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.
- We have a third email address that we share with the school (etc.); this email address is not a real inbox but a forwarding address that sends mail to the first two
- When email is sent TO this address, the default is to reply FROM the address
- When email is sent FROM this address, an Auto BCC rule sends a copy to the other spouse
In this way we both get our own personal email addresses, but we have a shared address that goes to both of us, and we know if an email sent to that address has been replied to, what the reply was, etc.
Just wanted to give another shout to FastMail. I'm a super happy user. I originally switched over for business reasons as it had a lot of features I liked. The past year, I exported my gmail history to it and setup forwarding so now I'm 100% on it for personal and business. So much cleaner.
Paid service - but with all the features + privacy of not being on Google (Well, anything going to my gmail still goes through - but slowly moving away) + they have excellent and fast customer support - all makes it worth it.
The easy option is to create a common email account and share that and create a rule to forward all emails to that common email to both your emails. This way any email is forwarded to both the parents.
Unlike team members in a small company I actually talk to my SO every day and if it is important she will tell me or forward the mail. There is no problem like CustomerX wrote to Joe last week but he went on vacation and no one knows.
shared mailbox. Just putting a label/tag/category on a message to call dibs and a todo/completed status can go pretty far. I once worked at a callcenter that did that with hundreds of messages a day.
I tried sparkmail but it's a little much for non-business purposes to be honest.
Not exactly a tool like this, which I'll give a try to (but introducing new workflows in personal life is always challenging). We use https://emailshot.io to easily share and keep track of emails outside of GMail. This is very convenient in cases where you get the email and want to share it via WhatsApp, for example, or add them to a google sheet.
I have another variation on this problem: my wife and I get the same emails from school. We both have accounts within the school platform.
So, what usually happens:
1. Both of us get email
2. One of us sees email before other, may or may not do something about it
3. Possibly one of us fwds the email to the other, creating two copies in one inbox.
4. It's not always clear if (2) results in something happening. And by that I don't mean in (2) that one of us said we would do it. Instead, I'm thinking one step further: we needed to pick a Parent-Teacher conference. How do we know we did it?
5. At some point we might archive/delete emails
6. Many of these emails contain admin dates. Things like half-days, dismissal changes, etc. Usually with dates/times that then need to go into a calendar. So, we try to send each other calendar invites (from personal Gmails) to handle.
#6 is often the real problem. We're looking into the Skylight Calender. Some people swear by it. I hear people like Cozi but that app is a mess.
My wife and I have personal emails but also one that’s shared between us and set up on devices for both, so we can keep track of things that should be shared, like credit card statements, bills, and whatnot.
We use Migadu, which allows you to have as many mailboxes as you want with any plan, so it’s pretty cheap.
I use Cloudflare Email Workers to manage this kind of thing. It works well, especially for receiving mail, but when you need to respond it does break down a bit. Jelly seems like a better solution overall, but if you need something simple and totally free Cloudflare is pretty good.
Definitely been looking for the same. I thought I would have a little time before needing to worry about it. However, our newborn has additional medical needs, so my SO and I are needing more coordinated back and forth with medical teams. Also means that our newborn needs a mailbox of their own in order to register for medical secure portals, which we need to access on their behalf.
Thinking of building this (and also for sms). Feel free to reach out if anyone is interested.
I think I can do something like $25 or $50 a year for an email address that's basically a distribution group w/ some smart routing for replies and something similar for sms.
Use cases as varied as shared accounts, everyone getting grocery delivery notifications, etc.
from my own experience. There are some amazingly interesting use cases for organising family life. We have shared drop offs/pick ups with another family which is a constant flow of WhatsApp messages.
I too have thought of a shared comms channel for all "incoming family business" SMS & Email would be a good start, but WhatsApp is a non-negligible channel as well.
