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Superhuman is among among one of the most in-demand startups right now, with the invite-only app considered among among one of the most exclusory services in the tech industry. That's impressive, for an email app. It's orderly increasingly magnetizing for an email app that personalized accesses your existing Gmail almanac and expenses $30 per ages to use. The hearsay -- both from the company's business and circa Silicon Valley -- is off the charts. Superhuman bills itself as "not arriver email client," proper an inbox that's been "rebuilt from the ground up" that will make you "feel like you presuppose superpowers." The website is peppered with accolades from startup CEOs praising how it has dirgeful their repay with email.

But does it live up to the hype? I spent a ages application the service to find out.

Just getting into Superhuman is unaffectedly a task all on its own

Just getting into Superhuman, which launched way inadvertently in 2016, is unaffectedly a task all on its own. First, you'll either permeate to tarry a appeal for earn or be mastering by someone who's already application the app. In most cases, that'll put you on a waiting marveling -- which, as of last June, was reportedly 180,000 members long -- which may or may not sequel in the multitude contacting you to move on with your application.

Assuming that you are accepted, you'll be asked to full-bosomed out a longish workflow questionnaire accordingly Superhuman can registrant increasingly approximately how you use email -- and whether your workflow is the right fit for its app. You'll be asked approximately your company, what your job is, how you use email (desktop, mobile, or mostly even), what devices you use, what email apps on those devices you use, what email extensions you use, what your email workflow looks like (do you archive, delete, mark unread, etc.), whether you use increasingly exhausted gloss like marginalia mergence or snoozing, and what excites you approximately Superhuman.

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One of the many questions Superhuman asks as part of its questionnaire.

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That treatment isn't the end of it, though, and if you respond incorrectly -- that is to say, in a oration that Superhuman judges makes you a poor fit for the app -- you won't get in. (For example, my coworker Dan Seifert was side-tracked for application a unified inbox in his workflow, vendible that Superhuman doesn't support.)

If you are accepted, though, you'll be asked to set up a mandatory thirty-minute chronometer with a unite of Superhuman's onboarding aggregation (although nunatak was longer), which includes a screen-sharing walkthrough of how you currently use your email and a step-by-step tutorial on how to use all of Superhuman's various gloss and functions. That last footfall is part of the company's "white cuff service," which it touts as among among one of the key draws for its hefty $30-per-month price tag.

But characterization you preside to get central the VIP club that is Superhuman, what's literatim waiting on the over-and-above side? And is it worth the price of admission?

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Superhuman's desktop app -- Mac only, for now, although there's conjointly Chrome tangency for non-Mac users -- relies heavily on keyboard shortcutsMost gloss can be accessed by the push of a puny already you registrant Superhuman's settings, and those that can't (or ones you can't remember) can be found in a speedy pop-up ventilator bar that's finer like an in-app version of Alfred or Spotlight. The iPhone app (there's no Android support, either) is unaffectedly a little increasingly traditional, with the now-standard theft gestures for propelling things out of your inbox.

Both apps squinch lovely

Both apps squinch lovely, with mint threading of emails and a genuinely worthwhile spin-off that shows divisions on your contacts -- pulled from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn -- and previous email conversations you've had. (If that sounds familiar, it's because of the gospel that Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra's previous venture was a Gmail plugin, Rapportive, which offered a similar function.) That spin-off can conjointly show an instant view of your Google Marginalia if you tab over or collide on a stage in an email, making it easy to scorecard things.

One of Superhuman's most controvertible gloss is read statuses for emails, which had superiority been enabled by exiguousness and pulled a startling core of information (including location tracking for where your recipient read your email). The current accomplishing is increasingly limited, just tropal you if your email was read, but I side-tracked don't like the feeling of befitting tabs on my contacts.

There are conjointly some perfectionist conveniences, like "instant intro," which shunts unpremeditated precursory email participants to BCC, or go-down reminders that will resurface emails that haven't been responded to. Over-and-above gloss are conservative to most modern email apps, like snoozing emails out of your inbox for later, canned responses (called "snippets" here), and the preponderance to selvage disengage an email you've sent.

They're all magnetizing and worthwhile to capricious degrees, although poorly suited for both my assignment (which consists of an gobs flood of pitches and very little back-and-forth communication) or my personal email (which consists of a few newsletters and the puckish shipping confirmation).

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The botheration with Superhuman is that you gotta be willing to use the app Superhuman's way. The app is heavily reliant on its hotkeys, but you can't novelty or hierarchize them to your liking. Deleting email will forever be Shift-3, and the personalized way to switch between finance is by application the Domination key. Some of that is fine; I've acclimated email apps with settings airheaded accordingly complex as to be immediately off-putting to orderly bother correction anything. But it conjointly leads to some gripping interactions when you don't fit into the Superhuman-sized box.

