Overview

Surfing Dog Inbox is an open-source, self-hostable typed inbox for a business. It receives bookings, orders, quote requests and messages from people and from AI agents, through REST, MCP and email, and turns each one into a typed item with a lifecycle that rules, the owner, or the owner’s own AI can handle. It is fully functional with zero AI.

One codebase runs on Cloudflare Workers and on Node. One SQLite database holds everything the business owns. One discovery manifest at /.well-known/agent-inbox.json tells an agent where the REST, OpenAPI and MCP doors are.

Where things stand

Written on 21 September 2026. The self-hostable inbox is under way and this page says what actually runs. Working today, on both runtimes:

the core write path: typed items, five state machines, append-only events, idempotency keys and compare-and-set versions;
the rules engine, with presets for appointments, trades and shops;
REST with an OpenAPI document, a public MCP server and an owner MCP server;
owner API keys, owner sign-in by magic link, and an OAuth 2.1 authorization server for the owner MCP;
the owner app, first version: sign in by emailed link or owner key, a three-pane inbox, a typed item view with the valid next actions as buttons, and settings;
the email door: inbound MIME parsed, deduplicated and threaded onto the right item;
the job runner for notifications and rules, on cron and queues on Workers and on a loop on Node;
network membership: an instance reports to one or more networks, switched on in settings, with counts-only telemetry every hour and the receipts it issues;
our own live instance at inbox.surfingdog.ai and the network at network.surfingdog.ai.

Still to come: passkeys and a web form door (being built), connectors (coming), hosted tenancy, and the network’s reviews and reputation (coming). Every page in these docs says whether a feature is live.

Overview

Where things stand

Pages