And dont get any parent started on the 35 different School/Club apps etc
You can just leave a note to your spouse in a draft reply of your shared mailbox, like „going to take care of this, XO“ and avoid yet another tool in your setup, I think
i use racknerd and mailinabox. 3 years rock solid. no fuss.
i just have 1 mail@domain.ext email id that i use everywhere. everyone is logged in to that email
i use backblaze b2 for backups which are taken automatically.
this costs me something stupid, like $15/year for vps and $12/year for domain if i remember correctly.
have to occasionally update the server by ssh which takes 5 minutes every 6-10 months.
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.
For us, affordability is _part of the product itself_.
We’re specifically building this _not_ to hoover up every dollar on the table, but to serve smaller groups that have been left out in the cold by "bigger" tools, and who get screwed by per-seat pricing. We believe there are enough teams who fit this profile to be profitable.
There’s a difference between making profit and maximizing profit. the capitalists will call us crazy, but we're not here to maximize profit.
I have teams with 1-2 permanent members and 8 more that may or may not want to check like... maybe once a week at most. Seat limits really mess with the "compliance officer needs to do something every once in a while but do we really need to pay for a separate seat?" issue with per-seat pricing.
A heavy user and a one-time-monthly user are different costs to the product but charge me the same. ;_;
This is such a refreshing perspective! I've always wondered if there's room for craftsmen to build quality products for smaller groups. Your focus on simple, well-designed software really resonates with me. Thanks for showing us a viable path.
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.
(would be happy to chat more, if you want to interview a potential customer; if you could really solve these above problems I'd pay you way more than your highest monthly rate on your pricing tier in a heartbeat, ideally scaling per email inbox rather than seat which would be likely be more lucrative for you, and more predictable for me)
I believe if you want a Google Group Collaborative Inbox for an email address at a domain you own, then you need to be paying for a Google Workspace, which is currently something like $6/user/month.
Beyond that, Jelly has better design (IMHO!), can be used without needing a Google account, lets you discuss conversations inline, gives you an activity view for quickly seeing everything that's happened... basically, GGCI is fine, but we are laser-focussed on making Jelly a _great_ shared inbox for teams.
We'd love to chat more about your ideas though -- send us an email! You can find the contact details on https://letsjelly.com ;-)
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!
Thank you! Months ago when we were working on naming this product, some sports-speak was on the table, like Pop-fly and metaphors like what you mentioned XD
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).
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.
Love the product and you've nailed the simple design!
Thanks for the kind words!
I'm concerned about email deliverability
As I’m sure you can imagine, we’re very concerned about email deliverability. We use Postmark to send email and deliverability hasn’t been an issue thus far, but your verification email ending up in spam is not cool. I would ask some followup questions here, but troubleshooting this on HN isn’t ideal for either of us. Any chance you could drop us a line at https://letterbird.co/jelly if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper with us? Sorry for the less-than-stellar experience thus far!
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.
Thank you for sharing Jelly with someone who could potentially use it! And for the feedback on the homepage. It's very much a basic v1 of a marketing site that we need to iterate on…
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].
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.
The short story is that Good Enough has put a handful of (hopefully) delightful things into the world: https://goodenough.us/
Putting things into the world means getting emails. Being a team means juggling said emails about things amongst several people.
Enter the Shared Fastmail Account.
"Oh! A new email. Click. Oh, this isn’t really for me. Mark as unread. Or did someone else already read this, mark as unread, and think it was for me? I guess I will go talk to..." And, you know, two dozen variations on that theme. It sucked as a way to work together.
what benefits does this provide over something like Slack or Discord for small teams?
We use Slack at Good Enough. It’s nifty. We even have a Jelly + Slack integration (and we use that too)! That said, the problem I described isn’t really solved by Slack. (Maybe Discord if you’re in a space that can funnel interactions there, but obviously there’s a lot of businesses who aren’t, and there’s a lot of drawbacks to using Discord as your only communication medium.)
Email is still widely used and wildly useful. We think being able to collaborate on emails as a team, with clear expectations about who is handling what and visibility on all the back and forth, is really helpful. We’ve been using it to scratch our own itch from day one, and we suspect it will be of interest to others as well!
