Elastic Email Inbox: The Help Desk and Team Chat We Built for Ourselves First

We are Elastic Email, an email delivery platform that helps small businesses send email through an API or SMTP and build campaigns in an easy-to-use campaign creator. We have been on the market for over 15 years, and all that time our energy has gone into one thing: robust software for people who want their mail sent well. But today, we’re sharing how we built Elastic Email Inbox, moved our whole company onto it, and why a $9 seat isn't the red flag it might look like.

Like any other business, we need tools to keep our own operations running smoothly. For years, we ran customer support in Intercom and team chat in Slack, then in Mattermost. Each did its job. Then the cost of external tools started climbing, as every small company has noticed, and we began comparing what we paid for with the features we actually used. At the same time, we were looking for a way to bring our daily operations into one place, so that everything would be within reach without switching between a handful of tools all day.

That review turned into a longer conversation within the team about the foundation we had been building for years. Email is a powerful communication tool, and we'd already done the hard parts. So we decided to start Elastic Email Inbox - the new product that we, a small SaaS business, could run our daily operations on, and that other businesses could use for conversations within an organization and with their customers. We would be its first customer, and the hardest one to please.

What did Elastic Email use before Inbox

Two tools, two logins, and communication scattered across both, which did nothing for the flow of information. Intercom handled everything a customer could send us, from email to chat on our website and inside the product. Mattermost handled everything we said to each other: channels per team, direct messages, threads, and the GIFs shared at the end of a long day. So customer conversations lived in one tool and team conversations in another. In a small company, the two are rarely separate. A customer question very often needs a quick word with someone from another department, sometimes two, before it can be answered. We were looking for a way to join them, so that everyone had the customer within reach without switching to another tool.

To be fair to both tools, Intercom is a polished product with a strong inbox, and it keeps adding to that inbox every year. Mattermost gave us Slack-style channels and threads on our own terms. Nobody on the support team, or on our team in general, was unhappy with either tool. Still, we knew from our own experience that a small business works a little differently than the companies these tools are built for, and the bill, as we said, was never a small detail.

Why was Intercom not the best fit for a company our size

Looking back, we were a small support team on a platform built for a much larger one, and that showed in two places: in how the tool assumed we worked, and in the monthly bill.

For an organization with tiers of agents, managers who assign conversations by hand, and someone who owns custom reporting, Intercom probably remains a great tool. At Elastic Email, whoever picks up a customer inquiry goes straight to the engineer, or solves it alone. Most of what Intercom offers a whole department either got in our way or we never configured it. A small business runs on a shorter loop, and we built Inbox around that loop.

Before we left, our Intercom bill was about $1,300 a month. The real problem was the one above: when you use a fraction of the product, price matters most, and the bill grows with headcount, because every teammate who replies to a customer needs a full seat. We are probably not the only small company wondering whether $39 to $139 per seat has to be the norm.

Take a five-person team that lets the AI agent close 300 conversations a month. On Intercom’s cheapest plan, that is about $442. On Elastic Email Inbox, the same team with the same 300 resolutions pays $120.

Intercom prices from Intercom's own plans and pricing page, checked in November 2026.

Why did we leave Mattermost, our team chat tool

With Mattermost, and with Slack before it, the chat itself was not the problem. The problem was that team communication lived in separate tools, so every piece of information had to be carried between them by hand, and in a small team, that is exactly where it slows down or gets lost along the way.

Our support team had Intercom open all day, while everyone else sat on Mattermost. And when an agent needed an engineer to look at a customer’s problem, they’d copy the conversation link from Intercom, switch over to Mattermost, find the right channel, paste the link with a little context, and once the feedback was received, switch back to Intercom to pass the information onto the customer. At first, the escalation cost a few minutes, but when you multiply that by a support operation that never closes, it stops being a few minutes.

There was also the usual question of how much of the product we actually touched. When we first started using Mattermost, it was a great tool for us, but over the years it grew into a fairly large platform, and with every release there was something new we’d never turn on. What we really used came down to channels, threads, mentions, and pinned messages. So when we planned our own help desk, we made team chat the other half of the same window.

Why build new software instead of buying a cheaper one

Once we decided to build, we did not stop at a help desk. If customer and team conversations were going to live in one place, that place needed everything we had been paying for separately: a help desk for the shared queue, team chat with channels and threads, live chat for the website, and an email server so a team can create an inbox on our own domain without yet another subscription. And it needed an AI agent to take the first reply, because when routine questions can be answered in seconds, leaving them in a queue overnight makes little sense anymore.

We also had something most companies do not. Elastic Email has been building communication tools for over 15 years, and we have run our own mail infrastructure since 2010. Receiving mail for a domain, scoring it against SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, threading replies, reading BCC from the envelope where it actually lives, keeping spam out of the queue - all of that was already running in our stack.

Then our team tested the product and shared opinions from day one. When a feature was missing, or something was slow, we knew immediately, built it, and shipped it to you. So when you read that on our product pages, know that it describes, quite literally, the development process.

We did look at other tools first, obviously. But none of them put team chat in the same window as the customer, and none ran their own mail. So we built Inbox.

How did the migration go

Of all the migrations we've done over the years, this was the easiest, and for email it was barely a migration at all. That is the whole point of how Inbox works: it needs to be effortless, or at least easy enough for a five-person team to handle in a few hours.

Our biggest move was switching from Intercom to Inbox and its Help Desk. All it took was pointing those addresses at Inbox so every incoming email showed up in the shared queue. As far as we can tell, nobody on the customer side noticed anything had changed, which is exactly what we were hoping for.

