Superhuman’s email app is overhyped and overpriced | Hacker News Reader

Superhuman’s email app is overhyped and overpriced

theverge.com

70 pointsitalophil57 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's not even a native app

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.

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.

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-subscri...

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).

That's bizarre. Two minutes? Mine takes about 3-6 seconds generally. Yours is 20x as much.

It takes around that much time until interactivity, yeah. It's incredibly slow, and I have gigabit internet.

I'll mention this yet again so everyone can ignore it, but if you use the HTML-only option, it's clunkier but very fast. But I can say this 100 times and nobody does it.

I can confirm the HTML-only option is great, and there is one for holdouts of Facebook too: https://mbasic.facebook.com

(also via Tor https://mbasic.facebookcorewwi.onion)

Something is pathologically broken for you. Don’t know whether it’s client side like a corrupted browser or service side like a malformed attachment that is causing Gmail to thrash. Chances of course are that the problem is on your end.

100% sure. I have been using gmail since forever on all sorts of networks and devices and never ever has taking "being useful" 20 seconds, unless there is something very wrong on my side.

Weirdest thing is that an add-on makes it faster, how's that even possible without a serious MiTB problem?

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.

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

Superhuman is a slightly faster GMail, while Hey (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.

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.

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".

No no, you see, you must be _brave_, be _bold_ and irrevocably tie yourself to our product.

I believe that it on their TODO list.

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/126602572713423...

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.

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.

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.

I would absolutely pay to get many of they Hey.com features on top of my Fastmail accounts.

If you don't mind me asking, what features would those be?

* 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/

mate, I got some really good hey names, interested?

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.

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.

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

How are you currently managing calendar invites and scheduling while using hey?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

Superhuman and apps like it aren't designed for every American. It's for people whose job is to basically email all day, like investors, managers, recruiters, etc. For them it is absolutely worth it. It's like asking why a specialized tool is so expensive for those who need it. It's precisely because they need and would use it so much that the tool is worth it.

I think people do consider the money value of time?

If you're an employee, it's irrelevant.

If you're self employed, the mental overhead and switching costs are high.

And if you are the person for which those things are true, do you believe the marketing?

Wouldn't 5 minutes memorizing keyboard shortcuts be a better use of time, at $0/monthly cost?

I would argue that the area in which people fail to consider the value of time is actually the time cost of implementing new processes, software or otherwise.

There are hundreds of thousands of free courses and tutorials that could each save someone a little here and a little there, why doesn't everyone spend all day learning?

It's an interesting question, really.

I lean towards pick the 2-3 core activities and optimize for time and output with those tools. For everything else, optimize for low mental overhead.

Maybe the switching costs are high, or maybe not. Superhuman is designed such that every single interaction can be done on the keyboard, I'm not sure of another email client that has that level of control, so I'm not sure as to your point about memorizing keyboard shortcuts.

It's like an email version of vim (or emacs if you prefer), but more GUI-based and for non-technical people. Would you pay for vim, is I think the real question, given that one is an active vim user already. Since it saves me so much time and switching cost from keyboard to mouse, I would pay for it. That it is currently free and open source is nice, too, but I think some programmers would definitely pay if it weren't.

I've saved hundreds of hours by ignoring email and I highly recommend that option as well.

By keyboard shortcuts I'm referring to any software that one uses frequently, whether text editor, email, video editing, analytics, or something else.

If someone is not using the keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, why not just start there? No migration necessary.

I made the original post you’re replying to, and I agree. Web gmail + shortcuts is actually a great service. I think most people who are fairly satisfied with their email and just want to improve some would be best served starting there.

Personally I found superhuman just better enough that it’s worth it, but that’s because I wasn’t very good at managing email in a web interface, and I like the command line approach in Superhuman.

Interesting, if I give email another look I'll check it out.

Does it have a way to auto unsubscribe from and delete promotional content and other non essential stuff?

It puts them into other, and it has a faster unsubscribe interface, though it doesn’t already work. When you delete a message you can trash or mark done all from the same sender, so that is nice.

For that use case you might look into Sanebox. It runs on servers and I think has a good reputation for that kind of filtering.

Personally I haven’t had too much issue with promotional email though, so I would take my comments here with a grain of salt. I can’t really speak to it.

The other folder filtering is decent, but I imagine gmail is also good at that with promotions.

Sure, that works for many people, I am not disagreeing. I'm just saying why shouldn't people pay for more specialized tools? Sometimes Gmail and keyboard shortcuts aren't enough.

the iOS app is trash. I built my own version of it with react-native and it is faster than the crap they threw together.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Can you explain more about what is "visionary"?

He is everywhere/podcasts talking about the PMF and how they built the product.

New way for monetizing a product many failed trying.

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