I think the comparison is that they just seem to give a shit about putting out a very good product. Filter and snooze automatically is probably my favorite unique capability but it’s less one thing than the overall ethos and execution.
Also, real support! Your email is important, you should be able to open a ticket and reach someone that knows what they’re doing.
Just like parent poster, there's a few things I pay for, and those are Kagi and Fastmail :)
Fastmail is... FAST. The page refresh is basically instant, and the UI is super-snappy, well refined and something like 2026, while Gmail hasn't changed in... 15 years? It supports a lot of features (identities, masked addresses, ...), not to mention that I can have my domains properly hosted on it, for 5eur/mo.
Fastmail is like Gmail used to be: fast, good search, functional spam filter. I have my own domain so switching took a couple of minutes and over the next week I realized that I never once regretted it – I saw less spam and I was surprised by how much stuff like infrequent newsletters I’d missed because Gmail was filtering it incorrectly while letting through tons of marketing junk.
I've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search.
Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.
To be fair, just because you understand the code you see doesn't mean its safe to copy-paste. Many of these compromised sites will show something that appears to be a benign command but will be something entirely different when you copy them.
Not good to get people into the habit of copying and running code in their terminal.
They will never remove tissue if you're still alive. This is the reason organ donation is most common in brain-death cases, because the tissue is still alive but you are entirely dead. As you point out, it would be horrible to dismember someone who is still alive and would certainly violate their oath.
I hope this is a comforting answer, I choose to be an organ donor because of these details.