Hey Sumo-lings! 👋

It's been a packed few weeks and I wanted to give you a proper update on everything that's shipped — almost all of it shaped directly by feedback from this community.

🧠 Your AI got a serious brain upgrade

This is where most of the work went, because it's what you asked for most:

• AI Rules — mandatory instructions your AI always follows, per channel. "Ask qualifying questions before offering a booking link." "Never discuss pricing, hand off instead." You write the rule, the AI obeys it.

• Rules now work together — a Sumo-ling showed me a case where the AI followed one rule and skipped another. We rebuilt how rules apply (they all apply, every reply), added it to our automated AI test suite, and shipped it within days. That's the feedback loop we want with you.

• AI Memory — your AI learns from your team's answers over time, and you stay in control of what it remembers.

• AI personality — set the tone and style so replies sound like *your* team, not a robot.

• Your AI can read images — screenshots, receipts, photos. It reads what's in them (including the text) and uses it in replies. Your agents also get an instant summary of any screenshot in the inbox.

• Train on exactly the pages you choose — index specific URLs instead of a whole site, and edit the selection anytime.

🔌 Connect your AI tools with MCP (Beta)

This is available on ALL PLANS. No AI Addon needed

Sonny now has an MCP server — plug Claude, or any MCP-compatible assistant, straight into your workspace with the same scoped API keys and permissions as our public API. Your AI tools can look up conversations, manage contacts, and (with an explicit opt-in scope) even send replies. We think this is where support tooling is heading, and you get it first.

💬 The widget keeps getting slicker

• Full-screen image viewer — swipe, zoom, download

• Links unfurl into neat preview cards

• Image uploads now work even on locked-down sites with strict security policies

• Visitors can reply straight from their email if they've left your site — the conversation just continues

🛡️ Quality of life

• Block senders by email, domain, or IP — across email *and* live chat

• Notification emails now wait a few minutes and group themselves, so you're informed without the noise

• Emoji reactions, delivery ticks (optional), saved drafts that stay put

• White label — hide "Powered by Sonny" (included with AI plans and the BYOK unlock)

If Sonny's been working for you, a review on the deal page means the world to a bootstrapped team. And if something's *not* working — tell me. You've seen how fast we ship. 😄

Hey Sumo-lings,

First off - thank you. The feature requests you've been leaving have shaped basically everything we've built this quarter, and today's update is the biggest one yet. It's live now, on your plan, at no extra cost.

Until now, your AI answered from your knowledge base and that was that. Now you get to shape how it works and how it sounds:

📏 Rules — Write plain-English instructions your AI must always follow in a channel. "Never promise a refund before checking the order." "Always reply in the customer's language." "Don't quote delivery dates — link the shipping page." Every AI draft and every automatic reply obeys them. Flip any rule on or off without deleting it.

🧠 Memory — Two kinds. Your AI can now learn reusable answers straight from the good replies your team already sends, so it gets sharper over time from real support you're doing anyway. It can also remember useful details about individual customers ("prefers email," "on the annual plan") for more personal replies. Everything it remembers lives in one place — searchable, editable, and deletable, so you're always in control. Nothing is a black box.

😊 Personality — Pick how your AI sounds. Tone from Professional to Playful, replies from Concise to Detailed, and emoji on or off. Each channel can have its own voice, so your storefront and your B2B inbox don't have to sound the same.

You'll find all of it under Channels → your channel → AI tab. There's a test chat right there so you can try your rules and voice before a single customer sees them.

We wrote up the full how-to here: www.usesonny.com/docs/ai-rules-memory

As always — this got built because you asked for it. Keep the requests coming on the roadmap board, and tell us what you'd want your AI to do next. We read every one.

PLEASE NOTE: The AI Addon is not part of the AppSumo deal - as it's not a economically feasible thing for us to offer on a lifetime deal. We wanted to make you aware of the functionality either way. You do however have the optional ability to add it on at any time.

Cheers for now.

Hey Sumo-lings,

Quick update on what's landed in Sonny over the last few weeks. Most of it came straight out of your emails and feature requests, so thank you for that.

Bring Your Own Key

You can now plug your own OpenAI or Anthropic key into Sonny (or point it at a self-hosted Ollama server) and run the AI with no conversation limits. If you're already paying for an API key, this is the cheapest way to run AI support at any real volume. You can test your key before you switch it on, and go back to a Sonny AI plan whenever you like.

Live: see who's on your site right now

A new page showing every visitor currently browsing. What page they're on, where they came from, whether they've been here before, and the path they've taken through your site. If someone's been sitting on your pricing page for two minutes, you can say hi and start the chat before they leave.

The iOS app is out

Sonny is on the App Store. Push notifications, swipe to archive, your whole inbox in your pocket. Android is next.

Writing replies got a lot better

Rich text composer everywhere. HTML email signatures, and owners can lock them so the team stays on-brand. Contact fields you can drop straight into a reply. @mentions that use real names. And you can now start a new outbound conversation from the inbox instead of waiting for someone to message you first.

Smaller things you asked for

- Trash for conversations. Delete without losing anything. If the customer replies, it comes right back.

- Open the chat widget from your own button or link, anywhere on the page.

- Teams, so conversations route to the right group of agents.

- Search that actually finds things, plus a command palette (⌘K).

- The app is faster and updates live. No more refreshing to see a new message.

Tell us what to build next

There's now a public roadmap inside Sonny. Post an idea, vote on other people's, see what we're working on. We read every single one, and it's the first place we look when we decide what to build next.

Thanks for backing us this early. Keep the feedback coming.

Chris

A couple of years ago I counted the support tools we were paying for: 5 of them. We run around ten small software companies, and every single one had its own help desk subscription, its own login, its own inbox. My morning was ten browser tabs, ten sets of credentials, and the same context-switching tax over and over just to answer customers.

The frustrating part was that none of these tools were built for how we actually work. Every one of them assumes one company per account. If you run more than one business, you're expected to pay full price again, set everything up again, and check yet another inbox. Nobody had built a help desk for people running a portfolio of companies instead of just one.

So we built Sonny. One account, every one of your businesses inside it as a separate workspace, and a single inbox that pulls it all together. Each workspace keeps its own brand, email, and team, but you log in once and work from one place. The thing I wished existed when I was drowning in tabs.

If you run more than one company - or you're an agency handling support for a bunch of clients - Sonny was made for exactly your situation. We built it for ourselves first, and we use it every day.