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!

user:	gabesaruhashi
created:	February 26, 2019
karma:	49