[graeme]

> 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.

[ericlewis]

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.

[cercatrova]

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]

>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]

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]

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.

[cercatrova]

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.

[jlbnjmn]

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.

[cercatrova]

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.

[jlbnjmn]

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.

[graeme]

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.

[jlbnjmn]

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?

[cercatrova]

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.