Launch HN: Unlayer (YC W22) – Add email and document builders to your app (unlayer.com)

Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HsDtNkdMpM.

We started with an embeddable email editor because a lot of products eventually need one: CRMs, marketing tools, customer engagement platforms, marketplaces, internal tools, and vertical SaaS apps all run into this at some point. At first, it sounds like a small feature: "just" add a drag and drop editor. In practice, it turns into a big pain. You end up dealing with email rendering, Outlook quirks, responsive layouts, templates, merge tags, image uploads, exports, permissions, localization, versioning, and a long tail of edge cases that have nothing to do with your core product

Over time, we saw the same problem beyond email. Apps also need landing pages, invoices, proposals, reports, contracts, and PDFs. Some of this content is best created visually by end users. Some of it is better generated in code by developers. Increasingly, some of it is also generated by AI agents. Many teams eventually need all three workflows. That is the direction we have been working toward with Unlayer.

There are three parts we are showing today:

(1) Unlayer Elements. This is our open-source React component library for creating emails, pages, and documents in code (repo: https://github.com/unlayer/elements, more at https://unlayer.com/elements). Instead of hand-writing raw HTML templates, developers can compose content using React components, reuse sections like headers, footers, CTAs, invoice rows, and branded blocks, keep templates in Git, and render them into production output.

One newer use case we are seeing is AI-assisted content creation. If an AI agent is asked to create an email, invoice, report, or landing page, the output is usually raw HTML or markdown that becomes hard to maintain. With Elements, the agent can generate structured React components instead. A developer can review the result, refactor it, keep it in Git, and still pass the design into a visual builder later if someone needs to edit it.

(2) Visual Builder. This is the drag and drop editor (repo: https://github.com/unlayer/react-email-editor, more at https://unlayer.com/email-builder) that can be embedded inside an app so non-technical users can create or edit content. In the demo, we show the email builder and the AI assistant inside the builder. The goal is not to replace the developer workflow, but to connect it with a visual workflow when marketers, admins, customers, or internal teams need to make changes themselves.

(3) Document Builder. This is for structured documents such as proposals, reports, invoices, contracts, and PDFs. We have seen a lot of teams build separate systems for email templates, web pages, and document generation, even though the underlying primitives are similar: layout, content blocks, variables, assets, preview, export, and permissions. More: https://unlayer.com/document-builder

The technical challenge is making these workflows share a common foundation. Developers should be able to build templates in code when that makes sense. End users should be able to edit visually whe...