At the moment my costs are about $100/mo, so it only takes a handful of subscribers to keep it going. Beyond that it was something I wanted for myself and I'm just glad if other people find it useful. I also learned a ton from making it and have been able to carry that over to my day job.
https://hubdesk.io/. Create Github issues from emails and respond to them by starting a comment with "@reply". If you've got a side project, already use Github issues, and want to manage support emails the same as bugs. Easier and cheaper than signing up for a help desk SaaS.
Thanks! I do have plans to eventually charge for organization repos, but I need more installs to list a paid plan in the Github App store. So it's free forever for anyone who signs up now.
You can restrict the permissions to just one repository when you authorize the app. There should be a radio button for "All apps" or "Selected Apps". If you select the second one, you can pick the repos where to install it.
For #1, Currently the response uses your custom email address as the Reply-To address, but the email comes from a hubdesk.io email address. It's on my list to add support for custom domains.
For #2, yes. You can go back a forth with the user just using commments.
Having run several engineering teams (15-20 people), I used this approach extensively. It meant one less place to go and one less tool to use. I liked this approach so much, I also wanted to use Github Issues for internal and external customer support instead of having another help desk tool involved. I created https://hubdesk.io/ as a side project to do this. Forward your support emails to HubDesk and it creates a Github issue for every email thread. You can then communicate back and forth with sender by starting a comment with "@reply" to send a reply email.
Hey HN! HubDesk is a Github App that allows you to create Github issues from emails. You can also respond to those emails with an issue comment that starts with "@reply". It saves and add links to the issues for any attachments as well. I built HubDesk for a few reasons.
#1. It was a product I wished existed. Having run engineering teams for small startups, it's always nice to have one less thing to manage and Github issue was my bug tracking of choice. However, it was always difficult to get non-developers to create accounts and submit bugs or help desk requests with Github. HubDesk solves this problem by letting people without Github accounts send emails to create Github issues.
#2. I wanted a side-project that would let me dive deep into React, state management without Redux, Next.js, Tailwind, and Firebase. The app uses Firestore with Firebase triggers to coordinate the interactions of Github, Mailgun, Firebase Storage, and Stripe.
#3. I wanted a side-project I would actually finish and the scope of this project was just right :)
HubDesk is still new and I'm looking for any early/test users to try it out. Let me know what you think! Thanks!