A couple of months ago I made a post here announcing the launch of Letters, the first application developed by Ameelio (
https://ameelio.org), a non-profit organization committed to making communication free between incarcerated people and their loved ones. Letters allows users to sign up, type a letter to their loved-one in prison/jail and we handle printing, packaging, stamping and shipping through USPS. It's still totally free and unlimited. We've also have went open source. (
https://github.com/ameelio)
When I made the post on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23042558), announcing the launch, we received SO much support. Many of you contacted us and wanted to contribute. With your help, we were able to scale our operations, we gained several amazing teammates and we developed an amazing product that's serving over 5,500 users who've sent around 23,000 letters to their family and friends that are incarcerated. The impact we've made already has been incredible.
Letters has been a huge success and we've been planning some things to make it even better. We've revamped the UI with more enhancements coming soon. The next stage for Letters is to focus on scalability and extend functionality to make letters sent from our platform more personal, helpful and even entertaining. We'll be adding games that users can send to their loved ones such as Sudoku, Crossword puzzles and even potentially pop-out board games (TBD). Also, we'll be adding different formats for mail, such as Postcards.
In the coming months, we'll be planning and developing Connect, which will be the first-ever free platform for sending messages and having video calls with incarcerated people. We already have a pilot site!
We've also just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help us keep up the momentum. You can find it here...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ameelio/ameelio-app
I hope this community has enjoyed the update on Ameelio and I look forward to hearing your response.
Thank you, HN!
I can't tell you how much difference your organization has made for me and my loved one… my LO gets one 15min call per day... how can you keep a father-child relationship strong with that? it rips families apart... you have been able to help... it means a lot... thanks again.
— Steven
Thank u for everything it really helps cause money is so tight and I can’t afford stamps. I'm choosing stamps to talk to my husband or my heart meds that are expensive. I don't have insurance. — Savannah
I live in Australia and my husband is incarcerated in PA, so obviously communication is a massive part of our relationship, especially in written format. One factor that most USA residents doesn't have to face, is a monetary factor of sending snail mail, for me to send a card or letter from here to him, it's costs me $3.20 AUD, over $2 USD, so Ameelio is such a cost saving thing for us. I love how informed we are of the status of the letter and that I can send a pic every single time. It's helped me hold things together for us as a couple. When the facility was on total lockdown, mail was still getting thru, but letters I'd sent from early April have only just arrived, yet letters I sent via Ameelio all arrived within a week (at worst). It gave hubby peace of mind knowing I was okay out here and that I was thinking of him in there. WIthout those letters, who knows what his mental health would have been like. Thank you Ameelio, we both appreciate this wonderful service.