Let me know if any of that didn’t make sense or you have any other questions.
I now understand how this is specific to solving the problems of a shared email inbox. This isn't a problem I've had to deal with before, but indeed it appears to be a sufficiently painful problem to solve for.
I wish you the best of luck, and continue the good fight to simplify.
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.
1. Jelly has a way to follow conversations and get notifications about replies and comments. So everyone can follow the convos they care about via Jelly notification emails sent to their personal team email.
2. For teams on our higher tier Royal Jelly plan, we have an IMAP feature that can sync mail sent out of Jelly back into your Gmail. It says "Coming soon" on our price table, but it's a working feature in alpha right now, and we already have some customers using it. We'd be happy to help any team get that set up if they need.
The IMAP feature sounds interesting, but as someone who would be interested in exploring the service, but wouldn't be happy going "all in" with no way of switching back without losing data, it's a shame it's only planned as a feature in the higher tier.
Being able to try a service "risk free" seems really important. To start replying to emails in a new service and then lose them if it doesn't work out doesn't sound like a reasonable option.
The higher tier also has a trial period, so you can go all-in using the sent mail sync, and then all-out, should you wish.
We (Good Enough) would rather help an unhappy customer exit cleanly, than keep you stuck using software you don't like.
If this is the only thing stopping you from using the service, get in touch with us and hopefully we can reassure you about how committed we are to helping you leave Jelly with all your data intact, if it turns out to be the best thing for you.
Jelly looks really nice for replacing Google Groups for some things at $DAYJOB. However, having to look at yet another website for tasks is annoying. I'm about 90% of the way to "everything through `mutt`", so regressing back for such a steep price increase seems…hard to swallow. Would you consider at least making IMAP accessible on the lower tier (just as an access method, not necessarily "sync mail back to gmail" if it is separable)?
> 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.
This is why Jelly doesn't price-per-seat -- other tools get expensive, fast.
And those other tools do a lot more too, and they're definitely a great choice if you've got great revenue and dedicated customer support "agents", or you want AI to answer your 10,000 daily support queries.
Jelly tries to serve the rest of us: companies, teams and other groups who just want to collaborate on email, and not get stung in the wallet every time somebody new joins in.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes, what you suggest would work at distributing the literal messages, but it doesn't really support collaboration:
* It doesn't help with coordinating who is going to take responsibility for a conversation;
* replies are stuck in your personal accounts (unless you remember to CC everyone);
* there's no way of discussing conversations privately without using another tool; * you can't easily share URLs to conversations in other tools...
It’s a relatively mainline Rails stack. The Good Enough crew has worked in the Rails ecosystem for a long, long time, so it’s what we’re most comfortable/happiest working with!
are you using SES to handle the inbound mail?
We’re using Postmark to handle all the email processing.
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.
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
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.
Good questions! Most of our products are built with a pretty vanilla Rails stack (what we’re most familiar/comfortable with) backed by Postgres. Beyond that, it’s just the classic engineering struggle of trying to keep things simple and maintainable while making tradeoffs to ship stuff that’s Good Enough™. :) Happy to speak to any more specifics if you have further questions!
Jelly is currently using Render, and we have automated deploys set up from Github, so just merging the PR kicks off the magic sauce.
taking off my Jelly hat
I’ve also used Kamal + Hetzner for a few other simple things recently, and it’s been surprisingly delightful (speaking as someone who has never enjoyed mucking about with deployment frameworks).
I get that each person will decide if it's worth it or not, but $29/month isn't really anything in the big picture of what you are paying the people who will be using it.
Might be nice if there was a free tier for small non-profits, volunteer orgs, student orgs, etc. but a lot of things might be nice.
It's our goal to make this as affordable as possible for all types of organisation. If you're part of a non-profit or volunteer organisation, get in touch.
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
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?
