40 ms·

Superhuman’s email app is overhyped and overpriced

70 points by italophil 6y ago

raiyu 6y ago
When Hey.com announced their features I scrolled through each one and would probably get value from 75% of them. Superhuman seems more of a signaling play. Hey.com features on top of Gmail though, that would be amazing.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  I would absolutely pay to get many of they Hey.com features on top of my Fastmail accounts.
  - ekovarski 6y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what features would those be?
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      * Inbox whitelist * Files view * Native large file transfers (even if I had to provide my own Backblaze API creds for storing those files, instead of having to use Firefox Send) * Clips * Notes to self in an email thread * "Paper trail" for receipts (although I can probably accomplish this with filters) * Thread unfollowing https://hey.com/features/ https://hey.com/features/
      - terrycody 6y ago
        mate, I got some really good hey names, interested?
- northerdome 6y ago
  Hey looks awesome! I'll give it a spin when they release custom domain support. I've learned not to lock myself in to a service specific address.
j45 6y ago
Or it's not for everyone.. which is OK too.
koolhead17 6y ago
Rahul is a visionary, thought leader. Silicon Valley needs more founder turned VC like him.
- dpflan 6y ago
  Can you explain more about what is "visionary"?
  - koolhead17 6y ago
    He is everywhere/podcasts talking about the PMF and how they built the product. New way for monetizing a product many failed trying.
freediver 6y ago
I am an ex-user. A search through my email archive would regularly take ten seconds while gmail would do it instantly. The most frustrating thing about it was constant insisting on how super-fast it was in all their marketing while my experience was completely opposite.
- HuguesC 6y ago
  It's not even a native app
- kareemm 6y ago
  My experience is that search and UI transitions are blazing fast. It crashes (rarely, but more than I like) and requires a restart. But I love it and am happy to pay $30/m for it.
  - asutekku 6y ago
    Honest question. If this is not sarcasm, what makes it worth $30 a month. I can't think of a single other software I would pay that much for.
    - benologist 6y ago
      Apple's policies permit charging $360/year for that email client, so they do, and that's actually cheaper than many small iOS utilities and games. Since you can cancel any time it is presented as your fault if a small utility, recently worth maybe a buck or two, quietly charges you hundreds of dollars. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscriptions/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscri...
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Really? Mine is the exact opposite experience. Gmail, the website, takes at least 2 minutes to load and be usable, so much that I need to use a separate extension to use it normally (Checker Plus for Gmail).
graeme 6y ago
> Well, first off, despite the astronomical price, it is a good email application. In another world, one where Superhuman was more reasonably priced and a little more customizable, I could see it being very popular. Assume your time is worth $50/hour and you can deduct superhuman as a business expense. Let’s say you do email every day in a month, so 30 days. If I did my math right, Superhuman just has to save 36 min per month to break even. That is 1.2 min per day. If Superhuman is even marginally better than the best competition, then it meets that bar, and is profitable for someone who earns money with their work time. That’s the target market. I use it. I find the desktop app great, mobile apps so so. They have major ram issues on ios. But I love the desktop app.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  It is strange that people don't consider the money value of time when addressing the prices of products. 30 dollars is extremely cheap, since 36 minutes per month as you say is such a small value as to be negligible.
  - taytus 6y ago
    >30 dollars is extremely cheap There is a wide world out there where $30 is not cheap at all. I wish Americans consider stuff like that before commenting but I gave up years ago.
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      Sure, it has to be scaled to the market. However, even the equivalent of 30 dollars given a higher per hour rate (such as 50) is cheap. That Superhuman does not institute a region-based pricing is a different story, but you cannot deny that to Americans, 30 dollars is cheap when considering the time saved.
      - hellotomyrars 6y ago
        I actually don’t agree. $30/mo for an email service (which most people get for free) is a huge ask for many Americans. Especially when everything is sold as a subscription. Sure it’s “only x per month” but when everything someone buys is a small amount per month it adds up quickly. 30/mo might be chump change for a software engineer, especially one in a tech bubble area. 30/mo for email is however, not cheap or practical for many other people though.
sealthedeal 6y ago
My take on SH... They essentially just teach you how to do things that gmail already lets you do, but put a cuter UI around it, and they force teach you concepts like inbox zero. Other than that I see 0 value in the product.
theagilecoder 6y ago
Moved from Superhuman to hey.com. I really like both but hey.com is way cheaper.
- kamilszybalski 6y ago
  How are you currently managing calendar invites and scheduling while using hey?
