I’m all about productivity so when I heard about Superhuman I decided to give it a shot. I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and while it’s a solid product and well built it didn’t suit me. The onboarding experience is great and there’s a ton of functionality that Superhuman provides that makes it that much easier to go through email. This ranges from a variety of shortcuts (that can all be quickly found using Cmd+K) to functionality that you wish existed in email, such as typing a date and immediately seeing that day’s calendar to being able to copy a whole email message - attachments and all.

I really wanted to like it but unfortunately ran into a few issues that ruined my experience. The biggest was that it was just too slow and would occasionally freeze entirely when loading large emails. At that point my only option was to force quit the app and then go back to Gmail to handle the offending message. I also ran into a few cases where I tried to delete an email but due to the lack of an immediate response I’d hit delete again and would end up deleting a few messages. Given that my account was set up to optimize towards inbox zero accidentally deleting a few emails was a problem since these were important emails that took time to recover.

Superhuman invested a ton in their mobile experience and it shows. The iPhone app is smooth and provides an entirely different experience than the desktop client. Unfortunately, I rarely use mobile email and prefer to do all my emailing on the desktop. I never struggled with mobile email so there was little incentive for me to change my behavior.

If you can justify the $30/month, are a heavy email user, and find yourself spending more time in email than you should then give it a shot. If you’re more traditional, are happy with your current email experience, and don’t have the $30/month to spend you likely won’t invest the time to make Superhuman work for you. My gut is that a lower price and an improved desktop app experience would get me to come back.