Email for indie hackers with many projects

One account, many projects#

If you ship small products, each one ends up needing the same email: support@ that someone reads, and noreply@ that sends password resets and receipts. Set up per product, that is a mail provider account, a sending service account, a DNS session and a bill each, times the number of projects you keep alive.

Mailbay has one workspace for you, with a project per product. Each project has its own domains, inboxes, senders, API keys, webhooks and logs; the plan and its limits are shared across all of them.

Workspace  (you, your plan, pooled limits)
├─ Superchat        superchat.com, mail.superchat.com
│   ├─ inboxes      support@, billing@
│   ├─ senders      noreply@superchat.com
│   └─ keys         superchat-prod (sending), support-bot (inbox)
├─ Invoicely        invoicely.app
│   ├─ inboxes      hello@
│   ├─ senders      receipts@invoicely.app
│   └─ keys         invoicely-prod (sending)
└─ Playground       k7m3qz.mailbay.email, the Catch-all for tests and agents

Add a project#

Choose New project, name it, and paste the domain. Mailbay detects the DNS host and any existing mail, suggests support@, hello@, billing@ and noreply@, and shows the records with SPF merged into what you already have. On Vercel or Cloudflare it writes them for you. The details are in support@ on your own domain.

If the domain already gets mail elsewhere and you receive on mail.yourproduct.com, the root and its mail. subdomain count as one domain against your plan.

A key per app#

Give each deployed app a sending key for its own project, optionally limited to one domain. It can send from that domain and read its own send log, and nothing else, so a leaked key from one side project cannot read another project's support mail.

curl https://api.mailbay.dev/v1/keys \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUPERCHAT_FULL_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "superchat-prod", "permissions": "sending", "domain_id": "superchat.com"}'

Then send over the API or SMTP from whatever stack each product uses; the sending guide covers Supabase, Next.js, Nodemailer and the Resend SDK.

Work per project from the terminal#

An API key always acts in its own project, so the simplest setup is one key per project in each repository's environment. The mailbay CLI reads MAILBAY_API_KEY before its config file:

# in ~/code/superchat/.envrc (or your shell of choice)
export MAILBAY_API_KEY=mb_live_superchat_full_key

mailbay projects                 # the projects you can see
mailbay inbox list               # this project's inboxes
mailbay domain verify superchat.com
mailbay wait ibx_01m4x47frjph8segqg79gqpz2t --subject "invoice" --timeout 2m

The dashboard has a project switcher at the top, and the support Inbox shows conversations from every project at once, with a filter per project.

What it costs#

Nothing during the beta. After it, the planned plans are per workspace, not per project:

• Free: 3 inboxes, 3,000 emails a month, 3 custom domains. The Catch-all does not count as an inbox.
• Pro, $9 a month: 25 inboxes, 50,000 emails a month, 10 custom domains, shared by every project.
• Scale, $99 a month: 250 inboxes, 250,000 emails a month, unlimited domains.

Ten projects with support@ and noreply@ each fit in Pro. The pricing page has an estimator for your own numbers.