Every collective hits the same wall.

collective.email exists because of a problem I've had over and over for twenty years.

I've spent most of my life starting citizen initiatives and joining other people's — tech communities, neighborhood projects, open source collectives, and lately the Commons Hub in Brussels. Different causes, different people, and the exact same week-one problem every single time:

“We need an email address people can reach us at.”

So someone creates hello@ourcollective on Gmail. It takes five minutes and feels solved. Then the real questions arrive. How do we share the password? You paste it in the group chat — now it's a security hole, and the day someone adds two-factor with their own phone number, everyone else is locked out. And even when access is sorted: who actually checks it? In practice, always the same person. They become the inbox. Every question flows through them, nobody else sees what was asked or answered, and when they're on holiday — or burned out, which is how these stories usually end — messages from real people go unanswered and the collective looks dead from the outside.

The tools for this exist, but they're built for companies: helpdesks with agents, tickets and SLAs, priced per seat for support teams. A citizen initiative doesn't have agents. It has fifteen people who care, three of whom will answer email this month, and no budget line for “customer support software.”

collective.email is the small tool I wished existed each of those times. You claim one address for the collective. Everyone signs in with their own email — there is no password to share. Any member can pick up a conversation, and everyone can see it's being handled. The internal discussion (“who knows this person?”, “can you take it?”) happens right next to the email, invisible to the sender. The inbox belongs to the collective, not to whoever created it.

Two principles behind it:

• No free plan, no ads. Tools for communities should be sustained by the communities they serve. You pay $10 a month — or you contribute instead: onboard another collective, write a tutorial, translate, spread the word. Contribution is a currency here, literally: it earns credits, and a credit is a month of service.
• Built with its users. This started as the shared inbox for the Commons Hub in Brussels and is shaped daily by the first collectives using it. If something's missing, tell us — that address is, of course, a shared inbox.

— Xavier Damman
(previously co-founder of Open Collective, where collectives share their money the way they share their inbox here)