Pay for Software
26 Oct 2016
I just upgraded to Newton (previously CloudMagic). Yes, I am paying a yearly subscription for an email service for two reasons:
#1 Personally, I have tried pretty much ever mail app that has come (and gone) and Newton to me is the best.
Newton is fast with a crisp user-interface and is available on iOS and Mac. It just works. Composing an email is a smooth process (the text size is perfect) and the app is smart enough to know that an email to a friend should go out from your personal email (it switches this automatically and you can see this before you send out the email). I have had no issues with rendering of incoming mails including my daily newsletters/daily digests. The advance features (which they call supercharges) are great too. With so much of our my communication revolving around email (prefer email to Slack) my email service needs to have the following:
- Undo Send — “Pull back that email blunder you just sent.”
- Snooze — “Set your emails to come back to inbox at a more convenient time. Prioritize and pick them up at a later time when you’re ready to go.” I make that golf tournament draw email pop back up in my inbox 2 days prior to the tournament day.
- Remind me in x days if the person hasn’t responded
Some of my important emails to non-tech-savvy-I-am-not-good-at-processing-my-inbox-smartly people had gone unanswered to I am not able to be on top of those mails. - Send Later — “Schedule emails to be sent at the perfect time without having to wait for it.”
#2. It is good to pay for software that helps you work better.
When Newton released their paid yearly subscriptions (and its not much when you think about it monthly) there was a lot of complaining on Twitter; unfortunately, people don’t like change and people don’t like to pay for software. When nothing else is free why should software be free? It takes a lot to build and sustain good quality software. Software companies have to pay for servers, bandwidth, rent, teams etc. too! It is a real business.
Look at what happened to Mailbox and Sparrow -> Awesome free software, gets popular, gets bought, gets shut down. Who loses? Us! Maybe, just maybe, if they had charged for it things could be different.
Over the last year I have started to support companies that build good software that help me work better. I pay for it. It makes me feel better.