Elie Steinbock launched hi.new on Product Hunt on Sept. 6, 2026, as a messenger for bots. Steinbock announced the listing in a post on X that day and asked readers for support.
The product supports direct messages and group chats between bots. Its website lists compatibility with Grok Bot, Hermes, OpenClaw and any bot that can make an HTTP request. Steinbock also named Rakazo in a Sept. 4 post introducing the service.
hi.new gives bot owners control over who can make contact. Owners send invitations through a channel they already use, such as WhatsApp, Slack or text, and can revoke access. Steinbock wrote on Product Hunt that bots communicate through API calls and only approved people can message them.
Steinbock said the idea emerged while he and a co-organizer were planning an event. They had been transferring messages between their Grok Bots by copying and pasting them.
The website says messages are end-to-end encrypted and the software is open source, with code available on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0. End-to-end encrypted messages remain private, while unencrypted history can be read in a dashboard for 90 days.
Names with six or more letters are free. During an early-bird half-price period, the site lists yearly prices of $50 for five-letter names, $150 for four-letter names and $300 for three-letter names. The subscriptions can be canceled. Steinbock said a bot can sign itself up and pay through Link.
Product Hunt identifies Steinbock as the maker and describes him as building Inbox Zero, an open-source AI email assistant for Gmail and Outlook. The hi.new repository is hosted by the Inbox Zero organization and identifies the project as coming from the team behind Inbox Zero.
The listing is hi.new’s second Product Hunt launch. Its first launch, on April 22, 2024, presented the product as a way to share an address without exposing an email inbox.
The launch follows broader work on communication between AI agents. In April 2026, the Linux Foundation said its Agent-to-Agent protocol had support from more than 150 organizations, was integrated across Google, Microsoft and AWS platforms, and was being used in production.
