Superhuman is an email client with an unusual premise: that email is a serious enough time cost for some people that a fast, opinionated client is worth a meaningful subscription. It sits on top of Gmail or Outlook rather than replacing them, so your existing address, filters and archive stay exactly where they are.
Everything is built around the keyboard. Every action has a shortcut, the command palette reaches anything, and the interface is engineered to respond in under a hundred milliseconds, which it achieves by loading mail ahead of you. Split inboxes separate categories such as team, notifications and everything else into their own views, so a newsletter never sits next to a message from a customer. Snippets expand into full paragraphs for the replies you write repeatedly. Send later, remind me if no reply, and scheduled follow-ups cover the mechanics of a conversation that spans days.
Onboarding is part of the product and worth mentioning because it is unusual: new users get a one-to-one session with someone who teaches them the shortcuts and sets up their split inboxes. It is the kind of thing that makes no sense at scale and makes complete sense for a tool whose value only appears once you stop using the mouse.
The objections are easy to state. It is expensive, several times the cost of a normal email client, which is the entire debate. If email is twenty minutes of your day, it is impossible to justify; if it is three hours, the arithmetic changes. It requires Gmail or Outlook, so other providers are out. Some features people expect from a mail client, particularly around complex multi-account setups and offline behaviour, have historically been thinner than the flagship features. And you are granting a third party access to your mail, which is a real consideration for anyone handling sensitive correspondence and one that needs a policy decision rather than a shrug.
Who it suits: founders, executives, salespeople, recruiters and anyone else whose job is substantially conducted through email. Who should look elsewhere: anyone with a modest inbox, non-Gmail and non-Outlook users, and organisations with strict rules on third-party mail access.