Jelly doesn't directly integrate with Office365 or any existing shared mailboxes, at least not at the moment. You just forward email into it, from any source, and then use the Jelly web application to collaborate on those emails.
In the future we'll be looking at ways to streamline the setup with existing mail providers like Google, Office365 and so on, but we're starting out simple. There are lots of teams sharing logins to single email accounts whose lives we want to improve.
Ah, okay. I’ll keep an eye on Jelly. It looks really nice and could be something they go for, though I know a nice smooth transition would be nice and the possibility of falling back to the shared mailbox if necessary.
I’ve thought about putting for serious effort to setup discourse like they explain using it as a ticketing system with email but this seems better.
Thanks for the love! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or feedback: https://letterbird.co/jelly — we’ll be handling any messages you send from our own Jelly account! :)
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.
I’d also be interested in this. Right now, I use Fastmail with a partner and we use the new “Notes” feature to track what’s been open/plan for response.
Yes! Jelly was born out of a shared Fastmail account. You can forward your email to your dedicated Jelly address and be jamming (sorry not sorry) in no time. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you have any questions or feedback!
I take your comment was meant to be funny, but pink is one of the easiest colors to obtain from natural ingredients. Beetroots, strawberries, chochineal, cherries, radish, raspberries, pomegranate, guava, peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, cranberries, blood oranges, blood, shrimp…
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.
We can totally appreciate that everyone has their own price points. That said, I do want to clarify that Jelly is not priced per user. The starting plan is $29/mo for your entire team. Period. In the landscape of similar tools, we think that’s quite a lovely deal.
For some folks, that’s still expensive. We get it. If so (especially if you’re a nonprofit or educational institution or...) reach out to us and let’s talk!
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.
I use Fastmail for this. Here's what we do:
- My wife and I each have our own email addresses
- We have a third email address that we share with the school (etc.); this email address is not a real inbox but a forwarding address that sends mail to the first two
- When email is sent TO this address, the default is to reply FROM the address
- When email is sent FROM this address, an Auto BCC rule sends a copy to the other spouse
In this way we both get our own personal email addresses, but we have a shared address that goes to both of us, and we know if an email sent to that address has been replied to, what the reply was, etc.
Just wanted to give another shout to FastMail. I'm a super happy user. I originally switched over for business reasons as it had a lot of features I liked. The past year, I exported my gmail history to it and setup forwarding so now I'm 100% on it for personal and business. So much cleaner.
Paid service - but with all the features + privacy of not being on Google (Well, anything going to my gmail still goes through - but slowly moving away) + they have excellent and fast customer support - all makes it worth it.
We love Fastmail, and that's the service that hosted our email for a long time.
Hi,
I don’t really get where to configure the auto bcc rule when sending emails from third email address.
Thanks
In Fastmail: Settings, My email addresses, [address], Show advanced composing preferences, Auto BCC
Thanks again!
The easy option is to create a common email account and share that and create a rule to forward all emails to that common email to both your emails. This way any email is forwarded to both the parents.
Downside there is you can't tell what's been replied. In a shared mailbox you can move it out and disappears for everyone so you know it's done.
Unlike team members in a small company I actually talk to my SO every day and if it is important she will tell me or forward the mail. There is no problem like CustomerX wrote to Joe last week but he went on vacation and no one knows.
You mean you don’t ask your SO to just do it “async”
My family has addressed this (partially) by using an Auto BCC rule, so that mail sent from the shared address gets BCC'ed to the other partner.
But that… doesn’t behave the same…?
shared mailbox. Just putting a label/tag/category on a message to call dibs and a todo/completed status can go pretty far. I once worked at a callcenter that did that with hundreds of messages a day.
I tried sparkmail but it's a little much for non-business purposes to be honest.
Not exactly a tool like this, which I'll give a try to (but introducing new workflows in personal life is always challenging). We use https://emailshot.io to easily share and keep track of emails outside of GMail. This is very convenient in cases where you get the email and want to share it via WhatsApp, for example, or add them to a google sheet.
