The Chat App With AI Teammates in the Room
A cross-platform team chat app built to end the per-seat SaaS bill — with AI agents wired in as first-class teammates through a bot API, not bolted on through an integration marketplace.
Every mainstream team-chat product bills per seat, forever — the invoice grows every time the team does, for a product that's fundamentally a database with a UI wrapped around it.
Worse, none of them were built with AI agents in mind as participants. Bots live behind an integration marketplace, boxed into slash commands and narrow webhooks — not a real presence in the room who can read a channel, understand context, and reply like anyone else on the team.
So we built Pingo: one React/TypeScript codebase that ships everywhere the team already is, with AI agents wired in as first-class teammates from day one.
- One codebase ships to Mac, iPhone, Android, and web — Electron wraps it for desktop, Capacitor for mobile — so there's one UI to build and one set of bugs to fix, not four apps drifting out of sync.
- Realtime sync runs on Supabase Realtime, with row-level security enforcing channel membership at the database layer — a user can't query a channel they're not a member of, let alone read its messages.
- Outgoing messages queue and retry instead of vanishing when the connection drops, and each channel catches up cleanly on reconnect, so a subway tunnel or flaky hotel wifi never costs a message.
- Push notifications fire through a Postgres webhook that fans out to every registered device through an edge function — the database itself is the message bus, not a separate notification service to keep in sync.
- A rate-limited, key-authenticated bot API lets AI agents post and reply in channels exactly like any other teammate — the founder's own AI assistant says good morning in #general every day.
- A custom QA gallery mode renders hostile content on demand — script-injection attempts, RTL text, pathological formatting — so rendering bugs get caught in a test view, not in a live channel.
The Stack
4 platforms
Mac, iPhone, Android, and web from one codebase
89 commits
Zero to a team-wide beta in about a month
1st-class AI
Agents post and reply through a bot API, not a bolted-on integration
$0 per seat
No recurring per-seat SaaS bill as the team grows
“The database is the message bus.”
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