Launching today
Hotly
Get paid to answer your DMs. Open source.
69 followers
Get paid to answer your DMs. Open source.
69 followers
Your inbox, with a price on it. People pay to send you a note or subscribe weekly. You reply from one inbox, when it suits you, and Stripe pays you. Run it free on your own server, or let us host it: 30 days free.
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Hi Product Hunt, I'm Saloni from Hotly.
You know the DMs. "Quick question." "Can I pick your brain?" "Love your work, could you…" Some of them matter. Most get buried, and none of them pay.
Hotly gives those messages a front door with a price on it. Share one link. People pay to send you a note, or subscribe weekly, and you reply from one inbox when it suits you. Want to send something special back? Lock a photo and set the price.
Our first creator (536K on Instagram) shared it once with the fans she already had. 217 of them paid to write to her, across 921 conversations. She banked $22,400 in that stretch: about half from those fans, the rest from brand deals.
Today we're opening it up:
• Hosted: we run it for you. 30 days free, and Stripe's fees are on us • Open source: the whole thing is on GitHub. Run it on your own server, 0% commission
One question for you: if people could pay to write to you, what would they write about?
Very interesting, seems a bit more decentralised than the subscription models like of Substack and BMaC, and a bit like Topmate.
What situations you think this will be best utilised for?
@sujay_srivastava1 Good read, and yes, that’s the point of open-sourcing it.
The one difference from all three: those are one-to-many (a feed, a tip jar, a booking page). This is one-to-one, in writing, on a schedule. People pay to write you, you reply on your reply day. That’s the whole mechanic.
So it works best where the conversation itself is the product, not the content around it:
• Your DMs are already full of real questions and you can’t answer them for free anymore (coaches, therapists, niche experts, the orchid guy on YouTube)
• Small but intense audience. Our pilot creator Bailey has 217 paying guests, not 20K, and that was ~$11K over 8 months
• You want a weekly rhythm, not Topmate-style live calls or always-on DMs
• You’d rather run it on your own domain and keep the relationship (hence self-host)
Where it doesn’t fit: broadcast writers who want reach. Substack is better for that, honestly.
The one-off note and weekly subscription feel like two quite different expectations for the inbox. I would be interested in how you make the expected reply time clear before someone pays.
@oleksii_sekundant Good question. They're different purchases, but on hosted Hotly they run on one clock.
The creator picks a reply day, and the page shows it above the prices. Bailey's said "Responds by Tuesday every week." A one-off note gets one reply on the next reply day. A subscription gets a weekly allowance that refills each billing week, and its replies come on that same day. So the two options differ in how much you can write, not in how fast you hear back.
The open-source version doesn't show this yet. We dropped the fixed day so creators could reply when it suits them. Right now the one-off option shows no timing before checkout, and the weekly one only says the creator "writes back when they can." Someone paying should know when to expect an answer, so the timing is going above the prices for both options.
We're deciding between a set day and a window like "usually replies within 3 days." Which would you trust more as the person paying?