About
→ Tool for collecting emails and providing real-time chat support
Concept
Chatea was intended to be a unified inbox for low- to medium-traffic applications, covering both email and on-site widget messaging.
Target Market
The app was designed for indie developers, meant for heavy email coolection and facilitate sales. The expected volume per customer was around 1–5 concurrent connections via the application (with no limit on the number of emails it could handle). With this in mind, the unified inbox would offer a cheaper alternative to competitors like Ozark, HelpScout, Twilio, ChatWoo, and Chatbase. Despite the simplicity of the idea, most inbox providers have very limited free plans. The cheapest option—ChatWoo—starts at around $20 per user, lacks AI functionality, and offers no API integration in its free tier.
Technicals
Despite its nuances, this project was quite interesting, especially in terms of different protocols’ limitations on concurrent connections and the related security, notification, and real-time update challenges. In the end, I chose a stateless approach: conversations were written to a temporary Redis table-like structure and then stored in an SQLite database for long-term preservation. A Server-Sent Events (SSE) system alerted various clients when to read from Redis, creating the impression of real-time connectivity.
Monetization
SaaS. The free tier would include unlimited inbox capabilities with AI accessibility and unlimited email collection, but would charge per message once usage exceeded a certain cap.
Main Costs
The development was quite affordable—since the app was heavily reliant on a local SQLite instance and Redis, and Google APIs offer a generous free tier to start with.
Conclusion
The project was definitely interesting and worth exploring in the future. There were many ways it could have been developed into something akin to an ERP for businesses. However, given the strong competition and maturity of existing solutions, I chose to move on to something more practical, with a commitment to revisit the opportunity later.
Next Steps
Maybe instead of building first, I should gather some solid metrics on the market. Find out how much interest there is, and only then develop a project.