Hotly
The open-source part is what actually gets me going here. Anyone can fork Hotly, tweak the pricing, wire it into their own stack, and turn their inbox into a revenue line without waiting for some platform to bless them. That's a genuinely different move in a space where most monetization tools are closed gardens.
I think the idea lands because DMs have quietly become the most valuable real estate on the internet. Founders get pitched all day, creators get asked for advice, and right now the default answer is to just eat the time cost. Charging for that attention feels overdue, and doing it in public with source code out in the open builds trust that a closed tool never could.
What I'd want to know next is how the payment flow actually works, whether it's per-message, per-thread, or a subscription, and how it handles spam. If a stranger can pay to jump the line, that's great, but the economics only hold if the pricing matches the value of the reply.