Sublime Text doesn't have a $30/month fee like this does though. ST is popular not because it's sleek, but because it's fast, uses little memory, never crashes, and restores everything when your computer goes brrrrp
I paid for Sublime Text during its early days, I believe about 10 years ago. I paid for an upgrade again. Sublime Text, iA.Writer, Hemingway App, and Grammarly is my primary writing tool.
I was invited to SuperHuman during its beta, and I tried it. I didn't upgrade. First reason was of course, the cost. The Second was, it isn't for me. In 2008, the first things I did with Mail on the iPhone was to remove that "Sent from my iPhone". So, the "Sent with SuperHuman" kinda labels do not work with my ways. "This is not the Way."
I have been using emails for just over 20+ years, and I have learned a lot of tricks to manage my emails. Right now, I've reduced to just about 7 mailboxes. I have tried many email clients but I have settled on macOS Mail for quite a while.
Here's a purely speculative analysis of what's really going on with "Superhuman":
Most of those users paying $30/month are trying to figure out how an application with such a mundane use-case could possibly charge that much.
This is a more elaborate version of the "I'll tell you the secret to getting rich if you buy my product" marketing scheme. The secret, it turns out, is to sell people the secret to getting rich.
The fact that this product is invite-only neatly obfuscates that this approach doesn't scale beyond a small niche of users. There's no conversion rate that would show that this product actually performs above-average.
Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost. Increasing the price is often the correct strategy, and the flood of comments on it might be a (vital) consumer defense mechanism against sophisticated marketing and pricing strategies.
> Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost.
In general, targeting the people who literally don't care about price will not maximize profit. There are of course luxury brands that do target these people exclusively, but they aren't big companies.
Apple is a very strong brand so they can achieve high markups, but even they have price ceilings on what's reasonable, at least for their bread-and-butter products. Moreover, you can not just "decide" to be profitable like Apple by imitating its approach to product design and pricing.
That is not to say that you can't build a profitable company targeting the particular niche of users ready to spend $30/month for an email client. You just can't scale it.
> LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B. There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience!
LVMH is a huge conglomerate of brands. I would argue that most of these brands are in fact not targeting the "price-insensitive" demographic, but those buying "premium goods", which isn't quite the same.
If you did a revenue breakdown, you'd probably see that the bulk doesn't come from Louis Vuitton purses, but rather from products that the middle class can afford - similar to Apple.
The problem for them is the “we threw amazing design at this so it’s better” sales pitch stopped being convincing in 2018. Good design is nice yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that email is email and email is broken.
Email continues to suck because the one company that dominates it (Google) has stopped trying to innovate. The most promising attempt to improve E-Mail in years - Google Inbox - was shutdown and officially “merged” into Gmail but it reality what got merged was lip service to Inbox.
The basic problem with E-Mail still today after years is 80% of the time spent in it is wasted time. Everything from junk to conversations you didn’t need to be part of, people you don’t even know contacting you to “misuse“ by connecting things like the build system to your email so you get the same message every day that you never read. Add to this that 40%+ of people now ignore their emails so you never know if you’re getting a reply.
And from a user perspective - email doesn’t scale - the moment you start interacting with 100’s or 1000’s of people, the brokenness of email turns into insanity.
So making you “faster at emails with our beautiful design” is not solving the real problem, it’s just making a faster hamster wheel. The real problem is most of the emails you read every day were a waste of your time.
And what’s even crazier is you have people saying “well I’ve developed my emailing system over the years that allows me to survive” when in fact people should be screaming “email is broken and needs to die”.
Phew ... first email rant of 2021 done. Next up... JIRA
Heres an article where Paul Graham in 2012 calls out Gmail for being slow, and stating that he would be willing to pay $50-$1000 a month for a good email experience.
I think any "Sublime Text of X" should also support offline only use. In my book this rules out apps that only function in the browser, require syncing with some service to function, or are only offered as a subscription service.
I agree. For me, one of the defining features of Sublime Text is that it is a no-brainer purchase. It is inexpensive and a one-time purchase, not an ongoing expense. 30$ per month does not fall in the same category for me.
I was talking about the products themselves. None of the brands you mention would be popular nor would be able to justify their prices if their products came with an LCD to display ads and beeped at you every 10 minutes to make you look at it.
Good old surveillance capitalism. The cruel irony: the most valuable data is produced by those with the means to buy their way out of data tracking.
I want one of those big master lists made for things you can actually own and not rent - from free or non-subscription software to devices that won't randomly brick themselves if a company's server goes down.
The only sliver of hope is that most of the surveillance capitalism is itself funded by VC-backed bullshit startups that can afford to spend unsustainable amounts of money on customer acquisition in a futile attempt to secure a monopoly or economies of scale and we see that it isn’t really working out in the long term, so eventually this bubble will pop and data about customers with not much money will no longer warrant such advanced efforts to capture it.
“sleek design, responsive speed, and suite of keyboard shortcuts to improve a user’s email efficiency”
I have no intention of trying this, but I have very little doubt that Mutt is superior in these regards to something that runs in a browser.