I have another variation on this problem: my wife and I get the same emails from school. We both have accounts within the school platform.
So, what usually happens: 1. Both of us get email
2. One of us sees email before other, may or may not do something about it
3. Possibly one of us fwds the email to the other, creating two copies in one inbox.
4. It's not always clear if (2) results in something happening. And by that I don't mean in (2) that one of us said we would do it. Instead, I'm thinking one step further: we needed to pick a Parent-Teacher conference. How do we know we did it?
5. At some point we might archive/delete emails
6. Many of these emails contain admin dates. Things like half-days, dismissal changes, etc. Usually with dates/times that then need to go into a calendar. So, we try to send each other calendar invites (from personal Gmails) to handle.
#6 is often the real problem. We're looking into the Skylight Calender. Some people swear by it. I hear people like Cozi but that app is a mess.
My wife and I have personal emails but also one that’s shared between us and set up on devices for both, so we can keep track of things that should be shared, like credit card statements, bills, and whatnot.
We use Migadu, which allows you to have as many mailboxes as you want with any plan, so it’s pretty cheap.
I use Cloudflare Email Workers to manage this kind of thing. It works well, especially for receiving mail, but when you need to respond it does break down a bit. Jelly seems like a better solution overall, but if you need something simple and totally free Cloudflare is pretty good.
I wrote about my setup here: https://www.commithash.com/posts/a-better-way-to-share-email...
Definitely been looking for the same. I thought I would have a little time before needing to worry about it. However, our newborn has additional medical needs, so my SO and I are needing more coordinated back and forth with medical teams. Also means that our newborn needs a mailbox of their own in order to register for medical secure portals, which we need to access on their behalf.
Please get in touch, we'd like to help.
Email sent!
Check your inbox <3
Mailing list with both parents as recipients? All my generic house stuff goes to a utilities@ alias that goes to my spouse and I. Works great.
Thinking of building this (and also for sms). Feel free to reach out if anyone is interested.
I think I can do something like $25 or $50 a year for an email address that's basically a distribution group w/ some smart routing for replies and something similar for sms.
Use cases as varied as shared accounts, everyone getting grocery delivery notifications, etc.
from my own experience. There are some amazingly interesting use cases for organising family life. We have shared drop offs/pick ups with another family which is a constant flow of WhatsApp messages.
I too have thought of a shared comms channel for all "incoming family business" SMS & Email would be a good start, but WhatsApp is a non-negligible channel as well.
And dont get any parent started on the 35 different School/Club apps etc
Easiest is to leave/mark message unread if you are not taking action. Not a 100% solution, but often good enough.
This is exactly what we were doing before we built Jelly. We decided it was not Good Enough™ :)
You can just leave a note to your spouse in a draft reply of your shared mailbox, like „going to take care of this, XO“ and avoid yet another tool in your setup, I think
Let's break out after family stand up.
Share Gmail credentials and assign labels for who’s handling the response.
i use racknerd and mailinabox. 3 years rock solid. no fuss.
i just have 1 mail@domain.ext email id that i use everywhere. everyone is logged in to that email
i use backblaze b2 for backups which are taken automatically. this costs me something stupid, like $15/year for vps and $12/year for domain if i remember correctly.
have to occasionally update the server by ssh which takes 5 minutes every 6-10 months.
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.
For us, affordability is _part of the product itself_.
We’re specifically building this _not_ to hoover up every dollar on the table, but to serve smaller groups that have been left out in the cold by "bigger" tools, and who get screwed by per-seat pricing. We believe there are enough teams who fit this profile to be profitable.
There’s a difference between making profit and maximizing profit. the capitalists will call us crazy, but we're not here to maximize profit.
I love this. Seriously.
I have teams with 1-2 permanent members and 8 more that may or may not want to check like... maybe once a week at most. Seat limits really mess with the "compliance officer needs to do something every once in a while but do we really need to pay for a separate seat?" issue with per-seat pricing.
