Outgrow Gmail labels. Skip the per-seat helpdesk.
Indie SaaS support runs on Gmail labels until it does not. AcornReply is the smaller jump: a shared inbox priced flat per workspace, with AI drafts grounded in your help articles. Forward your support address and keep replying like a person.
Gmail labels work — until two people open the same thread.
The standard indie SaaS support stack is one founder's Gmail with a `support` label, plus a co-founder who CCs themselves in. It scales to about three customers per day before duplicate replies, missed messages, and the 'who said what' Slack thread eat your morning.
No shared state.
Two teammates do not know if the other already replied. Customers get two answers, or none.
No way to write in one voice.
Your co-founder writes 'Hey friend, sorry about that!' You write 'Hi, thanks for the report.' Customers feel it.
Per-seat helpdesks tax the wrong axis.
You add a contractor for six weeks; their seat costs $300 for a 3-month engagement. The math punishes the way indie teams actually staff.
No clean way to send a contact form to your site.
Most indie SaaS landing pages link to a personal Gmail. Spam-filtered, no analytics, no signal.
How AcornReply replaces the Gmail-label stack.
Forward your support address, paste a one-line contact-form snippet on your landing page, invite your co-founder. Three steps, one inbox, flat price.
One inbound channel for email, contact form, and JS chat.
Anything sent to your per-workspace support address, submitted through the hosted contact form at your-slug.acornreply.com/contact, or dropped into the slide-out chat button on your site lands in the same conversation list.
Assignment that does not require a process doc.
Returning customers automatically route to whoever last replied to them. Sending a reply claims any unassigned thread. The "Mine" filter shows just yours. No SLA queues, no round-robin rules to configure.
AI drafts grounded in your FAQ, not the open web.
Paste your help articles into the FAQ. Every draft cites which articles it used, and if it can't find a confident answer it asks for clarification instead of inventing one. You see exactly what the customer would see before you hit send.
Mobile-first PWA, no native app required.
AcornReply installs to your home screen from Safari or Chrome — no App Store wait, no native build. Swipe right to snooze, swipe left to resolve. The way you actually do support: on your phone, between meetings.
A two-person indie SaaS, week one.
Founder A forwards [email protected] to [email protected]. Founder B drops the contact-form `<script>` tag into the marketing site's footer. They paste eight help articles into the FAQ. By the end of week one, every inbound message has a draft waiting, customer replies thread automatically, and the Slack 'who's on this' chatter goes quiet.
Your first reply, in five minutes.
Sign up, forward your support address, paste five past replies. The next inbound message arrives with a draft already written.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to change my DNS records?
No. AcornReply gives you a per-workspace forwarding address on acornreply.com — you just add a forward rule from your existing [email protected] in Gmail or Outlook. No MX changes, no DKIM rewiring, no waiting for DNS propagation.
How does AcornReply handle two people opening the same conversation?
Every conversation has at most one assignee. Sending a reply auto-claims an unassigned thread for you, so the second person sees the assignee chip update in real time. There's no shared-cursor edit mode — that's a feature: drafts stay separate, the assignee is the source of truth.
Can I embed the contact form in my marketing site?
Yes. Three ways: a hosted public URL at your-slug.acornreply.com/contact to link from anywhere, a single `<script>` tag that injects an inline iframe wherever you paste it, and a JS snippet that adds a slide-out chat button to the bottom-right of every page. All three feed the same inbox.
Will the AI try to send replies on its own?
Never. AcornReply explicitly does not ship autonomous reply. Drafts sit in the conversation and wait for a teammate to edit and hit send. If you want a bot that replies to customers without a human in the loop, AcornReply is the wrong product on purpose.