Androider 6y ago
Superhuman is a slightly faster GMail, while Hey (https://hey.com/features/ https://hey.com/features/) on the other hand seems like a rethinking of the fundamentals of email starting from "Anyone can email you". I've tried inbox zero etc. but they all fail in the long run for me (I'm one of those folks with the red badge of shame with literally 40,000 unread emails on my phone), so I'm eager to give Hey a try which gives you a workflow of how to do email: screen, reply-later, focus mode bulk reply.
- jonshariat 6y ago
  I got into the "beta" last night only to find out it was a 1 week trial and the cost was $100/year. (Also when claiming emails short addresses costs even more money per year). Right off the bat it put a really bad taste in my mouth. I'm helping you test your product. Changing your email is a really big commitment, I can't imagine this is the way to convince people to try it.
  - balladeer 6y ago
    Wait, don't they allow custom domains? I think this lock-in, even if it is for reinvented email, ought to be a big "no".
    - hguant 6y ago
      No no, you see, you must be _brave_, be _bold_ and irrevocably tie yourself to our product.
    - devdas 6y ago
      I believe that it on their TODO list.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    It was explicitly a rollout of a release, not a beta. They weren’t expecting any testing from you. You never saw any beta language on hey.com or your signup email. Proof from Jason: https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1266025727134236673 https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/126602572713423...
KennyFromIT 6y ago
Am I the only one that feels like this article (along with this resulting HN thread) is straight out of the Hey PR machine? I guess I just don't understand the value this type of post adds to the HN community.
- mike-cardwell 6y ago
  I signed up for a hey.com trial, to test it with emailprivacytester.com (of which I'm the author). I was a bit disappointed to be honest. When you use hey.com's webmail, it loads remote images when you read an email, and there doesn't even appear to be an option to turn that off. Granted, they hide your IP by proxying the content, just like Gmail does, but they don't hide the fact that you read an email, or when you read it. These systems should really just fetch all remote content in advance, rather than waiting until it's read. That would make it impossible for a sender to know if a message was read or not.
- hguant 6y ago
  I feel like that has become my typical experience reading The Verge - "here's this thing! You shouldn't use it, you should totally use this thing that we (or our sponsors) like better!" I remember reading their articles about the Windows Phone and some early Android devices, and realizing that the 'review' was just some guy complaining about how it's not like an iPhone, as if approaching a user interface or solving a problem in a different manner than Apple was inherently a bad thing for all use cases, in all places. That sort of promoted fanboy-ism permeates, well, almost all of their articles, be it a tech piece or a purported report on politics.
m3kw9 6y ago
One of the best secrets to manage your email is to disable the Badge. It’s useless, really for the most part unless you can consistently get it down to single digits. Instead you aggressively set rules to filter and check your email manually when you are good and ready. If you really need to, only allow VIPs email to show up in badge count. iOS supports this.
kstrauser 6y ago
On the one hand, that’s ridiculous. On the other, if you find a way to get people to pay you $30 a month for an otherwise free or cheap service, then bravo. Even if I think it’s silly, it’s a progressive tax on something way less evil than, say, bottling public water and then selling it back to the public.
- j45 6y ago
  As much as I’m not a fan of paying that much for email, the fact that anyone has the ability to interrupt you has an enormous potential cost. Being more effective with email and communicating is a life changing discipline and skill. The 30/mo should be seen as the hundreds or thousands it can make or safe some people who have to be effective with their time and communication. Again, maybe not for everyone.
northerdome 6y ago
I use Superhuman. It's really good and they get the details right. Good keyboard shortcuts, good offline. It isn't revolutionary but has an attention to detail other services I've tried in the past miss. I also like paying a premium for software rather than see a company flounder to make the financials work. I've had so many of my favorite tools die. I like that I can pay Superhuman to help them continue to make a great product.
pl0x 6y ago
Never understood the hype around superhuman. From the outside it looks as if it was hyped by a bunch of silicon valley VC's to drive up the valuation of the product.
- omniscient_oce 6y ago
  Also the invite-only beta thing that was being talked about on Twitter in a way to make it #mysterious
upofadown 6y ago
Superhuman is supposed to be for business but it doesn't do encryption?
dhagz 6y ago
I don't see why anyone would pay more than $10/mo for a non-Gmail email service. But I'm also a grumpy weirdo who prefers to use plain-text email wherever possible, so all these "Gmail-killers" don't really offer what I want.
foobaw 6y ago
It's good to see more competition in the email space as a consumer. Superhuman should get a good push from hey.com, as their only previous large competitor was Gmail.

