Show HN: Jelly – A simpler shared inbox for small teams (letsjelly.com)
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!
132 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadMight 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 always a good idea to be critical of monthly subscriptions, they add up fast.
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'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.
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. ;_;
Let me know if you have any other questions!
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.
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.
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.
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)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 ;-)
Very true. Unfortunately, for our management it is, well, good enough.
I see what you did there.
Jelly’s here for you when it stops being, well, good enough!
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
* 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 :)
Is this a Spelunky reference? If so, I love it.
> 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.
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 tried sparkmail but it's a little much for non-business purposes to be honest.
- 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.
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.
I don’t really get where to configure the auto bcc rule when sending emails from third email address.
Thanks
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 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.
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
We use Migadu, which allows you to have as many mailboxes as you want with any plan, so it’s pretty cheap.
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.
I wrote about my setup here: https://www.commithash.com/posts/a-better-way-to-share-email...
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.
(;
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).
> 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'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.
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."
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? :)
would mail still be sent from our Fastmail servers?
Good stuff. I'm going to send this around to some people.