Get up and running in five short steps.

Getting started with Solves means five things: sign up, create your first brand, connect a mailbox using forwarding-first setup, send a test reply once the mailbox is verified, then work your first tickets from the queue. You can do the first three in one sitting, and read and triage forwarded email before live sending is switched on.

A quick map of the words you will see. Your organisation is the workspace you sign up for: your billing and security boundary. Inside it, a brand is one customer-facing identity, with its own support address, from-name and signature. A mailbox is a support address that belongs to a brand. A ticket is one customer conversation, owned by a teammate and moved through clear states.

The order matters a little. Create the brand first, because a mailbox belongs to a brand. Connect and verify the mailbox next, because verified sending is what lets your replies go out under your own domain. Everything after that is the day-to-day: assign, reply, note and resolve.

Start at £29 so you can explore without commitment. It is GBP 29, covers three users, one brand, one mailbox and 1,000 tickets a month, because it is for small teams. It is paid for the pilot rather than free forever, and when you are ready to go live the early-adopter pilot gives the first 20 paid customers Team at GBP 49 a month for 6 months, then GBP 79.

Invite a teammate while you set up. Solves uses role presets rather than an enterprise permission builder, so you can give someone full agent access, notes-only collaborator access, or admin rights in a couple of clicks. You can also set which brands a person sees and whether they can reply.

1. Pick the brand the mailbox belongs to, then enter its support address, for example [email protected].
2. Set up forwarding from your existing inbox to the Solves address shown on screen, so a copy of every incoming email starts arriving in Solves.
3. Send yourself a message to the support address and confirm it appears as a ticket in Solves. At this point you can already read and triage real email.
4. When you want to reply under your own domain, add the copyable DNS records the setup screen lists with your domain provider.
5. Wait for the records to verify, then send a test reply. Live sending stays gated until verification passes or a recorded founder override is in place.

Forwarding-first is the reason you can start today rather than blocking on DNS. You move off a shared inbox without a risky cut-over: forward first, work the queue, and turn on verified sending only when the checks are green. If a record is missing, the setup screen tells you which one.

Open the queue and you will see every ticket you are allowed to see, with a brand badge on each row. Start with the New view, assign a ticket to yourself, and read the customer message. When you reply, the composer is locked to that ticket's brand and mailbox, so the reply goes out with the right identity and cannot send as another brand.

Replies, notes and the difference

A public reply goes to the customer. A private note is for your team and stays internal. Solves keeps a hard wall between the two, and guards against sending a stale reply if the conversation moved on while you were typing. Collaborators with notes-only access can chip in without ever being able to email the customer.

Moving a ticket through its states

Set a ticket to Waiting for Customer when the ball is in their court. Snooze it to clear it from view until a date you choose. Mark it Resolved when you have answered, and Closed when the conversation is done. Each state keeps the queue honest, so you always know what genuinely needs attention now.

Seeing how you are doing

Once email is flowing, the reports give you the picture: open backlog, ageing, what is waiting, first response and resolution times, and created versus resolved over time, all filterable by brand. They build from the work you are already doing.