“Part of its feature offering includes read statuses, which is useful for executives and sales people who like to keep a pulse on their conversations.”
Seriously?
The article closes with:
“I look forward to a [...] future where everything can be done fast and efficiently through keyboard shortcuts.”
Sounds like the future that I’ve been living in for 20 years, using free software.
I would pay a flat amount if the product was actually appealing to me (this one isn't, for many reasons), but such a high subscription cost is insanity.
If you live in your email client then it doesn't sound unreasonable. I don't plan to look at it but it doesn't take much imagination to see there is enough value for some users.
Almost nobody lives in their email client, and if you do you should consider reevaluating your life options instead of using the "cool" client. We're only here once
With Hey you get an actual email service, not just a an email client. I'd argue that $99 per year for something as important as email is not expensive at all.
I tried Superhuman for over 2 months (and paid). The first experience, beyond the wait-list, was a little strange. You were required to meet with a Superhuman rep to guide you through the app. This was strange because I've bought more expensive software and was never "guided", but perhaps I should have been, so I was open to the process.
The woman I met was very friendly and consumer focused. After the walk through I felt this might be a great product until I stopped and considered what I just had been taught: keyboard shortcuts. Almost the exact same one you can turn on in Gmail.
For the next two months I tried liking Superhuman - partially the hyper, partially I want better email. Superhuman is pretty, has a few nice macros, email open tracking, and of course shortcuts. At the end I dropped it because of the price. $30/mo. for what it does just didn't make sense. If it were $5, easy sell. $10, perhaps.
I know they are trying to make email better, and perhaps they did - a bit. I believe over time email will continue to be made incrementally better, but Superhuman's underlying claim is they have tectonically shifted email, thus the price.
Isn't that the email service that tracks where and when the
receiver opens the message? Not sure how that's related to a decent text editor, let alone one that doesn't only come with an invite-only subscription.
Remember Quicksilver? Concept so strong that even Apple implemented UX in Spotlight. Sublime text/VSCode etc. If this thing was some universal app working on top of popular mail clients with one time license it will be like Sublime. $30 for one year is $360. For a web only app.:)) It's borderline ridiculous. And is actually fake Luxury. Luxury is always associated with long term value and in this context privacy and offline mode are valuable points. This is just expensive toy for SaaS hipster crowd.
I’d attribute Spotlight's UX to LaunchBar[0], not Quicksilver. LaunchBar (1996) predates Quicksilver (2003), and it was one of Quicksilver's influences, likely the most important one. Spotlight's UX more closely resembles LaunchBar's than Quicksilver's.
Here's a bit I wrote previously on LaunchBar:
> LaunchBar popularized many features we take for granted in search user interfaces today, such as seeing search results live as you type, fuzzy string matching, and combining search results of various types, such as apps, bookmarks, contacts, events, and files all into one unified interface.
(I’d argue most search interfaces today are indebted to LaunchBar, and that it has one of the worst influence-to-fame ratios of any app.)
I happily accept your correction. It's not coincidence that people with those ideas are makers of Little Snitch (one of the reasons for me to use Mac OS after 2013).
I am really happy with Seamonkey email client. One of these days, I felt sheepish, and went to Thunderbird. Didn't cut it for me. The killer feature in Seamonkey for me is the search. The default works, but so does MacOS mail - but the advanced search in Seamonkey really works. I wonder why so many mail clients make a mess of this.
Especially during this Covid era, when the mail volume seems to have multiplied by a factor of 3 for me, search is really important. I don't want fuzzy search, but rather exact search. Strangely enough, the mail client that seems to get it right is also the one that is clunkiest to look at.
I haven't used Seamonkey in close to 15 years, but how does advanced search in the mail & news part of it in that differ from Thunderbird? I can right-click on one of the folders in my email account in Thunderbird and get a modal window where I can add or remove criteria to search for things based on header contents, attachment presence, junk status, etc.
It's similar to what I remember Seamonkey (and and the Mozilla application suite that preceded it) having.
Or are you comparing the quick filter feature in Thunderbird with advanced search in Seamonkey?
I think this could be it. Perhaps I did not explore Thunderbird enough to find the exact match feature. I was surprised because Thuderbird and Seamonkey should be from the same code base, so they should behave similar.
Anyway, thanks for your reply. I might try Thunderbird again after some time. I am very satisfied with Seamonkey, but am afraid that they might scrap the project at any time.
This article appears to have been wrongly flagged. It does not, to me, look like an ad but instead a piece about a set of features across a number of productivity apps that the user admires.
It would, if it weren't for the SaaS email client ad at the beginning. And there isn't much of the article itself, it's just a (blogspam) list of a few apps.
The article mentions Linear as the "sublime text of issue trackers". Just in case anyone is interested in this space, Kitemaker (YC W21) is considerably more keyboard friendly. Much like Superhuman, you can do literally everything without the mouse.
by sublime of x, you mean 'no longer as cutting edge as it used to be'? Used it for years, but had problems locating my license when transferring computers. Moved to vscode and haven't looked back.
Same with the original paid version of BSD. Lost an ethernet card on a Friday night, had to deal with license BS or just go install FreeBSD.
