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Comment by paraditedc | Hacker News Reader

I read the whole tech page and some of the comments here. I might be willing to pay for this service, but not in its current form. I wouldn't want to spend 500USD on a proprietary hardware in addition to paying a subscription fee. What needs to happen to convince me to pay:

Open up the hardware component as a platform for anyone to extend (allowing direct ssh, or using my own hardware). It's fine to not open source the email server code. But I would like to utilize the hardware to do other things, like file storage, etc. Instead of waiting for your company to build other features, I would rather have community contributed (preferably open source) plugins that integrates with your ecosystem and runs on the hardware.

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This is extremely valuable feedback and worth strongly considering.

When the iPhone came out, it didn't support apps - just built-in features like Mail and Mobile Safari. I agree with you that an app store for Helm could be valuable.

This could be especially valuable as a way to build email apps for enterprise. Especially if there were a good API that returned email data in JMAP format.

I know Nylas tries to do this, but their model doesn't really work for me.

Why JMAP over something universal like JSON?

JMAP returns data in JSON, but with a standardized schema. It's better than the current status quo, where each email provider returns API data in JSON but using their own schema, meaning you need to build different endpoints and methods to work with each email provider. The spec is about to be finalized, so there is no reason why email providers who haven't yet released an API shouldn't be using it.

Seems similar to https://ciceronetech.com/about, I know they were building similar app style features on their similar style box.

Hey paraditedc - thanks for your feedback. We will be launching a developer program next year. We are very interested in a community of people like you hacking on Helm to build new services/features.

Related feedback, you might to launch it well before the year 1st subscription year ends, otherwise customers who bought the setup assuming they won't opt for subscription and would still be able to use the device will left with no option for possibly a long time.

Thanks balladeer - we will definitely be launching the developer program in less than one year from now.

Honestly, I would rather see it as a paid add-on to something like a synology or qnap..

To be fair - building a business like Helm while needing to deal with other people's hardware and their software updates which you wouldn't find out broke your product until your customers start screaming about their email not working - wouldn't be fun. I could easily see how someone could want to do that and seriously consider it, then discard it as an option (or at least as part of their MVP launch options).

So make a supported hardware list,docker container, etc. The hardware is interesting, but the types of people who would buy this either already have racks in their houses and just want someone else to manage their stuff, or want to manage their own hardware because they want to make sure they have their own hardware components locked down. It's a neat project to be sure, and it's not terribly expensive for the hardware, but the real money maker is the ongoing support and security for the service, which is functionally really similar to a cloud service without a lot of the benefits.

Have a look at https://cloudron.io. They let you run apps on your own hardware - email being one of them

This looks interesting, but seems like their email server requires port 25, or some email relay (which is expected since everything is run locally).

Also, it is not clear how it works without a static IP from my ISP.

https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

Indeed, the dynamic IP setting is not documented. But there was a blog post about it at https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-04-13-home-server.html

Also only 1 year warranty

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