like labels or messages-left-in-draft to try and avoid stepping on each other's toes and coordinate responses. But again, you've got to be diligent.

What Jelly aims to do is make it _easy_ for non-technical people (and technical people who want something that "just works") to share email smoothly, without having to build the rules themselves or make sure everyone sticks to the system to keep it working well.

Does anyone use a tool like this for shared family email? As the kids are getting older and there's email communication from daycare and school and extracurriculars and everything else, the method of "all communication about X goes to one parent" is not really scaling. Just using one shared gmail could also work, but requires more communication around "are you handling that response or am I?".

It seems like fundamentally the same problem as this tool is solving, but when it's for family instead of business, even $30/month starts to feel pretty pricey.

How will you keep your price so low?

I've been burned too many times on "simple, cheap, multi-user" shared inboxes. Most recently Groove HQ where it went from $20 for our team of 3 to $45/seat for our team of 5 over the course of a few years. It was still worth it, but when I left that company, I had to switch to a shared gmail account because I'm not dropping $135/mo for a software project that may or may not take off.

Would you mind explaining a bit more over why this has value over and above a google group in collaborative inbox mode?

Annecdotally, I think there's a lot of good problems for a new vendor to solve with a product in this category, but a collaborative inbox is really just the baseline of a solution. Personally, the main issue my team has with collaborative inboxes are not issues with handling who replys to each message, it's an issue of spam. Would love to have a vendor build a solution powerful enough to solve these specific problems:

  1. Filtering out automated beg-bounty outreach from any actual security issues by having some form of LLM responder: ideally having a bit of semi-automated back/forth (e.g. approved with a rich Slack button) to help determine if someone is serious or not (after two years of operating, I'm still at 100% of messages (over 1-2 messages per month per company) to security@example.com being spam; suspect over the mid-term it'll still be 98%+). 
  2. Filtering out spam where people are accidentally reaching out to the wrong company. 
  3. Filtering out spam where people are trying to sell us products we're not interested in. E.g. we attend conferences, for every actual conference email we get maybe 5 or 6 trying to sell us attendee email lists. 

I'm really liking the UX there! In sports-speak there's the "Whose got the ball" method to identify who is managing a topic...and the way this is executed - from what i saw in the video - seems really straight-forward to help answer that. While maybe some super tech-savvy orgs might not immediately see the value, i can absolutely see tons of small and maybe medium businesses wanting this functionality. As a father and a husband, almost by definition i am a cheapskate...but even i have to agree that the monthly pricing is quite fair. (Even though I'm really cheap, i am done with "free services" which are just not worth it - especially for running a business on, etc. I am now in the phase of my life where i am willing to pay for good products/services, assuming i do't get treated like cattle.) Best of luck and kudos on a really nice product!

I _really_ like the way this landing page is designed. And I think it really highlights one of the sales points, which is that you are decent and reasonable.

Good stuff. I'm going to send this around to some people.

This reminds me of the decade old Show HN for Front, but I really like that this is gonna be "Good Enough", instead of the "modern customer service platform" that Front has become (with prices to match).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726

https://web.archive.org/web/20141013115541/https://frontapp....

Love the product and you've nailed the simple design!

I'm concerned about email deliverability--Even more so after the email verification ended up in my spam. Handling incoming email is simple enough, but for this to be useful to my team we would want to be confident that the emails are ending up in the right place.

Since no one else has mentioned it, I appreciated the Arrested Development references. Very cute.

This product looks great! I know a team who might be interested. Below is a minor suggested edit:

> There are plenty of shared inboxes out there, but they’re incredibly expensive and bloated with features that small teams don’t need. How expensive? Try $20+ per user per month. That’s over $240 a year just for one user—in this economy!?

The wording is confusing here, "user" used back-to-back to represent different dollar amounts.

We're a small team and have a similar problem. Currently solving it with Intercom (quite expensive, but at least it also handles chat and tickets for that).

But a big remaining problem is that for meetings (sales/support calls etc.), we need to give out our individual emails so that the invites show up in our calendars.

As soon as we do that, customers start emailing us on our individual emails for support, and we have to manually nudge them back to the team inboxes.

Would be cool to get a solution for that.

We use Missive[0] and it's pretty good. It's definitely not as low price as Jelly though.

[0] https://missiveapp.com/

Very well done, bookmarking for when I need this in the future.

Oh cool -- It'd be so easy to think someone else had solved this problem but I assure you, it hasn't yet ben solved. Eager to give this a try!

FYI the comma is being placed awkwardly on its own line on the homepage.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/19zt9067x8j230810bjcp/Screens...

This is one of those tools that do one thing and do it very well. Also the pricing is convenient. Congratulations to the creators.

If you want to go the open source + self hosted route, Chatwoot [1] [2] may be for you. It is more feature rich (or bloated, depending what you need) and complex to set up, defined as "Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc.", and it has a shared inbox feature [3].

[1] Website: https://www.chatwoot.com/

[2] Github: https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot

[3] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox

Nice product. You guys remind me of Hey & Once from 37signals. Excited to see what else ships from Good Enough.

