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Inbox Zero
👤 Elie Steinbock (A serial founder in Tel Aviv who codes in public: his repo hit #1 on GitHub trending, so the repo brought users for free.)🌐 site𝕏
An AI that reads your whole inbox is a trust problem. His answer: publish the code, charge the teams.
Will it work? · our read
Licensed, not free. 10,000 sign-ups and 11.7K stars came from code he gave away. Payment isn't triggered by a locked feature but by a clause: five or more users, buy a license, even self-hosted.
01How the money moves
Publish the full app on GitHub under AGPL
→
Devs star it (11.7K), self-host free under 5 users
→
Teams of 5+ and hosted users pay $18-42/user/mo
02The numbers
$10K+ MRRStatedfounder-stated MRR, Oct 2025
2025-10
Stars read 17 Jul 2026. Sign-ups are as of the first launch anniversary, about Dec 2024.
Founder-stated $10K+ MRR (Oct 2025). Latka lists $330K ARR and $0 raised; nobody at the company has confirmed either.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
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Indie Hackers — Elie Steinbock interview, 16 Oct 2025: "We're currently at $10k+ MRR." Page metadata prints Revenue: >$10K a month.LICENSE — AGPL-3.0 plus additional terms: no commercial resale, and orgs with 5+ users must buy an enterprise license. Git history shows AGPL added 21 Jul 2023, terms added 25 May 2025.Product Hunt — badge reads "Inbox Zero was ranked #1 of the day for December 26th, 2023"; page data shows dailyRank 1, weeklyRank 2.Built by Olim — "3 paying customers and 170 total signups" before launch, then "10,000 total sign-ups" at the one-year mark.Pricing — $18 / $28 / $42 per user per month, read from raw HTML 17 Jul 2026; the annual toggle is the default.
Revenue is STATED, not filed: Elie told Indie Hackers "We're currently at $10k+ MRR" on 16 Oct 2025, and that vague figure is the newest first-party number we found. Latka lists $330K ARR (about $27.5K/mo) and $0 raised; we refused it as the headline because nobody at the company stands behind it. Every figure here was read from raw HTML or the GitHub API, not from search snippets. Two traps we caught: the pricing page defaults to the annual toggle, so $18-42 is the discounted rate and monthly billing runs 10-20% higher; and two of the three #1 strings on the Product Hunt page belong to a different product, ZeroInbox.ai — ours is the badge reading "Inbox Zero was ranked #1 of the day for December 26th, 2023". Note for re-checkers: Product Hunt returns 403 to a header-less fetch and needs a browser user-agent. The 10,000 sign-ups date to about Dec 2024, not today. Superhuman and SaneBox hide prices behind JavaScript, so we anchored those rivals on funding we could open instead of guessing prices. Not verified: today's paying-customer count, team size, and profitability. Nothing dramatic was invented: the license change is documented in git history, and the founder's own advice was simply to do one thing well. We never score you.