70 points by italophil 6y ago

When Hey.com announced their features I scrolled through each one and would probably get value from 75% of them. Superhuman seems more of a signaling play. Hey.com features on top of Gmail though, that would be amazing.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
I would absolutely pay to get many of they Hey.com features on top of my Fastmail accounts.
- ekovarski 6y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, what features would those be?
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    * Inbox whitelist * Files view * Native large file transfers (even if I had to provide my own Backblaze API creds for storing those files, instead of having to use Firefox Send) * Clips * Notes to self in an email thread * "Paper trail" for receipts (although I can probably accomplish this with filters) * Thread unfollowing https://hey.com/features/ https://hey.com/features/
    - terrycody 6y ago
      mate, I got some really good hey names, interested?
northerdome 6y ago
Hey looks awesome! I'll give it a spin when they release custom domain support. I've learned not to lock myself in to a service specific address.

j45 6y ago

Or it's not for everyone.. which is OK too.

koolhead17 6y ago

Rahul is a visionary, thought leader. Silicon Valley needs more founder turned VC like him.

dpflan 6y ago
Can you explain more about what is "visionary"?
- koolhead17 6y ago
  He is everywhere/podcasts talking about the PMF and how they built the product. New way for monetizing a product many failed trying.

freediver 6y ago

I am an ex-user. A search through my email archive would regularly take ten seconds while gmail would do it instantly. The most frustrating thing about it was constant insisting on how super-fast it was in all their marketing while my experience was completely opposite.

HuguesC 6y ago
It's not even a native app
kareemm 6y ago
My experience is that search and UI transitions are blazing fast. It crashes (rarely, but more than I like) and requires a restart. But I love it and am happy to pay $30/m for it.
- asutekku 6y ago
  Honest question. If this is not sarcasm, what makes it worth $30 a month. I can't think of a single other software I would pay that much for.
  - benologist 6y ago
    Apple's policies permit charging $360/year for that email client, so they do, and that's actually cheaper than many small iOS utilities and games. Since you can cancel any time it is presented as your fault if a small utility, recently worth maybe a buck or two, quietly charges you hundreds of dollars. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscriptions/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscri...
cercatrova 6y ago
Really? Mine is the exact opposite experience. Gmail, the website, takes at least 2 minutes to load and be usable, so much that I need to use a separate extension to use it normally (Checker Plus for Gmail).

graeme 6y ago

> Well, first off, despite the astronomical price, it is a good email application. In another world, one where Superhuman was more reasonably priced and a little more customizable, I could see it being very popular. Assume your time is worth $50/hour and you can deduct superhuman as a business expense. Let’s say you do email every day in a month, so 30 days. If I did my math right, Superhuman just has to save 36 min per month to break even. That is 1.2 min per day. If Superhuman is even marginally better than the best competition, then it meets that bar, and is profitable for someone who earns money with their work time. That’s the target market. I use it. I find the desktop app great, mobile apps so so. They have major ram issues on ios. But I love the desktop app.

cercatrova 6y ago
It is strange that people don't consider the money value of time when addressing the prices of products. 30 dollars is extremely cheap, since 36 minutes per month as you say is such a small value as to be negligible.
- taytus 6y ago
  >30 dollars is extremely cheap There is a wide world out there where $30 is not cheap at all. I wish Americans consider stuff like that before commenting but I gave up years ago.
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Sure, it has to be scaled to the market. However, even the equivalent of 30 dollars given a higher per hour rate (such as 50) is cheap. That Superhuman does not institute a region-based pricing is a different story, but you cannot deny that to Americans, 30 dollars is cheap when considering the time saved.
    - hellotomyrars 6y ago
      I actually don’t agree. $30/mo for an email service (which most people get for free) is a huge ask for many Americans. Especially when everything is sold as a subscription. Sure it’s “only x per month” but when everything someone buys is a small amount per month it adds up quickly. 30/mo might be chump change for a software engineer, especially one in a tech bubble area. 30/mo for email is however, not cheap or practical for many other people though.

sealthedeal 6y ago

My take on SH... They essentially just teach you how to do things that gmail already lets you do, but put a cuter UI around it, and they force teach you concepts like inbox zero. Other than that I see 0 value in the product.

theagilecoder 6y ago

Moved from Superhuman to hey.com. I really like both but hey.com is way cheaper.

kamilszybalski 6y ago
How are you currently managing calendar invites and scheduling while using hey?

