10 ms·

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

338 points by mlettini 2y ago

Hello HN! I wanted to share something we at Good Enough (https://goodenough.us https://goodenough.us) built over the past year: Jelly! https://letsjelly.com https://letsjelly.com Jelly is a simpler shared inbox for small teams (like us) to answer team email. We had just been sharing a login to Fastmail previously, but as email started getting busier, that really started to stink as a solution — no one knew who was going to answer what, if someone else saw an email or not, etc etc. 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! We went looking for a tool to solve these problems, but everything we found was way too much software, and really quite expensive charging per seat. We didn’t need a complex ticketing system. We just needed email, as a team, in a simple and sane way. So we built Jelly! And we’re not charging per seat, so you can bring your whole team for a very affordable price. (As a quick comparison for our team of six: Jelly’s lowest tier costs just $29/month while Zendesk’s costs upwards of $330/month.) We would love to hear thoughts from anyone on a small team that needs to handle shared email. Also, if you know of other teams in that same position, we’d appreciate you letting them know about Jelly. Thank you!

didacusc 2y ago
29 dollars a month is a bit of an insane starter price, especially for smaller teams.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  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.
  - Slurpee99 2y ago
    $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.
    - naniwaduni 2y ago
      $290/month is still peanuts if you have employees.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        Especially if that $290 improves productivity enough that you need fewer employees.
  - lazyatom 2y ago
    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.
- prdonahue 2y ago
  What do you think is a fair price? (It seems quite reasonable to me.)
- gukov 2y ago
  For an unlimited amount of users $29 is not all that insane.
- tmountain 2y ago
  I disagree. Seem very reasonable for a key tool to help the team run the business.
- naniwaduni 2y ago
  How much do you think it costs to have a "team" at all?
- DandyDev 2y ago
  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.
jermaustin1 2y ago
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.
- lazyatom 2y ago
  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.
  - ROFISH 2y ago
    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. ;_;
  - izolate 2y ago
    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.
campak 2y ago
Bro, love what comes out of Good Enough. I'll share this with our customer support team
- cade 2y ago
  Thanks for the love! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or feedback: https://letterbird.co/jelly https://letterbird.co/jelly — we’ll be handling any messages you send from our own Jelly account! :)
Onavo 2y ago
What's the stack like? I love the frontend design, are you using SES to handle the inbound mail?
- cade 2y ago
  Cade here with Good Enough. I love the frontend design Thanks! What's the stack like? 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. Let me know if you have any other questions!
johtso 2y ago
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.
- mlettini 2y ago
  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.
  - mathstuf 2y ago
    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)?
  - johtso 2y ago
    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.
    - lazyatom 2y ago
      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.
teeray 2y ago
I'd love something like this specifically for email 2FA codes. Shared SMS 2FA would be great too, but obviously different to deal with.
ThomasRooney 2y ago
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)
- lazyatom 2y ago
  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 https://letsjelly.com ;-)
mfld 2y ago
> 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.
- cade 2y ago
  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I see what you did there. Jelly’s here for you when it stops being, well, good enough!
Exuma 2y ago
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
- lazyatom 2y ago
  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 :)
veggieroll 2y ago
> Royal Jelly Is this a Spelunky reference? If so, I love it.
- tmountain 2y ago
  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.
- muti 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly
  - cade 2y ago
    Por que no los dos?
mxuribe 2y ago
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!
- mlettini 2y ago
  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
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
uneekname 2y ago
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.
- mlettini 2y ago
  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…
mroset 2y ago
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.
- folmar 2y ago
  Easiest is to leave/mark message unread if you are not taking action. Not a 100% solution, but often good enough.
  - lazyatom 2y ago
    This is exactly what we were doing before we built Jelly. We decided it was not Good Enough™ :)
- wanderingmind 2y ago
  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.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    But that… doesn’t behave the same…?
  - cube00 2y ago
    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.
    - jmcphers 2y ago
sethammons 2y ago
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.
noleary 2y ago
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!
- cade 2y ago
  Glad to hear it! Let us know if you have any questions or feedback. (Cade @ Good Enough)
NetOpWibby 2y ago
Hey, neat design. (;
37signals_ 2y ago
Hey you totally ripped off our design for hey.com!
- mfkp 2y ago
  I thought it looked familiar!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ordinaryradical 2y ago
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.
- cade 2y ago
  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!
  - ordinaryradical 2y ago
    Cool! What about deploying?
    - cade 2y ago
      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).
dtonon 2y ago
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!
kunley 2y ago
"No artificial colors or sweeteners" yet the main color is pink.
- ricardobeat 2y ago
  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…
kbanman 2y ago
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.
- cade 2y ago
  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 https://letterbird.co/jelly if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper with us? Sorry for the less-than-stellar experience thus far!
  - jonahx 2y ago
    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."
    - Centigonal 2y ago
      For a counterpoint - I like it! "Jam" reminds me of jam sessions and FigJam, both pleasant experiences.
graypegg 2y ago
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? :)
- cade 2y ago
  Thanks for the kind words (and for passing Jelly along to others!). Maybe my only suggestion would be different kinds of archiving Definitely something for us to consider. Thanks for the feedback! Also I see the Trix WYSIWYG editor, rails? :) 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. :)
yawnxyz 2y ago
Can we use this as a mail interface on top of Fastmail?
- nemosaltat 2y ago
  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.
- cade 2y ago
  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!
  - yawnxyz 2y ago
    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?
    - lazyatom 2y ago
      Jelly itself does the sending, although we are exploring sending from your existing mail provider.
jklinger410 2y ago
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.
- cade 2y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! We’re definitely trying to spread more decency and reason in the world. :) I'm going to send this around to some people. Even bigger thanks! It’s hard to ship stuff, and it’s even harder to spread the word.
nabeards 2y ago
Quick feedback: Couldn’t watch the video because it requires a YouTube account
dhc02 2y ago
FYI the comma is being placed awkwardly on its own line on the homepage. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/19zt9067x8j230810bjcp/Screenshot_20241112-171237.png?rlkey=u6pu80ku8tro8zf3ci3yf0kf7&st=ojlo68gd&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/19zt9067x8j230810bjcp/Screens...
- cade 2y ago
  OH , NO! Thanks for the heads up! We’ll crack open the CSS...
Meph504 2y ago
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.
nikolay 2y ago
This is so expensive! I signed up for it, but when I saw the price... Come on, get real!
- cade 2y ago
  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!
  - nikolay 2y ago
    For small teams, it's expensive. You need a third tier for up to 3 people, or even just a duo plan.
hi_hi 2y ago
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.
- cade 2y ago
  The short story is that Good Enough has put a handful of (hopefully) delightful things into the world: https://goodenough.us/ 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.
  - hi_hi 2y ago
    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.
jacktheturtle 2y ago
Nice product. You guys remind me of Hey & Once from 37signals. Excited to see what else ships from Good Enough.
pentagrama 2y ago
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/ https://www.chatwoot.com/ [2] Github: https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot [3] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox
getcrunk 2y ago
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
blueberryfarm 2y ago
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.
captn3m0 2y ago
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726 https://web.archive.org/web/20141013115541/https://frontapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20141013115541/https://frontapp....
tupolef 2y ago
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 https://github.com/zammad/zammad
replwoacause 2y ago
Very well done, bookmarking for when I need this in the future.
reiderrider 2y ago
We started routing emails from our shared inbox to our API with a bunch of regex to look up who the email belongs to.
torrance 2y ago
Since no one else has mentioned it, I appreciated the Arrested Development references. Very cute.
- lazyatom 2y ago
  A little easter egg for the eagle-eyed ;-)
  - matthiaswh 2y ago
    There are dozens of us! Dozens!
praveen9920 2y ago
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.
kundi 2y ago
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
lazyatom 2y ago
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.
tapeo 2y ago
I like your landing page UI
tayloramurphy 2y ago
We use Missive[0] and it's pretty good. It's definitely not as low price as Jelly though. [0] https://missiveapp.com/ https://missiveapp.com/
- lazyatom 2y ago
  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.
hk1337 2y ago
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?
- lazyatom 2y ago
  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.
  - hk1337 2y ago
    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.
ezl 2y ago
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
nh2 2y ago
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.
- genewitch 2y ago
  can't you bcc to your email to do the calendar invites?
  - nh2 2y ago
    To whose calendar? For each customer meeting only specific staff needs to attend, not all.