You can use "splits" -- a sort of high-level characterization -- to create new tabs in the apps, but they personalized assignment for a single ventilator term. My attempts to filter out PR blasts into a single split was foiled since I couldn't come up with a ventilator title to pressurize everything at once. It's worthwhile for some things, like bringing out any emails with a .ics marginalia invite into its own tab.

There are conjointly several premade splits: a fairly standard Important/Other ambience that tries to juxtapose important emails (which will vitalize notifications) and filter out less important ones. There's a VIP inbox, which allows you to manually flag iceman senders as VIPs and put them in their own priority tab. There's a News tab designful to filter out newsletters and a Aggregation tab that filters out emails beatific from persons at the same domain as you.

But the Important filter, while useful, isn't perfect -- despite Superhuman's "A.I. Triage" -- leaving me with profusion of offal in my "Important" inbox and a few key messages, including a team-wide email from our editor (which skipped the Aggregation inbox since it was beatific to the staff list, a fondness you can't disable) terminated up in Over-and-above instead.

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That brings me to the wallet-bursting elephant in the room: price. Superhuman expenses an eye-watering $30 per month. Unaffectedly put, the diamond and gloss it offers are not worth $30 per month. I'm not sure that it'd orderly be practicable to make an unabridged email service that was worth $30 per month, numerous less a very nice wrapper for Gmail with some (admittedly nice) gloss charred on top.

For comparison, Bole Photoshop and Lightroom (bundled together) stratum $10 per month. Microsoft's Submittal suite (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, and a terabyte of cloud storage in OneDrive) expenses $6.99 per month. Automation tool Zapier expenses $24.95 a month. It's literatim difficult to find a major software cable that charges increasingly per ages for a single user than Superhuman without axis to things like the full Bole Creative Cloud apartment ($53 per month) or proper drafting trapping like AutoCAD LT ($55 per month).

It's literatim difficult to find a major software cable that charges increasingly per month

Even over-and-above paid email apps and services don't come close. A G Apartment account personalized expenses $6 per ages for a single user. AirMail (which offers sleek Mac and iOS apps) expenses $2.99 per ages or $9.99 a year. Newton Mail (which conjointly has Windows and Android apps) expenses $49.99 per year. Spark has a unheard-of cable for increasingly exhausted users for $7.99 per month, although the borax app is totally free. And orderly Hey, the newly released email service from Basecamp -- which is an explicitly new service that can oomph more top-heavy fixes to the idea of email -- expenses $99 a year.

All that ignores the gospel that the commemorated Gmail service, which Superhuman piggybacks on top of, is free, as are any pivotal of mint email applications that exist for both desktop and Mac and oomph many of the same gloss as Superhuman. As Rohit Nadhani, the founder of unheard-of email app Newton, explained when the company indigenous shut down, it was approximately incommunicable for it to find a commerce typic that could jeopardize with the unasked-for apps from Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

So what's the appeal, then?

Well, indigenous off, despite the astronomical price, it is a good email application. In arriver world, one where Superhuman was increasingly searching priced and a little increasingly customizable, I could see it concreteness very popular. (Although, history has not been decidedly maternal to postulated email applications. One personalized permeate squinch at the examples of Mailbox and Sparrow, neither of which managed to survive long, despite the massive funding powerfulness of Google and Dropbox.)

But as of last June, Superhuman unopposed just 15,000 customers compared to the nearly 180,000 who wanted in. This suggests to me that the point isn't really to create a finer email app for the masses the way over-and-above email services -- or orderly the unabridged idea of Gmail itself -- intended.

The point of Superhuman is the exclusivity

Part of the point of Superhuman is the exclusivity. It's the email app for the 1 percent of persons who use email in a very perfectionist way for very perfectionist commerce purposes. It's inborn for the founders and CEOs and feds who are featured recognizably on the company's armpit and who're willing to pay the price to be part of the VIP club.

Superhuman wants to reinvent the wheel when it comes to email, but it's infrangible to get circa the gospel that it's still inborn on Gmail and G Suite. Right now, you can't orderly use it with arriver email service at all, leaving Superhuman as a nice laminate of paint and some disarming gloss onto the same Gmail levelheadedness you already have.

Superhuman isn't going to save email -- orderly if it could, it's not worth what it'll impeachment you for the privilege.

Update June 23rd, 12:35pm: Added advice on Superhuman's typical onboarding calls, which the multitude says are usually a half-hour long for most users, withal with divisions on Chrome browser support.