A shared customer
support inbox
A shared customer support inbox inside the tool that already tracks your time. Forward your support address, answer as your agency, and log the hours without leaving the thread.
Included in the trial. $12 per seat per month after that, and only for the people who answer client mail.
Morning. Two customers rang this week to say their Amex card bounced at checkout. Visa goes through fine. Can someone take a look before the weekend sale?
Hi Priya, found it. Amex was failing the address check on the new gateway rules. Fixed and tested both cards this morning, so you are clear for the sale.
The hours nobody records
Ask an agency where their unbilled time goes and it is rarely the work itself. It is the time spent reading a client's email properly, and the requests handled out of somebody's personal inbox that never reach a timesheet.
A help desk gets those requests out of a personal inbox. It cannot help with the rest, because it does not know your rates or your retainers.
- Requests arrive in one person's mailbox and stall there when they are away.
- Nobody logs email time, because doing so means opening a second application and remembering which client it was for.
- The retainer is at 90% and the person answering the email has no idea.
- At month end the invoice shows the project work and none of the correspondence around it.
A support inbox that knows what time costs
Answering a client, recording the hour, watching the retainer and raising the invoice all happen in the same place, so nothing has to be joined up afterwards.
Set up in one forwarding rule
Your mail keeps arriving where it does now, and there is no mailbox password to hand over.
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Forward
Point your support address at Hour Cap
One forwarding rule at your existing provider. Everything sent to [email protected] from that moment appears in the inbox.
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Match
Watch it file itself
Senders are matched to your clients from your synced Xero contacts and the domains you set. Mail from a known client lands assigned to whoever handles that account.
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Bill
Reply, and log the time
Answer from the thread as your agency. Start a timer while you work, or log the duration afterwards. It reaches the same invoice as the rest of the month.
Close the loop with Linear
For the agencies and product teams whose work lives in a backlog.
Connect a Linear workspace and any conversation becomes an issue in one click, routed to the right team with a link card pointing back at the client who asked. Agencies running a Linear team per client can route each client's requests to their own.
The way back matters just as much. When the issue is completed, the conversation reopens in your queue with a reply to the client already written. You read it, change what you want, and send. Nothing sends automatically, since telling a client their request shipped is worth reading first.
You can also turn it around: let new requests from known clients raise issues on arrival, and stop triaging an inbox and a backlog separately.
$12 per seat per month
An add-on on top of a Team or Business plan, and only for the people who answer client mail. Here is a six-person agency with everyone on the inbox.
Hour Cap
Inbox + time trackingIncludes the time tracking, retainer budgets and Xero invoicing. Inbox seats are given out per person, so you only buy them for the people who answer client mail.
Front
Front's published rates are the annual-billing prices; paying monthly costs roughly a quarter more. Starter caps at ten seats. August 2026, re-check before relying on it.
$90 a month less for 6 people, with the time tracking and Xero invoicing included rather than bought separately.
It is included in your trial, so you can work real client mail through it before deciding. If you later stop paying for it, your conversations stay readable and mail keeps being collected quietly, so coming back gives you an unbroken history.
Frequently asked questions
How does client email get into Hour Cap?
You forward your support mailbox to the address Hour Cap gives your organization. There is no IMAP connection, no Gmail or Outlook sign-in, and no mailbox password to hand over. One forwarding rule at your existing provider is the whole setup.
Do replies come from my agency, or from Hour Cap?
From your agency. Replies go out under your organization name and clients reply straight back into the thread. If you want the address itself to be your own, you can add a sending domain with a few DNS records and replies then come from [email protected].
How does Hour Cap know which client an email is from?
It matches the sender against the contact addresses synced from your Xero contacts, then against email domains you set on the client. Shared providers like gmail.com are only ever matched on the exact address. Anything it cannot match still opens a conversation, and you file it in one click.
Can I log time against an email?
Yes, and it is the reason the inbox lives inside a time tracker. Start a timer or log a duration from the conversation itself, prefilled with the client and project it is already linked to. The retainer meter sits beside the thread, so you can see what answering this request costs the cap while you answer it.
What happens to a forwarded email?
Hour Cap reads the forwarded message and attributes the conversation to the client inside it rather than to the colleague who sent it on, so replies reach the right person. You choose that behaviour, and you can list transactional senders that should always stay with the forwarder.
How does the Linear integration work?
Connect a Linear workspace and any conversation becomes an issue in one click, routed to the right team with a link card back to the thread. When the issue is completed the conversation reopens with a reply to the client already drafted, and nothing sends without somebody reading it.
What does the Customer Support Inbox cost?
It is an add-on at $12 per seat per month on top of a Team or Business plan, and you choose who gets a seat. You pay per person who answers client mail, and a Business plan includes the first seat. It is included in your trial, so you can work real client mail through it before deciding.
What happens if I stop paying for it?
Your conversations stay readable. Replying and configuring stop, and mail keeps being collected quietly in the background, so re-subscribing gives you an unbroken history rather than a gap.
Get the email time onto the invoice
Forward one address and see a fortnight of client email land where it can be tracked, capped and invoiced.