$35 a year, not $33 a month

Superhuman is a careful, expensive Mac and iOS client built around a fast keyboard, an AI surface, and a real human onboarding call. Epistles is a careful, inexpensive multi-platform client in the same keyboard tradition, with no AI and no concierge. The price gap is roughly tenfold. Here is who each one is for.

What Superhuman does well

Superhuman has been the reference for "fast email on a Mac" for the better part of a decade. The keyboard model is the heart of it, every verb on a letter, every screen reachable without the trackpad, the read-and-act loop tightened until it disappears. The team has spent years shaving milliseconds out of rendering, scroll, and search, and on a recent Mac the result is genuinely faster than most alternatives. If you measure email by how quickly you can move through it, Superhuman is, today, at the front of the field.

The AI surface is the second story. Superhuman now ships writing assistance, thread summarisation, and an "instant reply" feature that drafts on top of the conversation you're looking at. For people whose inbox is largely first-person prose with people they already correspond with, this saves real time. The integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive sit in the same category: aimed at sales-style inboxes where the tax of context-switching is high.

And then there is the onboarding. New Superhuman users get a real, human, roughly thirty-minute call from a person whose job is to teach the app. Most software companies long ago decided this was uneconomical; Superhuman built their pricing around keeping it. By most accounts, it’s very good. There’s also an effect that isn’t on any feature page: a Superhuman subscription has become a small status marker in some circles, the way a particular notebook or a particular pen used to be. Pretending otherwise would be silly. Some buyers are paying for that, and that’s a fine reason to buy a product.

Where Superhuman stops

Two boundaries shape the rest of this page. The first is platform: Superhuman is Mac, iOS, and a web client. There is no Linux build, no Android client at parity with iOS, no native Windows app. If your daily driver is a ThinkPad on Ubuntu or a Pixel on stock Android, the answer is the web app or nothing.

The second is providers: Superhuman is, by deliberate design, a Gmail and Outlook client. Microsoft 365 mailboxes work. Personal Gmail works. Fastmail, ProtonMail, iCloud, and arbitrary IMAP hosts do not, and the team has been clear that this is not a roadmap gap, it is the product. If your work inbox is on Microsoft and your personal inbox is on Fastmail or Proton, Superhuman cannot hold both ends of that.

Pricing is the third number worth naming up front. Superhuman Mail sits inside the Business tier at $33 per member per month billed annually, $40 month-to-month, with an Enterprise tier above it. That is the public price as of May 2026. For a single seat the annual figure is roughly $396.

What Epistles ships that Superhuman doesn't

Epistles is a different product for a different reader. It is a cross-platform, multi-provider client whose first commitment is that every account you answer to should live in one application on every device you use, and that the price of doing so should not be a recurring four-figure bill.

It speaks six providers in their own protocols: Gmail through the Gmail API, Microsoft 365 through OWA, Fastmail through JMAP, ProtonMail through Proton's API with OpenPGP decryption on the device, and Apple Mail / iCloud through one app-password wizard that sets up IMAP mail plus iCloud calendar and contacts together. Anything else falls back to IMAP. Each adapter loads on its own, so a Fastmail-only user never downloads Gmail code, and threads, labels, flags, and push stay in each provider's own dialect instead of being flattened to lowest-common-denominator IMAP.

It runs on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web, all shipping today and all from one codebase. Linux ships as signed APT, DNF, and Flatpak repos at repo.epistles.com; Windows as NSIS installers for x86_64 and aarch64; the web client lives at app.epistles.com. The engine, the SQLite cache, the adapters, and the vault are the same code everywhere.

Mail lives in a local SQLite database on your device, searchable in milliseconds with the wifi off. Your connected-account credentials, the OAuth tokens, JMAP sessions, and IMAP passwords, are wrapped on your device with a key derived from your Epistles password and stored on our servers as ciphertext we cannot read. Sign in on a second Mac, enter your password once, and the inboxes are already there. The security page has the long version.

The apps ship with no analytics SDK, no third-party crash reporter, and no usage metrics. The only calls Epistles makes to our servers are functional ones, and the security page lists which subprocessors we use and what each one sees.

The keyboard

Epistles is built in the same keyboard tradition, and the core of it is here. On the message you have selected, e archives, Backspace deletes, r replies, Shift+R replies to all, f forwards, j and k or the arrow keys move you through the list, n jumps to the next unread, and Enter opens. After you archive or delete, the selection moves to the next message on its own, so a pass through the inbox never has to reach for the trackpad. A command palette on Cmd+K reaches any command, folder, or account by name, every triage action applies at once with an undo on Cmd+Z behind it, and search runs against the local full-text index, so it answers with the wifi off.