338 points by mlettini 2y ago

didacusc 2y ago

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

SoftTalker 2y ago
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.
- Slurpee99 2y ago
  $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.
  - naniwaduni 2y ago
    $290/month is still peanuts if you have employees.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Especially if that $290 improves productivity enough that you need fewer employees.
- lazyatom 2y ago
  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.
prdonahue 2y ago
What do you think is a fair price? (It seems quite reasonable to me.)
gukov 2y ago
For an unlimited amount of users $29 is not all that insane.
tmountain 2y ago
I disagree. Seem very reasonable for a key tool to help the team run the business.
naniwaduni 2y ago
How much do you think it costs to have a "team" at all?
DandyDev 2y ago
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.

jermaustin1 2y ago

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.

lazyatom 2y ago
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.
- ROFISH 2y ago
  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. ;_;
- izolate 2y ago
  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.

campak 2y ago

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

cade 2y ago
Thanks for the love! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or feedback: https://letterbird.co/jelly https://letterbird.co/jelly — we’ll be handling any messages you send from our own Jelly account! :)

Onavo 2y ago

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

cade 2y ago
Cade here with Good Enough. I love the frontend design Thanks! What's the stack like? 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. Let me know if you have any other questions!

johtso 2y ago

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.

mlettini 2y ago
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.
- mathstuf 2y ago
  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)?
- johtso 2y ago
  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.
  - lazyatom 2y ago
    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.

teeray 2y ago

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

ThomasRooney 2y ago

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)

lazyatom 2y ago
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 https://letsjelly.com ;-)

mfld 2y ago

> 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.

cade 2y ago
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I see what you did there. Jelly’s here for you when it stops being, well, good enough!

