The idea of Vanilla has been an idea bugging me for years now. As someone who has started many small online businesses, the number of tools it took to effectively run them became overwhelming. I needed a tool to connect with website visitors and customers, a CRM to manage sales, a tool to collect e-signatures, etc etc. It felt like death by a thousand cuts.

Most of these tools have free versions. And if you're lucky, you can get by on that free version. But most of these companies are smart enough to bring you in, get you using the app, and then hit you with a paywall right on that feature that you needed. Next thing you know, you're spending hundreds, if not thousands, a month on tools....it adds up quickly!

What is Vanilla?

Vanilla is a pretty ambitious idea. We want to build 1 mega app that has dozens of apps within it. Apps to help you run your business. Instead of having 10 different tools with 10 different logins that are all charging you money, Vanilla will be 1 login, 1 subscription, and all the apps.

We're tired of spending thousands of dollars on SaaS tools to run our business.

What apps will Vanilla have?

This is where things get fun. We plan to let our users vote on the next type of app to get added to Vanilla. Within our "marketplace," users will have an opportunity to vote on the app that they want to see built next. Our users will continuously drive the product roadmap for Vanilla.

Our first app: Inbox

To kick things off, we had to build an initial app. We were spending $500/month on Zendesk so we decided to tackle a customer support software tool first. We're calling this app Inbox. The MVP of Inbox is currently out now and anyone can sign up. It's bare bones. Users can add a Vanilla-branded forwarding address to their email they use to run support and start receiving emails directly in their inbox and respond using the Vanilla-branded email, similar to how Intercom can work.

Right now, we are working on adding live chat functionality with a widget you can place directly on your website

How will pricing work?

Pricing is an area that we are admittedly still fleshing out. There are 3 main things we know we want in regards to pricing:

• We want it to be affordable

• We want it to be simple

• We want the first app to always be free

What we mean by "the first app to always be free" is that any user can come in, pick one of the apps within Vanilla and use it for free, no strings attached. In order to activate a 2nd app, you must become a Premium member which will be charged on a per user, per month basis.

For the first couple of months, we will keep everything free until we feel it's fair to start charging money. So we invite you to come in and start testing things out now!

We need your feedback!

The success of this project will rely heavily on the feedback we get from our users. We hope that as a user, you'll help us out with voting on new apps to build and giving feedback on the ones that are already out!