# Parabel

> Parabel is a new type of email for people and agents. It is an action-oriented shared inbox where a person, an AI agent, or an automation can send work that stays useful after it arrives. The recipient does not get only a note and an attachment — they get a typed Mail item carrying the context it was built from, the evidence behind it, and the next permitted action, available directly in the inbox.

Parabel is for all teams that need one shared place to receive, understand, prepare, approve, and complete communication-driven work. Examples include document follow-up, renewals, intake, and team communication. Parabel is not limited to one industry. Teams send and receive on up to two domains they own; recipients reply from their usual inbox. A team on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 can keep that host and have copies of incoming and outgoing mail arrive in Parabel through mail rules an admin adds; sending from Parabel as their own address needs the domain verified.

## What it costs

- Preparing a workspace is free. An agent can create a workspace, add contacts and people, and load preview mail before the person has an account. Nothing sends and no clock runs until the owner pays. Prepared work is kept if the owner declines.
- Workspace: $20 per month for the whole team. No seat fees. Inviting teammates, adding contacts, importing, or installing apps never adds a charge. Includes live email in Mail; each member's own WhatsApp and Telegram, linked to contacts; business email on up to two domains the owner controls; files; calendar; business apps; a first read on new leads; the built-in agent; and the customer's own assistant reading and staging work at no extra charge.
- Account monitoring is optional: $10 per account per month, for accounts Parabel's AI keeps reviewed. Turned on by a person, or, once the owner accepts it at activation or later in Billing, by Parabel's built-in agent within the owner's monthly limit. Never by an install or import. A connected outside assistant can turn it on only for an account the owner has approved for that connection. Stop anytime; results already paid for stay.
- The AI budget defaults to $1,000/month and is a ceiling the owner sets, not a charge. With no accounts monitored the bill is $20.
- No free trial, nothing converts by itself, and no tax is added to these prices.
- Existing customers on earlier plans keep them.

The binding prices are at https://app.parabel.so/pricing and in the terms at https://app.parabel.so/terms. An outside agent cannot pay or accept terms for the owner, and cannot turn on monitoring without the owner's approval.

## What arrives in Mail

Mail is the common delivery surface for ordinary correspondence and for agentic work. Seven layouts keep work actionable instead of flattening it into prose:

1. correspondence — a message with its recipients, its send context, and what it was drafted from;
2. file set — a set of documents that stays a set;
3. change set — proposed field-level changes, old value and new value, applied only on approval;
4. work item — a note or a piece of setup work to read, acknowledge or start, with nothing to send;
5. recurrence — something that repeats, with its cadence and its next runs;
6. automation — an editable workflow with steps, timing, and conditions, off until a human reviews and activates it;
7. interactive list — a live list that can be filtered, sorted, and acted on inside the item.

Interactive views extend that beyond a static attachment. Nine view domains are available today: Contacts, Files, Automations, Compliance actions, PDF templates, Knowledge collections, Knowledge documents, Calendar events, and KPIs (owner only). More typed layouts and view domains are added deliberately.

## People, agents, and control

People and agents share one operational inbox, split into People, Agents, and Other. Agents can read the context they are permitted to read, prepare work, and send a typed item to Mail. People inspect it, edit the fields the item permits, and take the action it allows.

**Mail → Agents** is the approval queue for agent-prepared work. A connected ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Copilot account may prepare work for that queue, but does not gain permission to approve or send external-facing work. Money, signatures, and anything ambiguous stop for a person.

Contacts, Calendar, and Files supply the context and execution surfaces around the inbox: Contacts hold the people, organizations, and relationship history; Calendar holds time-bound work; Files hold shared reference material and reusable templates. They are supporting surfaces, not the category claim.

## The built-in agent

Every workspace has a built-in agent; refer to it as "the agent". Any member can ask it in the app's chat, by email from the address they sign in with, or on Telegram, and it sees only what the person asking can see. It answers from that member's mail, contacts, and files, makes PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, and text files, sets reminders, and adds calendar events. In the app it also takes background work (replies to everyone waiting, a broadcast, a list of contacts) and leaves the result in Mail: reply drafts in Drafts, other prepared work in Mail → Agents. Background work runs once the owner has activated the Workspace; it does not run during free setup. Nothing it prepares is sent until a person sends it; a member can also tell it in chat to send drafts it has written. Chat and background work are included in the Workspace price, within fair-use limits.

## Work first, account second

Read [the agent setup guide](https://parabel.so/agents.txt) for an overview and links to the canonical API instructions, preview seeding, and human handoff.

Stage-and-Claim is the agent-first onboarding loop:

1. an external AI can prepare a useful Mail-and-Contacts workspace, free, before a human has an account;
2. the human opens a claim preview, signs in, and becomes the owner;
3. after explicit owner authorization, the original agent may receive one short-lived, revocable continuation with only `read` and `stage` access.

The claim is a web ownership flow, not an MCP tool. The public ChatGPT directory connector is a separate, post-claim OAuth/MCP connection.

### Agent setup documentation

- [API instructions for agents](https://app.parabel.so/llms.txt): the canonical entry point for agents preparing a workspace for a human to claim.
- [Stage-and-Claim setup guide](https://app.parabel.so/developers/stage): step-by-step integration instructions.
- [OpenAPI contract](https://app.parabel.so/openapi.json): machine-readable API specification.
- [Public app directory](https://app.parabel.so/apps): where apps offered to every workspace are listed once Parabel has reviewed them. None are listed yet.
- [Builder's guide](https://app.parabel.so/developers/apps): how agents and developers author apps for the directory.

## Key facts

- Pricing: preparing a workspace is free; a Workspace is $20 per month for the whole team with no seat fees; account monitoring is optional at $10 per account per month. See “What it costs” above.
- Human control: connected MCP assistants prepare work but do not gain external-send or approval permission. Human-activated automations have their own sending rules. The pre-account Stage API cannot send for a new workspace: preview seeding never sends, and live sending starts only after the owner activates the Workspace.
- Channels: email is in Mail. Each member links their own WhatsApp and Telegram, and a linked chat's new messages appear on the contact's page beside that contact's email. Messages sent before a chat was linked are not imported.
- AI interoperability: Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT (OpenAI), Grok (xAI), and Copilot (Microsoft) connect over MCP. The connected assistant proposes and prepares work; sending still requires a click inside Parabel.
- Desktop: a Windows desktop app runs the same inbox in its own window, adding Windows notifications, an unread count on the taskbar, and opening a file with Parabel to attach it to an unsent draft. Anyone can download it at https://parabel.so/download; signing in needs a workspace.
- Data: workspace-isolated, encrypted in transit and at rest, never used to train AI models.
- Email: teams send and receive on up to two domains they own (you@yourteam.com). A team can keep Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 as its host and mirror copies of its mail into Parabel.

## Pages

- [Home](https://parabel.so/): business email on your own domain, WhatsApp and Telegram beside each contact, the built-in agent, the app store, and the Workspace price.
- [Pricing](https://parabel.so/pricing): the Workspace plan, what is free, and the FAQ. Optional account monitoring is described at https://app.parabel.so/pricing.
- [Download](https://parabel.so/download): the Windows desktop app — public download, Windows 10 or later, 64-bit. There is no public macOS download; on any other computer Parabel runs in the browser.

## Building with Parabel

A list stays searchable. A workflow keeps its steps and conditions. A proposed update shows what will change. Agents prepare the work; people use the controls inside Mail to review and act on it. For integrations or team rollouts, contact support@parabel.so.

## Contact

- App: https://app.parabel.so
- Support: support@parabel.so