A heavy user and a one-time-monthly user are different costs to the product but charge me the same. ;_;
This is such a refreshing perspective! I've always wondered if there's room for craftsmen to build quality products for smaller groups. Your focus on simple, well-designed software really resonates with me. Thanks for showing us a viable path.
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:
(would be happy to chat more, if you want to interview a potential customer; if you could really solve these above problems I'd pay you way more than your highest monthly rate on your pricing tier in a heartbeat, ideally scaling per email inbox rather than seat which would be likely be more lucrative for you, and more predictable for me)I believe if you want a Google Group Collaborative Inbox for an email address at a domain you own, then you need to be paying for a Google Workspace, which is currently something like $6/user/month.
Beyond that, Jelly has better design (IMHO!), can be used without needing a Google account, lets you discuss conversations inline, gives you an activity view for quickly seeing everything that's happened... basically, GGCI is fine, but we are laser-focussed on making Jelly a _great_ shared inbox for teams.
We'd love to chat more about your ideas though -- send us an email! You can find the contact details on https://letsjelly.com ;-)
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!
Thank you! Months ago when we were working on naming this product, some sports-speak was on the table, like Pop-fly and metaphors like what you mentioned XD
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.
Thanks for the kind words! We’re definitely trying to spread more decency and reason in the world. :)
Even bigger thanks! It’s hard to ship stuff, and it’s even harder to spread the word.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.
I also liked the landing page.
Constructive criticism, might just be me: I would lose the phrase "jam on email"... something about it (too folksy?) rubbed me the wrong way.
Perhaps something simpler like "Say hello to Jelly, team email done right."
For a counterpoint - I like it! "Jam" reminds me of jam sessions and FigJam, both pleasant experiences.
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.
Thank you for sharing Jelly with someone who could potentially use it! And for the feedback on the homepage. It's very much a basic v1 of a marketing site that we need to iterate on…
Since no one else has mentioned it, I appreciated the Arrested Development references. Very cute.
A little easter egg for the eagle-eyed ;-)
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
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!
Glad to hear it! Let us know if you have any questions or feedback. (Cade @ Good Enough)
FYI the comma is being placed awkwardly on its own line on the homepage.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/19zt9067x8j230810bjcp/Screens...
OH
,
NO!
Thanks for the heads up! We’ll crack open the CSS...
Nice product. You guys remind me of Hey & Once from 37signals. Excited to see what else ships from Good Enough.
Very well done, bookmarking for when I need this in the future.
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
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.
The short story is that Good Enough has put a handful of (hopefully) delightful things into the world: https://goodenough.us/
Putting things into the world means getting emails. Being a team means juggling said emails about things amongst several people.
Enter the Shared Fastmail Account.
"Oh! A new email. Click. Oh, this isn’t really for me. Mark as unread. Or did someone else already read this, mark as unread, and think it was for me? I guess I will go talk to..." And, you know, two dozen variations on that theme. It sucked as a way to work together.
We use Slack at Good Enough. It’s nifty. We even have a Jelly + Slack integration (and we use that too)! That said, the problem I described isn’t really solved by Slack. (Maybe Discord if you’re in a space that can funnel interactions there, but obviously there’s a lot of businesses who aren’t, and there’s a lot of drawbacks to using Discord as your only communication medium.)Email is still widely used and wildly useful. We think being able to collaborate on emails as a team, with clear expectations about who is handling what and visibility on all the back and forth, is really helpful. We’ve been using it to scratch our own itch from day one, and we suspect it will be of interest to others as well!
Let me know if any of that didn’t make sense or you have any other questions.
Thank you for the detailed reply.
I now understand how this is specific to solving the problems of a shared email inbox. This isn't a problem I've had to deal with before, but indeed it appears to be a sufficiently painful problem to solve for.
I wish you the best of luck, and continue the good fight to simplify.
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.
