Reply with three
lines. Skip the dashboard.
WeeklyChat sends a short prompt to your team every Monday. They hit reply. You get a clean dashboard of what shipped, what's stuck, and what's next — without anyone learning new software.
Wins
- Shipped v2 calibration — finally under 200 ms
- Pair-debugged the gripper firmware bug with Priya
Blockers
- Waiting on force sensors from procurement
Next week
- Unit tests for the calibration code
- Sketch the gripper redesign
Three steps. No app to install.
We use the tool everyone already opens 80 times a day. The trick is a token in the subject line that survives every reply format.
A short email lands in everyone's inbox.
Each prompt carries a unique token like [wc:e4cdd004] in the subject. It survives Re: threading, quoted blocks, and signature tails — Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail.
MON
The team hits reply. Three lines is plenty.
Free-form prose works. Wins / Blockers / Next week works too — we parse loose labels case-insensitively, fall back to a summary field, never enforce a format.
The manager opens a dashboard. Everything's there.
Replies arrive at replies@weeklychat.us, get quote-stripped, sender-verified, parsed into sections, and rendered. No reading half-threads in your inbox.
Daily, weekly, monthly. Per person.
Engineering wants weekly. Sales wants daily standups. Your CFO wants monthly. Everyone picks their own — and we never bug anyone outside their schedule.
Admins can't read your updates.
Only your manager can.
Most check-in tools quietly give HR a read-only seat to everyone's weekly updates. We don't. Your direct manager sees your replies. Admin sees that an update happened — not what it said.
People manager
- ✓Reads every update from their direct reports
- ✓Submits their own update on the same cadence
- ✓Can edit cadence per-report
- ✓Skip-level visibility is opt-in, per-team (v2)
HR / Admin
- ✓Manages users, billing, org chart
- ✓Sees that an update happened — not what it said
- ✕Cannot read update content. Enforced at the query layer.
- ✕Cannot retroactively grant themselves access
One price. Honest.
Per seat, monthly. 14-day free trial, no card. Cancel anytime.
- ✓Per-person cadence — daily, weekly, monthly, or custom cron
- ✓Manager & employee dashboards
- ✓Inbound reply parsing — Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail
- ✓Manager-on-report prompts & cadence overrides
- ✓Audit log, GDPR export, manager-change flow
- ✓Slack-free, plugin-free, methodology-free
| Compare | Per user / mo | Methodology required | AI bolt-on cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| WeeklyChat | $4 | None | — |
| 15Five | $8+ | Pulses, OKRs, reviews | + $5 / user |
| Lattice | $11+ | Whole suite | Premium tier |
Things people ask before they sign up.
Why email instead of an app?
Because everyone already opens email. We're not adding a third place to check on Monday morning — we're using the place that's open already. The dashboard exists for managers who want a clean view, not as a substitute for the inbox.
What if someone prefers the web?
They can submit and edit updates directly in the dashboard. Email and web are interchangeable — both write to the same Update row, both show up in the same digest.
Does it work with our email provider?
Yes. We send via Postmark and parse inbound via a webhook. We've tested round-trips through Gmail, Outlook (web + desktop), Apple Mail, and Fastmail. Subject-line tokens survive every reply format we've found.
How do you handle skipped updates?
One reminder, 24 hours later. Then we stop. If you're on vacation, missing a week shouldn't generate three follow-ups. Configurable per company in v2.
What about SSO, HRIS, mobile app?
Mobile web works fine. SSO, Google Workspace, Okta, BambooHR sync — all on the roadmap, not in the MVP. We'll ship them when our segment (20–200 employees) asks for them by name.
One reply a week. That's the entire product.
14 days free. No card. Bring your team — or just you and a manager — and see the next prompt land Monday.