Who We Are and Why We Build This Way

We are Joost and Martijn. Our story began 25 years ago in high school, where we bonded over learning to code.

Our love of coding never stopped and at one moment worked a in the same company building image recognition. However, our careers eventually took different paths.

Joost became an AWS serverless evangalist who always pushes for the most optimal event driven concepts. Now working in an enterprise company enabling teams to work efficiently in the cloud.

Martijn stayed close to the hardware, writing software for scanners and NFC chips. He is also our designer, bringing an eye for detail.

We still share the passion for coding and everything around it. The hobbies migrated into daily work. When working together we can challenge each other and deliver the best end product.

The Spark: Why Email?

The idea for ServerlessInbox was born out of a simple frustration. While building on AWS, we leaned heavily into serverless tools, keeping our infrastructure costs at a flat $0 during development. For any bootstrapped project, this is the gold standard: use S3 and CloudFront, and your hosting costs effectively disappear. Combine this with Lambda, SQS and API gateway and you have a full scope event driven application that runs completely within the AWS free tier

However, the “zero-cost” dream usually dies the moment you need a professional email address.

Currently you will end up in one of the following concepts:

• Fully managed Saas hosting
  • flat fee per account even when nothing happens
  • no control over your own data
  • difficult to automate
• Self hosted VPC
  • constant patching
  • certificate rotation
  • difficult to automate
  • babysitting
  • “Will this still reboot after years of idling…”

We wanted a middle ground: the ease of SaaS with the total control of self-hosting.

Our Philosophy: Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

This led to our core mission. Instead of a centralized service that holds your data hostage, ServerlessInbox deploys directly into your AWS account.

• Data Sovereignty: Your emails live in your own database. We cannot read them.

• True Cost: You benefit from the AWS Free Tier. You don’t subsidize the costs of massive enterprise clients.

• Zero Maintenance: There are no servers to patch. The system stays “asleep” until an email arrives.

The Bottom Line

We believe the backbone of your internet identity shouldn’t cost $10 a month before you’ve even received a message.

Our single-user architecture is designed to cost $0 to run. Even as we add features like calendars and contacts, our goal remains: it should always be cheaper to bring your own cloud than to pay for a “Black Box.”

We are finishing our first release now. If you’re a developer who refuses to pay for idle servers, we’d love for you to join us.