Great question! Two things:
1. Jelly has a way to follow conversations and get notifications about replies and comments. So everyone can follow the convos they care about via Jelly notification emails sent to their personal team email.
2. For teams on our higher tier Royal Jelly plan, we have an IMAP feature that can sync mail sent out of Jelly back into your Gmail. It says "Coming soon" on our price table, but it's a working feature in alpha right now, and we already have some customers using it. We'd be happy to help any team get that set up if they need.
The IMAP feature sounds interesting, but as someone who would be interested in exploring the service, but wouldn't be happy going "all in" with no way of switching back without losing data, it's a shame it's only planned as a feature in the higher tier.
Being able to try a service "risk free" seems really important. To start replying to emails in a new service and then lose them if it doesn't work out doesn't sound like a reasonable option.
The higher tier also has a trial period, so you can go all-in using the sent mail sync, and then all-out, should you wish.
We (Good Enough) would rather help an unhappy customer exit cleanly, than keep you stuck using software you don't like.
If this is the only thing stopping you from using the service, get in touch with us and hopefully we can reassure you about how committed we are to helping you leave Jelly with all your data intact, if it turns out to be the best thing for you.
Jelly looks really nice for replacing Google Groups for some things at $DAYJOB. However, having to look at yet another website for tasks is annoying. I'm about 90% of the way to "everything through `mutt`", so regressing back for such a steep price increase seems…hard to swallow. Would you consider at least making IMAP accessible on the lower tier (just as an access method, not necessarily "sync mail back to gmail" if it is separable)?
> 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.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I see what you did there.
Jelly’s here for you when it stops being, well, good enough!
We use Missive[0] and it's pretty good. It's definitely not as low price as Jelly though.
[0] https://missiveapp.com/
This is why Jelly doesn't price-per-seat -- other tools get expensive, fast.
And those other tools do a lot more too, and they're definitely a great choice if you've got great revenue and dedicated customer support "agents", or you want AI to answer your 10,000 daily support queries.
Jelly tries to serve the rest of us: companies, teams and other groups who just want to collaborate on email, and not get stung in the wallet every time somebody new joins in.
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.
can't you bcc to your email to do the calendar invites?
To whose calendar?
For each customer meeting only specific staff needs to attend, not all.
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!
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
I'd love something like this specifically for email 2FA codes. Shared SMS 2FA would be great too, but obviously different to deal with.
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.
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
Yes, what you suggest would work at distributing the literal messages, but it doesn't really support collaboration:
* It doesn't help with coordinating who is going to take responsibility for a conversation; * replies are stuck in your personal accounts (unless you remember to CC everyone); * there's no way of discussing conversations privately without using another tool; * you can't easily share URLs to conversations in other tools...
... you get the idea :)
What's the stack like? I love the frontend design, are you using SES to handle the inbound mail?
Cade here with Good Enough.
Thanks! It’s a relatively mainline Rails stack. The Good Enough crew has worked in the Rails ecosystem for a long, long time, so it’s what we’re most comfortable/happiest working with! We’re using Postmark to handle all the email processing.Let me know if you have any other questions!
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.
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
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.
Good questions! Most of our products are built with a pretty vanilla Rails stack (what we’re most familiar/comfortable with) backed by Postgres. Beyond that, it’s just the classic engineering struggle of trying to keep things simple and maintainable while making tradeoffs to ship stuff that’s Good Enough™. :) Happy to speak to any more specifics if you have further questions!
Cool! What about deploying?
Jelly is currently using Render, and we have automated deploys set up from Github, so just merging the PR kicks off the magic sauce.
taking off my Jelly hat
I’ve also used Kamal + Hetzner for a few other simple things recently, and it’s been surprisingly delightful (speaking as someone who has never enjoyed mucking about with deployment frameworks).
29 dollars a month is a bit of an insane starter price, especially for smaller teams.
I get that each person will decide if it's worth it or not, but $29/month isn't really anything in the big picture of what you are paying the people who will be using it.
