In simple English
This tool gives your team a shared inbox for customer emails. It runs inside your own cloud account so you keep all your messages private. You own the data, the keys, and the database. It costs nothing in software licence fees, but you need a cloud account. Setting it up takes some technical skill with command-line tools.
What it is
HQBase is an open-source shared email workspace written in TypeScript. It deploys directly to Cloudflare Workers (a serverless platform that runs code on the edge of the internet without managing servers) and stores data in a D1 database.
What it is good for
Small teams who want to handle support or sales emails together without paying for a hosted service like Front or Zendesk, while keeping all customer messages on their own infrastructure.
- Runs on your own infrastructure so no third party reads your email.
- AGPL-3.0 licence (a license that requires you to share source code if you modify and host the software for others) lets you run it for any team size.
- Includes an OAuth-protected remote MCP server for AI tools.
- Requires comfort with command-line tools and Cloudflare accounts.
- Uses AGPL-3.0 licence, which has strict rules for commercial cloud services.
- Relies on third-party cloud infrastructure pricing beyond free tiers.
Front
Cloudflare
- chatwoot/chatwoot38k stars
An open-source customer support workspace that connects to multiple channels.
- botpress/botpress15k stars
The command-line tool, software kit and integrations for the Botpress cloud service, rather than a chatbot you host.
- heyform/heyform9.0k stars
A form and survey builder you can run yourself, with conversational one-question-at-a-time forms.
- Notifuse/notifuse2.2k stars
Self-hosted newsletters, automations and transactional email, built on a delivery service you supply.
pnpm install pnpm db:migrate:local pnpm db:seed:local pnpm dev