Updates and changes - Aug 2024

It’s been a great week. Currently, our main focus is on releasing Hellokea to the public. As with most startups, it’s been a rollercoaster ride. We’ve made several improvements to ensure the product creation flow works flawlessly. The flow has been affected as the product plans have changed significantly.

Changes in payment plans

When Hellokea was launched about a year ago, the initial idea was to offer a decent trial period and let users choose their plan based on their requirements for the product. It was a great way to convert users to paying customers. However, it seems that many users were not satisfied with this approach. There are many small business owners who want to use the system only occasionally. Most people believe it’s not worth paying just for access to future emails. We agree with this sentiment.

In general, there are scenarios where people want to use email accounts just to check for new messages. For most people, it’s not important to retain old information, especially for support or inquiry emails. This happened in our case as well. We have some email accounts, e.g., [email protected], where we receive one-time queries that are rarely followed up on. Most of the time, we end up deleting these emails as they serve no further purpose.

For these reasons, we’ve decided to offer a free plan for all new products created on Hellokea. New plans will automatically be set to the free tier by default. The free plan is designed mainly for accounts used primarily for quick replies and follow-up threads. Any emails older than 120 days are automatically purged for the Product. To retain emails and access additional features, we recommend upgrading your plan.

Purging old data

With the release of these new changes, we’ve made numerous backend adjustments to accommodate the plan. First and foremost is the deletion of emails older than 120 days. We’ve also added options to delete created products. For some people, this might be crucial for managing their brand and domain. Deleting a product will remove all user permissions and domain entries. This will also deactivate the email generated by Hellokea and remove it from our database.

We don’t remove the product entry, name, and description for billing and accounting purposes. The bills and subscription plan history are still maintained. All email accounts, including attachments and emails, are completely removed from our servers.

Domain Hijacking prevention

Recently, one of our users found a way to hijack their domain by creating a new product. This is not a security vulnerability per se, but rather a product decision related to communication within the same account. As our users are not happy with this feature and Hellokea is evolving rapidly, we are removing it.

From now on, all new products created for domain verification will be given a separate key to validate domain ownership. Without the domain ownership verification key, emails from the accounts will not be sent from custom domains.

Resources on Domains

We have recently added a new section to our website about the importance of owning a domain and establishing an online identity. This is still a work in progress. We plan to write several sections on domain usage and how small businesses can leverage their domain by using Hellokea to simplify their day-to-day communication.

A New Shiny Logo

As you might have noticed, we have updated our logo to mark this new beginning. The logo represents the significance of communication and the depth of relationships through colors. We had plans to write a complete article about the new logo. However, our current priority is to release Hellokea to the general public beyond our closed user base.

Documentation for Hellokea

Documentation is challenging (at least for us). Our initial plan for documentation was to create numerous videos about each individual feature in Hellokea. However, we have decided to adopt a more traditional format of writing about the importance of each feature with screenshots and videos. This might take some time, as we will need to update all our screenshots and videos to incorporate the new logo.

These are our updates for now. Feel free to email us if you have any feedback.