Surfing Dog Inbox

An inbox for the bookings, orders, quote requests and messages that people and their AI agents send a business. Your rules answer the routine ones, and you see the rest. Open source, and you run it.

Try it in 60 seconds

Add our demo bike shop to Claude or ChatGPT as a custom connector (an MCP server):

https://demo.surfingdog.ai/mcp

Then ask it: "Book a bike service with Oficina Maré on Saturday morning." Watch the booking arrive, and the shop confirm it, at https://demo.surfingdog.ai/demo/live. The demo never emails anyone who uses it, shows no names and is wiped every night.

The same with curl, step by step: https://surfingdog.ai/try/

How ready is a business for AI agents today? The free AI agent readiness checker reads any website the way a customer's assistant would and shows what it can do there, and what to add.

Install

We host it for you, free, at an address on your own domain: get your agent inbox. Or run it yourself, three ways:

On your own server: Point a subdomain, such as inbox.yourbusiness.com, at an Ubuntu or Debian server, then run one command. HTTPS, a backup every night, and updates that undo themselves if they fail.

curl -fsSL https://surfingdog.ai/install.sh | sudo sh

Docker, or a platform you use: the image ghcr.io/surfingdogai/inbox, for amd64 and arm64. The data lives in the volume. deploy/ has the Compose file with HTTPS, and templates for Coolify, Fly.io, Render, Railway and a DigitalOcean Droplet. On Render it is one button (a paid Starter instance, as only those keep a disk): Deploy to Render. By hand, it answers on the server itself only, behind a proxy with TLS that drops a CF-Connecting-IP the caller sent:

(umask 077; echo "INBOX_SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 32)" > inbox.env)   # keep a copy somewhere safe
docker run -d --name inbox --restart unless-stopped -p 127.0.0.1:8787:8787 \
  -v inbox-data:/opt/inbox/data --env-file inbox.env \
  -e INBOX_OWNER_EMAIL=you@yourbusiness.com -e INBOX_PUBLIC_URL=https://inbox.yourbusiness.com \
  ghcr.io/surfingdogai/inbox:0.2.0

Cloudflare Workers, with D1, a queue and a cron. Press Deploy to Cloudflare. What to have ready, and what to do after, is in the quickstart. By hand, it's path A of the install guide.

From source, on Node 22.16+, 24 or 26 (one process and one SQLite file):

git clone https://github.com/surfingdogai/inbox && cd inbox
pnpm install
pnpm --filter @surfingdog/inbox build
INBOX_OWNER_EMAIL=you@example.com node apps/inbox/dist/server.mjs   # http://localhost:8787

Open http://localhost:8787/login and sign in with that address. With no email set up, the sign-in email is printed in the terminal. The release's inbox-server.tar.gz is the same build: node server.mjs in its folder.

Or give your AI the install guide and let it do the work: it is written for that, with a check after every step. The whole guide to running it yourself, with updates and backups: surfingdog.ai/docs/run-it-yourself.

Docs

• Quickstart: every setting, Docker, and a public demo of your own
• Connect your AI: the owner's MCP server
• API: REST and MCP; every instance also serves /openapi.json
• Decision records: read these before changing how things work

Working on it

pnpm dev               # the server on Node, http://localhost:8787
pnpm dev:workers       # the same app on workerd
pnpm test              # every test, on Node and on W

... [View full README on GitHub](https://github.com/surfingdogai/inbox#readme)