Might be nice if there was a free tier for small non-profits, volunteer orgs, student orgs, etc. but a lot of things might be nice.
It's our goal to make this as affordable as possible for all types of organisation. If you're part of a non-profit or volunteer organisation, get in touch.
$29/month isn't really anything until you have 10 tools that are all adding up.
It's always a good idea to be critical of monthly subscriptions, they add up fast.
$290/month is still peanuts if you have employees.
Especially if that $290 improves productivity enough that you need fewer employees.
For an unlimited amount of users $29 is not all that insane.
I'm not sure if you realize that this is _not_ a per user price, but a flat monthly fee. To me, that seems insanely cheap.
If you have a small team of 3 people who get paid 4k gross (severely under paid in all likeliness) then Jelly is 0.3% of your total cost.
I disagree. Seem very reasonable for a key tool to help the team run the business.
What do you think is a fair price? (It seems quite reasonable to me.)
How much do you think it costs to have a "team" at all?
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.
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
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?
Jelly doesn't directly integrate with Office365 or any existing shared mailboxes, at least not at the moment. You just forward email into it, from any source, and then use the Jelly web application to collaborate on those emails.
In the future we'll be looking at ways to streamline the setup with existing mail providers like Google, Office365 and so on, but we're starting out simple. There are lots of teams sharing logins to single email accounts whose lives we want to improve.
Ah, okay. I’ll keep an eye on Jelly. It looks really nice and could be something they go for, though I know a nice smooth transition would be nice and the possibility of falling back to the shared mailbox if necessary.
I’ve thought about putting for serious effort to setup discourse like they explain using it as a ticketing system with email but this seems better.
Hey, neat design.
(;
> Royal Jelly
Is this a Spelunky reference? If so, I love it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly
Por que no los dos?
I know it as a bee keeping term. Royal jelly is a honey bee secretion that is used in the nutrition of larvae and adult queens.
We started routing emails from our shared inbox to our API with a bunch of regex to look up who the email belongs to.
Quick feedback: Couldn’t watch the video because it requires a YouTube account
I like your landing page UI
Bro, love what comes out of Good Enough. I'll share this with our customer support team
Thanks for the love! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or feedback: https://letterbird.co/jelly — we’ll be handling any messages you send from our own Jelly account! :)
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? :)
Thanks for the kind words (and for passing Jelly along to others!).
Definitely something for us to consider. Thanks for the feedback! You nailed it! The Good Enough crew have all been long, long time Ruby/Rails fans. We’ve even landed a few commits into Rails along the way. :)Can we use this as a mail interface on top of Fastmail?
I’d also be interested in this. Right now, I use Fastmail with a partner and we use the new “Notes” feature to track what’s been open/plan for response.
Yes! Jelly was born out of a shared Fastmail account. You can forward your email to your dedicated Jelly address and be jamming (sorry not sorry) in no time. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you have any questions or feedback!
ah yay! I'm using Front right now for this but I'll look into using mail forwarding!
would mail still be sent from our Fastmail servers?
Jelly itself does the sending, although we are exploring sending from your existing mail provider.
"No artificial colors or sweeteners" yet the main color is pink.
I take your comment was meant to be funny, but pink is one of the easiest colors to obtain from natural ingredients. Beetroots, strawberries, chochineal, cherries, radish, raspberries, pomegranate, guava, peppers, tomatoes, watermelon, cranberries, blood oranges, blood, shrimp…
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!
I thought it looked familiar!
This is so expensive! I signed up for it, but when I saw the price... Come on, get real!
We can totally appreciate that everyone has their own price points. That said, I do want to clarify that Jelly is not priced per user. The starting plan is $29/mo for your entire team. Period. In the landscape of similar tools, we think that’s quite a lovely deal.
For some folks, that’s still expensive. We get it. If so (especially if you’re a nonprofit or educational institution or...) reach out to us and let’s talk!
For small teams, it's expensive. You need a third tier for up to 3 people, or even just a duo plan.