Where we go past Superhuman is that the keymap is yours. Every shortcut is remappable one command at a time, and we ship presets that match the keys you already know: Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Spark, and a Superhuman preset that puts compose on c, archive on e, reply on r, and the rest where a Superhuman user reaches for them. Superhuman's own keymap is fixed. Two of its habits we have not brought over yet, the g-then-letter jumps between mailboxes and a single key for snooze; the palette reaches every mailbox today, and both are on the near list.

Where Superhuman wins

If the AI writing surface and the thread summaries are real value to your day, Superhuman ships those today and we don't ship them at all, with no plans to ship them in the same shape. Epistles is a quiet client: the model we have in mind treats AI as a feature you might add later, not a layer the whole app organises around. If your bar is "the inbox writes back for me," Superhuman is the honest answer.

The white-glove onboarding call is also genuinely Superhuman's. We don't offer it. We offer documentation, a support address, and a 14-day no-card trial, which is a different kind of thing. For a buyer who values being walked through a tool by a person, the call is worth a meaningful share of the price difference.

On Mac specifically, Superhuman has had years of polish a younger application hasn’t had time for. Some of that polish, rendering, input latency, keyboard responsiveness, is measurable, and where it’s measurable Superhuman is likely still ahead. We’ll get there. We’re not there today.

The price math

Superhuman Mail at the Business tier is $33 a member per month billed annually, which is $396 a year. Epistles Pro is $35 a year, after a 14-day trial that asks for no card up front. Two connected accounts on Free, indefinitely. The ratio is roughly eleven to one. We're not going to tell you that ratio means Superhuman is overpriced; some of what they ship is genuinely expensive to operate, and a buyer who values it is not making a mistake. We will say only that for many readers of this page, the AI and the concierge are not what they came for, and an eleven-to-one price gap is worth pausing on before assuming the more expensive answer is the better one.

The matrix

Pricing

Superhuman: $33/member/month annual ($396/yr), $40/mo month-to-month, Business tier; Enterprise on quote. Epistles: $35/yr Pro, 14-day free trial with no card; 2 connected accounts on Free.

Platforms shipping

Superhuman: macOS, iOS, web. Epistles: macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, web.

Email providers supported

Superhuman: Gmail, Microsoft 365 / Outlook. Epistles: Gmail, Microsoft 365, Fastmail (JMAP), ProtonMail, Apple Mail / iCloud (single ASP wizard provisions IMAP mail + iCloud calendar + iCloud contacts), IMAP/SMTP.

Apple Watch app

Superhuman: no. Epistles: yes, archive, snooze, voice and template reply, “Reply & Done,” pin, forward to contact, agenda with RSVP, plus WidgetKit complications.

Wear OS app

Superhuman: no. Epistles: yes, Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch, any Wear OS 3+ device, with the same triage feature set as Apple Watch and an inbox tile.

AI features

Superhuman: writing assistance, thread summarisation, instant reply, AI labels. Epistles: none today, none planned in the near term.

Onboarding

Superhuman: roughly 30-minute white-glove call with a real person. Epistles: documentation, support email, no concierge.

Local-first storage

Superhuman: server-indexed mail with local cache. Epistles: SQLite on device; full search runs offline against the local cache.

Keyboard model

Superhuman: fixed keymap, single-key verbs, g-then-letter jumps between mailboxes. Epistles: single-key triage with auto-advance and a Cmd+K command palette; keymap is remappable per command, with Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Spark, and Superhuman presets.

Cross-device sync model

Superhuman: per-device account setup, server holds your credentials. Epistles: zero-knowledge Cloud Vault carries connected-account credentials encrypted under your Epistles password; we hold ciphertext bytes we cannot decrypt.

Open source

Superhuman: closed. Epistles: closed.

Telemetry

Superhuman: standard product analytics. Epistles: zero analytics, zero crash reporting SDKs, zero usage metrics; only functional API calls.

Who should pick which

If you live in Gmail or Outlook on a Mac, your day is heavy on first-person prose, and the AI summaries plus a personal onboarding call are real value to you, pay Superhuman the $396. We mean this. The polish is real, the keyboard model is excellent, the AI features are not vapor, and the onboarding call has earned its reputation. You are not making a mistake by choosing them.

If your inbox spans more than one provider, a work Microsoft 365 alongside a personal Fastmail, a ProtonMail you keep for the political work, an IMAP account your hosting provider gave you, then Superhuman cannot hold all of that and Epistles can. Provider breadth is the whole point, and we picked native protocols precisely so nothing flattens on the way in.

If you also work on Linux, or read mail on Android, the choice narrows further. Superhuman doesn't ship there. Epistles does, today, from the same codebase as the Mac app, with the same keyboard map and the same Cloud Vault carrying your credentials between devices. And if the price ratio matters at all, $35 a year against $396 is a difference worth feeling.

If you're still looking

Epistles is out now, shipping on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. 14-day free trial, no card up front, two accounts on Free afterwards. If you've been a Superhuman subscriber and you want to compare them on your own inbox, download Epistles, or read the rest of the site.