I watched the videos on the hey.com website and was intrigued by this new service. I of course heard about it because of Apple rejecting their app. Once that was straightened out, I downloaded their app on my iPad and signed up for a 2-week trial account (which I guess was the compromise they reached with Apple). So I have a temporary hey email address, 4760.3354.7436@hey.com (go ahead and email me if you want). I setup gmail to forward all emails to this new hey.com address.
I have to say, I really enjoy the design of this app and the philosophy behind it. Many of the things they talk about in their videos, I’m already doing. Inspired by GTD and other productivity advice I’ve accumulated over the years. I have gmail filters setup to put newsletters and stuff into their own labels (folders in Mail.app) so they don’t clutter my inbox. Unfortunately that does take a lot of work in gmail and I get lazy and stuff goes into my inbox that doesn’t belong. The strongest idea they have is to not let any new emails into your Imbox (yeah, it’s silly) without you screening it first. So my Imbox is filtered down to what I want to see and as it turns out, I really don’t get too many emails. Before hey, I thought I was getting too many emails, but it was more my laziness in filtering that let too much junk into my Inbox. I think the Hey approach is superior to what I have been doing in gmail.
I also like the idea of having a set aside and reply later stacks. It is a small visual reminder that I have something to do with these emails, but they aren’t in a list of emails in my inbox, hard to find and easy to lose track of. Before Hey, I setup 2 folders in gmail, Hold (like Set Aside) and Action (like Reply Later). But again, the small friction of moving emails into folders, made emails slip through the cracks. The interface of Hey makes it much easier to be disciplined.
So I think that $99 is a reasonable amount of money to charge for this service. Unfortunately at work, we use a completely different email system and I won’t be able to use it there. So I just don’t think it is worth the money to only handle my personal email. If I could use it at work, I would definitely think it is worth the money.
If it were cheaper, I believe I would switch for personal email, but for now I’m going to stick with gmail + Mail.app and tweak my system a little to accommodate what I’ve learned from using Hey.
Nice review! I think this is the first I’ve heard from someone using the temporary email addresses. Are they prompting you to change it to a more permanent name?
Thanks for the good review. I am also interested but, like you, my work forces us into a specific client. I don’t want to use multiple clients so I am not going to try it. If I was not forced into using outlook, I would love to try it.
Pricing is very subjective. Some believe the iPhone is way overpriced etc.
I personally find Hey way too expensive for what it provides. I have been a fastmail subscriber for some time and some people think thats too expensive at $50 a year. Fastmail does a lot more for a lot less than Hey without being locked into their platform and their apps.
I suppose it has an email philosophy behind it which some people may find it useful. I am glad it works for some and they are happy to pay $99 a year for the rest of their life.
More importantly, this is good for the industry as it will encourage other players like Fastmail to up their game. Hopefully by upping their game, they do not up their prices lol.
Fair question. 100GB (or more) of privacy-oriented email costs $30-80 a year from other providers, roughly. So it’s a premium but not necessarily a huge one.
The integrated large file send is worth a little something as it competes with a subset of WeTransfer/Dropbox features.
Beyond that it mostly comes down to wanting a @hey.com account and valuing the time saved or pleasure from using features in the Hey apps, and/or from preferring the design of those apps.
I personally feel the 100gb is more marketing considering Hey doesnt allow for importing of old emails and even a heavy user will not be using a sizeable percentage of that 100gb storage. happy to be corrected on this.
Yes, you’re not wrong, and it is definitely a marketing strategy to bundle every feature into one premium price point (vs. Fastmail’s $3/5/9/mo tiers segmented by storage space and a couple other features), but it’s still what they’re offering.
While there’s no import, I’d expect storage usage to accelerate faster than with a traditional email account because of the file send feature. I seem to be on track to add about 12GB/year which is going to get me to 100GB faster than I got to 15GB with Gmail. Not every user will be using Hey like that, but I expect many will.
Good point. I use the icloud mail drop for this exact feature but I understand where you are coming from. Storage hosting is pretty cheap these days so I suspect with time, if more customers are using it, HEY will increase the storage. Even at 12gb a year, storage will only be an issue for you after 10 years and after paying $1000. So certainly not an issue any time soon.
Indeed. And yes, it’s not like I couldn’t send 1GB files before a few weeks ago.
Based on how they operate Basecamp, 100GB is probably a soft storage limit. I think they may ask you to buy more Basecamp storage at some point beyond 500GB(?), but they don’t cap you unless your pattern looks spammy or abusive.
My trial has ended and… I decided not to subscribe (yet).
At first I was really thrilled how they attacked the omnipresent email problem (and still love some of the ideas). But… after using hey for month I pressed pause.
For me the key problem was that hey is a webapp and only webapp. MacOS “app” is just a simple browser wrapper without an acceptable level of integration with the system.
Take an event invitation from email - it is simply downloaded as a file… so to add it to your calendar you need to remember to click on downloaded file.
That’s just my $0.02.
BTW welcome everyone since that is my first post here!
I think it depends how overwhelmed you feel by your daily email flow. I’ve done a lot of work in gmail to manage it, but I assume most people would rather have an easier way to deal with it and $99 a year is worth the peace of mind. I went to lunch with my family on Saturday and paid close to $100 (beer was on the menu). So, I don’t think it is an unreasonable price.
@jcarucci tnx!
Re mobile - you are right, the tricks they used for mobile made those apps more native than mac browser-as-an-app version (based on DHH tweets).
Well I took the plunge and now have my own Hey email address.
Why? I just like the simplicity and that it filters everything OUT by default, and I must agree to receive email from people. After a month of paid use, I just don’t get spam anymore.
I also like the UI, once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts, it is quick to fly around the interface on my MacBook. The Paper Trail and Feed boxes work well, for me, with only the important stuff going into my imbox (ha, ha, imbox for important box - that is one thing they could change for me, as it is a bit annoying).
My 2 week trial of Hey is over. The way it ends is rather jarring and off putting. I went to my Imbox and saw a reply to my support email from Hey. I tapped on the email and it opens a page saying my account is closed. It says all my data will be deleted from Hey’s servers in a month and there is no button to upgrade or migrate to a paid account. They also never warned that my trial is finishing soon with an offer to upgrade to a paid account. Seems like they really fumbled this free trial. I wasn’t planning on paying for Hey, so I don’t really care, but they need to do some work on this aspect of the service.
Bit of both, notified all my most important contacts and services of the new email address. Then set up email forwarding from my Gmail and iCloud accounts.