Live Chat was an even easier migration. We simply removed Intercom's widget from the website, pasted in Inbox Live Chat, picked colors, wrote a greeting, and that was it. Thanks to a server-side signature, signed-in customers are recognized, and our team, along with the Milo AI agent, sees a verified name and account instead of a guess.

Team chat was the part we were nervous about. We didn't import Mattermost history into Inbox, and we don't offer a Slack or Mattermost importer yet. We started fresh in Inbox Team Chat, and from day one, everyone found their footing. New group conversations and channels appeared within days, and the speed at which anyone can now jump into a customer's conversation has noticeably improved how our customers and the specialists behind the support team communicate.

Milo, the no-code AI agent, came last. We connected our company knowledge, Help Center articles, and our website, tested it against the questions our support team hears most, and switched it on for live chat.

What changed after we moved to Elastic Email Inbox

Once everything lived in one place, the changes came quickly:

• About 250 hours of support work saved every month (so far), because Milo AI answers the routine questions before a person ever sees them.
• Up to 60% of incoming conversations resolved by Milo AI without a human touch.
• 99% faster first response, since the first reply now arrives in seconds.
• One place for all company conversations. A seat covers Help Desk, Team Chat, Live Chat, and Email Server. The AI agent is the only add-on, billed per resolved conversation.
• Roughly ~1,300 USD a month saved on external Help Desk software.

And obviously, some things are harder to measure, but they still make a difference for our organization. Escalations take less time because a link pasted into a channel opens in the same window. A customer who chatted on one day and emailed on another sits on one contact card, so whoever picks it up already knows the story. We also share every product documentation we discuss within the team with an AI agent that learns from it and helps customers understand the challenge they are facing.

There is a quieter change too. Every gap our support team hits is now a ticket for our own engineers, and the fix ships to every Inbox customer at once. We stopped waiting on somebody else's roadmap!

Is $9 per seat too cheap to be safe?

Fair question, and we would ask it too. When Elastic Email Inbox costs a fraction of the alternatives, it's natural to suspect something is missing. But that’s not the thing here. Elastic Email Inbox's price is low, but low is not the same as fragile.

We already own the expensive part

The cost of running a help desk is mostly the cost of reliably receiving, storing, and sending email. We've done that for customers since 2010, on infrastructure we operate ourselves. Inbox sits on top of systems that were staffed and monitored long before Inbox existed.

We are our own biggest customer

Every email and chat that reaches Elastic Email's support goes through Inbox Help Desk. Every internal conversation happens in Inbox Team Chat. If Inbox has a bad day, our support team has a bad day before any of your customers do. That is a stronger uptime incentive than any SLA we could print.

The pricing is simple on purpose

One seat price with Help Desk, Team Chat, Live Chat, and Email Server included. The AI agent is a separate add-on billed per resolved conversation, with a free monthly allowance. No tier hides the feature you need on the next plan up, because the Free plan has every feature, with message history limited to 90 days.

The security is the same as what we run our own company on

Multi-factor authentication on every account, granular roles, and private channels. When our support staff impersonates a user to help with an issue, message content stays hidden, and direct access to the message database is restricted to a small number of authorized engineers.

What Elastic Email doesn't do (yet)

We could end the story here, but a story that only lists wins reads like an ad. Nobody moves a whole company onto a new tool without finding a few rough edges on the way, and we found ours. Some we have already fixed, some are still on the list. So here is the other side.

• Email Server is not a mailbox provider. It has no IMAP or POP3, and no desktop or mobile mail client. It is built for the shared addresses customers write to.
• There is no importer for Slack or Mattermost history. We started fresh ourselves, and we recommend keeping the old tool read-only for a while.
• Desktop and mobile apps are under development right now. Until they ship, Inbox runs in a desktop or mobile browser.
• Milo answers questions. It takes no actions in other systems, so it doesn't issue refunds or change accounts, and it never answers from the open internet. If the answer is not in your sources, it says it doesn't know and offers a person.
• Reporting is sized for a small team. You see how much is coming in, how fast you reply, who is carrying the load, and whether customers are happy. There is no custom report builder.

Who should move to Elastic Email Inbox

We built Inbox for companies like ours, where two to ten people answer customers during the day and talk to each other in between. If that sounds like your team, and your customer email, website chat, internal channels, and knowledge base are spread across separate tools with separate logins, Inbox puts them in one window. And Milo, the AI agent, handles the first reply to the questions that come in every single day, so your people can pick up the rest.

It also fits a team that is about to buy its first help desk or its first team chat. Starting on Inbox means you never set up separate tools in the first place, and you never pay for a chat subscription alongside a support subscription.

On the other hand, if you run a whole support department, with analysts who live in the reporting, custom dashboards, product tours and outbound campaigns, and a budget where $100 a seat isn’t even a conversation, you should probably stay where you are. Intercom, Slack, or Mattermost are very good at what they do for the companies they were designed for, and we’d be the last to pretend otherwise.

But if you wonder whether Elastic Email Inbox is a good fit for your business, open the tools your team uses to talk to customers and each other, and count the features nobody has clicked in a month. If it's most of them, you are paying for a department you don't have.

Try Elastic Email Inbox, the app we run our company on

Inbox is free to start, with every feature included: Help Desk, Team Chat, Live Chat, Email Server, and Milo, a no-code AI agent, with a free monthly allowance of resolutions, plus 90 days of message history. For more history, Inbox Plus is $9 per seat per month.