Exuma 2y ago

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

lazyatom 2y ago
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 :)

veggieroll 2y ago

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

tmountain 2y ago
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.
muti 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly
- cade 2y ago
  Por que no los dos?

mxuribe 2y ago

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!

mlettini 2y ago
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
deleted 2y ago
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uneekname 2y ago

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.

mlettini 2y ago
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…

mroset 2y ago

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.

folmar 2y ago
Easiest is to leave/mark message unread if you are not taking action. Not a 100% solution, but often good enough.
- lazyatom 2y ago
  This is exactly what we were doing before we built Jelly. We decided it was not Good Enough™ :)
wanderingmind 2y ago
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.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  But that… doesn’t behave the same…?
- cube00 2y ago
  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.
  - jmcphers 2y ago

sethammons 2y ago

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.

noleary 2y ago

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!

cade 2y ago
Glad to hear it! Let us know if you have any questions or feedback. (Cade @ Good Enough)

NetOpWibby 2y ago

Hey, neat design. (;

37signals_ 2y ago

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

mfkp 2y ago
I thought it looked familiar!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ordinaryradical 2y ago

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.

cade 2y ago
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!
- ordinaryradical 2y ago
  Cool! What about deploying?
  - cade 2y ago
    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).

dtonon 2y ago

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!

kunley 2y ago

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

ricardobeat 2y ago
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…

kbanman 2y ago

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.

cade 2y ago
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 https://letterbird.co/jelly if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper with us? Sorry for the less-than-stellar experience thus far!
- jonahx 2y ago
  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."
  - Centigonal 2y ago
    For a counterpoint - I like it! "Jam" reminds me of jam sessions and FigJam, both pleasant experiences.

graypegg 2y ago

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? :)

cade 2y ago
Thanks for the kind words (and for passing Jelly along to others!). Maybe my only suggestion would be different kinds of archiving Definitely something for us to consider. Thanks for the feedback! Also I see the Trix WYSIWYG editor, rails? :) 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. :)

yawnxyz 2y ago

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

nemosaltat 2y ago
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.
cade 2y ago
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!
- yawnxyz 2y ago
  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?
  - lazyatom 2y ago
    Jelly itself does the sending, although we are exploring sending from your existing mail provider.

jklinger410 2y ago

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.

cade 2y ago
Thanks for the kind words! We’re definitely trying to spread more decency and reason in the world. :) I'm going to send this around to some people. Even bigger thanks! It’s hard to ship stuff, and it’s even harder to spread the word.

nabeards 2y ago

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

dhc02 2y ago

FYI the comma is being placed awkwardly on its own line on the homepage. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/19zt9067x8j230810bjcp/Screenshot_20241112-171237.png?rlkey=u6pu80ku8tro8zf3ci3yf0kf7&st=ojlo68gd&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/19zt9067x8j230810bjcp/Screens...

cade 2y ago
OH , NO! Thanks for the heads up! We’ll crack open the CSS...

Meph504 2y ago

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.

nikolay 2y ago

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

cade 2y ago
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!
- nikolay 2y ago
  For small teams, it's expensive. You need a third tier for up to 3 people, or even just a duo plan.

hi_hi 2y ago

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.

cade 2y ago
The short story is that Good Enough has put a handful of (hopefully) delightful things into the world: https://goodenough.us/ 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.
- hi_hi 2y ago
  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.

jacktheturtle 2y ago

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

pentagrama 2y ago

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/ https://www.chatwoot.com/ [2] Github: https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot [3] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox

getcrunk 2y ago

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

blueberryfarm 2y ago

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.

captn3m0 2y ago

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726 https://web.archive.org/web/20141013115541/https://frontapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20141013115541/https://frontapp....

tupolef 2y ago

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 https://github.com/zammad/zammad

replwoacause 2y ago

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

reiderrider 2y ago

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

torrance 2y ago

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

lazyatom 2y ago
A little easter egg for the eagle-eyed ;-)
- matthiaswh 2y ago
  There are dozens of us! Dozens!

praveen9920 2y ago

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.

kundi 2y ago

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

lazyatom 2y ago

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.

tapeo 2y ago

I like your landing page UI

tayloramurphy 2y ago

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

lazyatom 2y ago
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.

hk1337 2y ago

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?

lazyatom 2y ago
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.
- hk1337 2y ago
  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.

ezl 2y ago

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

nh2 2y ago

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.

genewitch 2y ago
can't you bcc to your email to do the calendar invites?
- nh2 2y ago
  To whose calendar? For each customer meeting only specific staff needs to attend, not all.