After-Hours Auto-Responder & Morning Queue
Acknowledge overnight messages with realistic, tailored replies and hand your team a prioritized morning queue - so customers feel heard and you open the day organized.
Off-hours messages are classified urgent vs normal, get an approved acknowledgement sent via Resend, and land in a prioritized morning queue your team reviews at open.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account (plus a verified sending domain or test address)
- A CSV or Google Sheet export of incoming messages with timestamps (no API required to start)
The problem this kills
Your team doesn't work 24x7, but your customers send messages at 11pm anyway. By morning the shared inbox is a wall of unread mail with no order to it - the genuinely urgent ticket buried three screens below a coupon question. Worse, nobody got so much as a "we've got you, here's when to expect a reply" overnight, so people stew, re-send, or escalate before you've even had coffee.
The usual fixes are bad. A blanket auto-reply that says the same thing to everyone feels robotic and sets the wrong expectations. Turning it off means silence. And manually sorting the overnight pile every morning eats the first hour of the day.
What you'll build
A small internal web app that watches for messages that arrive outside your business hours and does two things: sends a tailored, pre-approved acknowledgement that sets a realistic reply window, and drops the message into a prioritized morning queue ranked urgent-first. Truly urgent overnight items can flag your on-call person. When the team opens up, they review the queue in order instead of scrolling a chaotic inbox.
It drafts; a human approves the templates and the escalation rule once; then it runs - and never auto-acknowledges spam.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your hours and time zone, where messages come from, how you tell urgent from normal, who's on call - so the tool is tailored to how you actually work, not a generic template. It reflects a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up before building anything.
From there it walks you, prompt by prompt, through standing up the app, modeling your data, importing your messages (CSV or Google Sheet - no API needed), classifying and acknowledging them, and building the morning queue screen. Every build step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt for your AI coding agent.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own messages.
- A full audit trail - who approved which template, what got sent, and when.
- A human-in-the-loop approval gate: the AI drafts acknowledgement templates and the urgent-escalation rule, a person reviews and approves, and only then does anything send.
- Duplicate guards keyed on message-id so the same message can never be acknowledged twice.
Who it's for
Shared-inbox support and ops teams without round-the-clock coverage who want customers to feel heard overnight and the team to start the day organized - built by the ops person, no developer required.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your shop.