Androider 6y ago

Superhuman is a slightly faster GMail, while Hey (https://hey.com/features/ https://hey.com/features/) on the other hand seems like a rethinking of the fundamentals of email starting from "Anyone can email you". I've tried inbox zero etc. but they all fail in the long run for me (I'm one of those folks with the red badge of shame with literally 40,000 unread emails on my phone), so I'm eager to give Hey a try which gives you a workflow of how to do email: screen, reply-later, focus mode bulk reply.

jonshariat 6y ago
I got into the "beta" last night only to find out it was a 1 week trial and the cost was $100/year. (Also when claiming emails short addresses costs even more money per year). Right off the bat it put a really bad taste in my mouth. I'm helping you test your product. Changing your email is a really big commitment, I can't imagine this is the way to convince people to try it.
- balladeer 6y ago
  Wait, don't they allow custom domains? I think this lock-in, even if it is for reinvented email, ought to be a big "no".
  - hguant 6y ago
    No no, you see, you must be _brave_, be _bold_ and irrevocably tie yourself to our product.
  - devdas 6y ago
    I believe that it on their TODO list.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  It was explicitly a rollout of a release, not a beta. They weren’t expecting any testing from you. You never saw any beta language on hey.com or your signup email. Proof from Jason: https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1266025727134236673 https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/126602572713423...

KennyFromIT 6y ago

Am I the only one that feels like this article (along with this resulting HN thread) is straight out of the Hey PR machine? I guess I just don't understand the value this type of post adds to the HN community.

mike-cardwell 6y ago
I signed up for a hey.com trial, to test it with emailprivacytester.com (of which I'm the author). I was a bit disappointed to be honest. When you use hey.com's webmail, it loads remote images when you read an email, and there doesn't even appear to be an option to turn that off. Granted, they hide your IP by proxying the content, just like Gmail does, but they don't hide the fact that you read an email, or when you read it. These systems should really just fetch all remote content in advance, rather than waiting until it's read. That would make it impossible for a sender to know if a message was read or not.
hguant 6y ago
I feel like that has become my typical experience reading The Verge - "here's this thing! You shouldn't use it, you should totally use this thing that we (or our sponsors) like better!" I remember reading their articles about the Windows Phone and some early Android devices, and realizing that the 'review' was just some guy complaining about how it's not like an iPhone, as if approaching a user interface or solving a problem in a different manner than Apple was inherently a bad thing for all use cases, in all places. That sort of promoted fanboy-ism permeates, well, almost all of their articles, be it a tech piece or a purported report on politics.

m3kw9 6y ago

One of the best secrets to manage your email is to disable the Badge. It’s useless, really for the most part unless you can consistently get it down to single digits. Instead you aggressively set rules to filter and check your email manually when you are good and ready. If you really need to, only allow VIPs email to show up in badge count. iOS supports this.

kstrauser 6y ago

On the one hand, that’s ridiculous. On the other, if you find a way to get people to pay you $30 a month for an otherwise free or cheap service, then bravo. Even if I think it’s silly, it’s a progressive tax on something way less evil than, say, bottling public water and then selling it back to the public.

j45 6y ago
As much as I’m not a fan of paying that much for email, the fact that anyone has the ability to interrupt you has an enormous potential cost. Being more effective with email and communicating is a life changing discipline and skill. The 30/mo should be seen as the hundreds or thousands it can make or safe some people who have to be effective with their time and communication. Again, maybe not for everyone.

northerdome 6y ago

I use Superhuman. It's really good and they get the details right. Good keyboard shortcuts, good offline. It isn't revolutionary but has an attention to detail other services I've tried in the past miss. I also like paying a premium for software rather than see a company flounder to make the financials work. I've had so many of my favorite tools die. I like that I can pay Superhuman to help them continue to make a great product.

pl0x 6y ago

Never understood the hype around superhuman. From the outside it looks as if it was hyped by a bunch of silicon valley VC's to drive up the valuation of the product.

omniscient_oce 6y ago
Also the invite-only beta thing that was being talked about on Twitter in a way to make it #mysterious

upofadown 6y ago

Superhuman is supposed to be for business but it doesn't do encryption?

dhagz 6y ago

I don't see why anyone would pay more than $10/mo for a non-Gmail email service. But I'm also a grumpy weirdo who prefers to use plain-text email wherever possible, so all these "Gmail-killers" don't really offer what I want.

foobaw 6y ago

It's good to see more competition in the email space as a consumer. Superhuman should get a good push from hey.com, as their only previous large competitor was Gmail.