[HN Gopher] Show HN: Jelly - A simpler shared inbox for small teams
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Show HN: Jelly - A simpler shared inbox for small teams
Hello HN! I wanted to share something we at Good Enough
(https://goodenough.us) built over the past year: Jelly!
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!
Author : mlettini
Score : 156 points
Date : 2024-11-12 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (letsjelly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (letsjelly.com)
| didacusc wrote:
| 29 dollars a month is a bit of an insane starter price,
| especially for smaller teams.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| $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 wrote:
| $290/month is still peanuts if you have employees.
| lazyatom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What do you think is a fair price? (It seems quite reasonable
| to me.)
| gukov wrote:
| For an unlimited amount of users $29 is not all that insane.
| tmountain wrote:
| I disagree. Seem very reasonable for a key tool to help the
| team run the business.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| How much do you think it costs to have a "team" at all?
| DandyDev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bro, love what comes out of Good Enough. I'll share this with our
| customer support team
| cade wrote:
| 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! :)
| Onavo wrote:
| What's the stack like? I love the frontend design, are you using
| SES to handle the inbound mail?
| cade wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)?
| teeray wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| mfld wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| ( deg [?]? deg)
|
| I see what you did there.
|
| Jelly's here for you when it stops being, well, good enough!
| Exuma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Royal Jelly
|
| Is this a Spelunky reference? If so, I love it.
| muti wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly
| cade wrote:
| Por que no los dos?
| tmountain wrote:
| 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.
| mxuribe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| uneekname wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But that... doesn't behave the same...?
| cube00 wrote:
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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
| cube00 wrote:
| Let's break out after family stand up.
| folmar wrote:
| Easiest is to leave/mark message unread if you are not taking
| action. Not a 100% solution, but often good enough.
| lazyatom wrote:
| This is exactly what we were doing before we built Jelly. We
| decided it was not Good Enough(tm) :)
| physhster wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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.
| sethammons wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Glad to hear it! Let us know if you have any questions or
| feedback. (Cade @ Good Enough)
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Hey, neat design.
|
| (;
| 37signals_ wrote:
| Hey you totally ripped off our design for hey.com!
| mfkp wrote:
| I thought it looked familiar!
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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(tm). :) Happy to speak to any more specifics if you have
| further questions!
| dtonon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "No artificial colors or sweeteners" yet the main color is pink.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| graypegg wrote:
| 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? :)
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Can we use this as a mail interface on top of Fastmail?
| nemosaltat wrote:
| 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.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| 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.
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