Iirc when doing it support in college an incoming email to the support address would create a ticket with threading, Where a reply would be a reply to the customer as an email or you can also have internal conversations with your team members and tag and lock things as well. Osticket iirc

I love the concept of simple tech which does 1-2 things well, and have built some apps myself following a similar philosophy.

However, there is always _some_ complexity when introducing a new solution. The simplest solution is generally what people already know and are comfortable with.

With that in mind, what benefits does this provide over something like Slack or Discord for small teams? I get those aren't email, but I'd assume the protocol isn't the selling point? As someone who struggles to answer this question myself, I'm genuinely interested in hearing the process which led to this being created.

I got in love with Zammad for this kind of things. It's a modern alternative to OTRS, but it's so light and easy to use that you can push it to any kind of business or personal project.

Every time I build something long-term with at least 3 people, I check if we can use Zammad. It's opensource, I know how to get a complete setup in 3 hours, the design and perf are nice.

https://github.com/zammad/zammad

> And a Google Group would prove to be worse, as replies too easily got lost to personal inboxes if someone accidentally didn’t “Reply All”. It wasn’t great!

Very true. Unfortunately, for our management it is, well, good enough.

If you're a team that currently uses google teams and gmail, is there a way you could start using it in parallel? I'm guessing any replies sent through Jelly would be invisible to someone looking at gmail.

i think the scary thing about onboarding teams onto products like this is the fear that it won't exist in a year.

i wonder if the "lite" solution looks something like a chrome extension for gmail.

an auth layer that lives on top of an existing mailbox that just adds the "last touched by michael" or "assigned to sally" and "seen by X, Y,Z" gives me: (A) the security that the underlying layer will exist in a year (B) a light solution to some of the coordination problems

Cool tool, I have often thought about something like this, it is certainly very useful.

> Email us, or find us on Mastodon, Threads, or Twitter X. (Gosh, can we all just agree on one social media network already?)

Nostr!

Looks promising but I think you are missing the essential plan for small teams or projects with 2 or 3 users. A plan that would capture those users would potentially enable them to use your service while they grow and scale

This seems really nice. How does it work with office365 and if we have an existing shared mailbox? Does it replace our current option or does it sit on top of it or what?

We used to create private Google groups with corresponding team and Google would provide a shared email like sales@ourdomain.com. Now admin has more control over who gets the shared mails. It is essentially free but with few caveats.

Guess I'm not in the target market for this problem. I suppose if you didn't have access to Microsoft 365 or Google Suites this would be a good fit?

But since you are likely paying per seat on your email accounts, it seems it would make sense to go with a provider that already handles this, built in, then you aren't splitting mx or anything else.

I'd love something like this specifically for email 2FA codes. Shared SMS 2FA would be great too, but obviously different to deal with.

The way I do it:

1. make contact@ do several filters: to:*@example.com, mark as read, never mark as spam, forward to teammember1@example.com 2. repeat filter for all people

now, your contact inbox will get all the mail, mark as read. when people reply with their personal email (or leave things unread as a 'todo') it wont interfere with anyone else

I love the UI and simplicity. Any startup discount? What stack did you use?

Are you funded by VCs? If we have to consider your app we have to make sure that you are going to be around and not leave us astray.

You seem to have an interesting product philosophy - how does that translate into your engineering choices? I’m curious what you built Jelly with and how you approach building web apps from a language and framework perspective.

29 dollars a month is a bit of an insane starter price, especially for smaller teams.

I like your landing page UI

We started routing emails from our shared inbox to our API with a bunch of regex to look up who the email belongs to.

Hey, neat design.

(;

> Royal Jelly

Is this a Spelunky reference? If so, I love it.

Quick feedback: Couldn’t watch the video because it requires a YouTube account

Bro, love what comes out of Good Enough. I'll share this with our customer support team

Can we use this as a mail interface on top of Fastmail?

I love this, and honestly it makes me wish I had a use case for it but I know a few folks that will! (Who will be excited to get in while you're still offering flat-rate pricing, heheh) Great job!

I can see some heritage of Hey.com email here, if so, that's a great source of inspiration. You've done a really good job at making concepts that people actually use, versus forcing some generic concepts of "tickets" and "assignments" on users.

Maybe my only suggestion would be different kinds of archiving, since I think it's probably useful to mark things as Dealt With (resolved and nothing more to do) or Went Cold (original sender never replied for some period of time) for example.

Also I see the Trix WYSIWYG editor, rails? :)

What's the stack like? I love the frontend design, are you using SES to handle the inbound mail?

"No artificial colors or sweeteners" yet the main color is pink.

Nothing is ever unlimited. We used to offer unlimited things because, like, how many could each customer really use? Turns out, enough to break the system. Every. Single. Time.

Start with sane limits. You can always increase them later. Rolling back after the cat is out of the bag is much more difficult.

Put a cap at 1k or 10k.

Hey you totally ripped off our design for hey.com!

This is so expensive! I signed up for it, but when I saw the price... Come on, get real!