About
→ Tool for collecting emails and providing real-time chat support
Concept
Chatea intent was to be a unified inbox for low- to medium-traffic applications, covering both email and on-site widget messaging.
Target Market
The ideal customer was indie developers, and the app was meant for heavy email collection and facilitating 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 the limitations of different protocols 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-like table 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 relied heavily on a local SQLite instance and Redis, and Google APIs offer a generous free tier to start.
Conclusion
The project was definitely interesting and worth exploring further. There were many ways it could grow 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 solid market metrics. Find out how much interest there is, and only then develop a project.