A shared inbox
for agencies
Built for teams that bill by the hour. Every request in the queue is work somebody has to do, and the time it takes should reach the client's invoice.
$12 per seat per month, and only for the people who answer client mail.
Every shared inbox solves the same first problem
A client emails the person they dealt with last time. That person is on leave, or busy, or did not see it. Three days later the client follows up, annoyed, and nobody in the office knew the first message existed.
Any shared inbox fixes that, and this one does too: everybody sees the whole queue, conversations can be assigned, snoozed and prioritised, internal notes stay internal, and a needs-response view tells you who is still waiting.
Every product in this category does that part well.
The second problem is the one that costs you money
Ask an agency where its unbilled time goes and it is almost never the work itself. It is the time spent reading a client's email properly, and the small requests handled between other jobs that never reach a timesheet because logging one meant opening a second application and remembering which client it was for.
At month end the invoice shows the project work and none of the correspondence around it. The client sees a smaller number than the effort you spent, and next year's retainer gets priced off a figure that was never true.
A shared inbox that does not know your rates cannot help with any of that.
What a shared inbox looks like inside a time tracker
The clients, the rates, the retainers and the invoices are already here. Putting the email beside them is the whole idea.
What the dedicated shared inboxes are built for
If email is the centre of your business rather than the edge of it, those tools are built for exactly that. Front has a deep rule builder, analytics and integrations. Missive is built around two people drafting one reply together. Help Scout has a help centre and saved replies at support-team scale.
Buy one of those if you handle high volume from many senders, need workflow automation across several channels, or want a customer-facing knowledge base.
Buy this one if your inbound is a manageable stream of requests from named clients on retainers, and the thing that hurts is that none of the time spent on them reaches an invoice.
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 shared 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.
Frequently asked questions
What is a shared inbox?
One mailbox that a whole team can read and reply from, rather than mail landing in one person's account. Everyone sees the same conversations, replies go out from a common address, and a request does not stall because the person who received it is on leave.
Why do agencies need one specifically?
Because an agency's inbound mail is billable work. A software company's support queue is a cost to reduce, whereas an agency's is a stream of retainer requests that each take an hour of somebody's afternoon. Tracking and attribution matter more than deflection or ticket volume.
Can I keep using Gmail or Outlook?
Yes. There is no IMAP connection and no mailbox password to hand over. You add one forwarding rule at your existing provider, and mail sent to your support address appears in the shared inbox from that moment. Your own mailbox keeps working exactly as it does now.
How is this different from a help desk?
A help desk fixes the "everybody can see it" problem. It does not know your rates or your retainers, so it cannot show you the cap while you answer or put the hour on an invoice. That is what this adds.
Do replies come from our own domain?
They can. Out of the box replies go out under your organization name from an Hour Cap address. Add a few DNS records and they come from [email protected] instead, so clients see the address they already know.
What does it cost?
Customer Support Inbox is $12 per seat per month on top of a Team or Business plan, and you choose who gets a seat. You pay for each person who answers client mail, and a Business plan includes the first seat. Billed monthly, the inbox alone starts at around $33 a seat on Front, $25 on Help Scout and $18 on Missive, none of which include time tracking, retainer budgets or Xero invoicing. Those vendors quote lower figures on their pricing pages, but only if you commit to a year up front. Check current vendor pricing before relying on any of it.
Stop losing the hours around the work
Forward one address and see a fortnight of client email land where it can be billed.