6 Best Email Apps for Startup Founders in 2026

Startup founders have a fundamentally broken relationship with email. You're getting customer support requests, investor check-ins, sales leads, partnership inquiries, internal team stuff, and random LinkedIn messages all dumped into the same inbox. Gmail and Outlook were built for corporate employees processing 20 emails per day, not founders dealing with 200.

I spent four months testing email apps specifically for founders. Not marketing teams using shared inboxes. Not corporate executives with assistants filtering their email. Founders who are in the trenches, responding to customers at 11pm, triaging urgent stuff between meetings, trying desperately to hit inbox zero before the week ends.

The pattern that emerged: founders need speed above everything else. Fancy features don't matter if the app is slow. Collaboration is nice but not essential if you're solo. What matters is processing email fast, finding important messages quickly, and not drowning in noise. Some of these apps cost $30/month, which sounds absurd for email until you calculate what 5 hours of saved time is worth.

Why Startup Founders Need Specialized Email Apps

The default email apps (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) are fine for normal people. You're not normal people. Founders have email volumes and patterns that break these tools, and using basic apps means you're either drowning or spending 3+ hours per day on email.

First, volume. Most professionals get 20-50 emails per day. Founders get 100-300, depending on stage and role. Customer questions ("how do I do X?"), investor updates ("what's your ARR?"), sales leads ("interested in your product"), team coordination ("quick question about the roadmap"). Without smart filtering and triaging, you're spending your entire day in email instead of building the business.

Speed matters way more for founders than corporate employees. When a customer emails with a problem, responding in 30 minutes versus 4 hours can mean the difference between keeping or losing them. When an investor asks for metrics before a meeting, you need to find that email and respond fast. Gmail's web interface is slow, cluttered, and requires tons of clicking. Founders need keyboard shortcuts, instant search, and zero friction.

Inbox zero isn't just a productivity meme for founders, it's psychological survival. Seeing 500 unread emails creates constant anxiety and decision fatigue. Email apps designed for inbox zero (Superhuman, HEY, Shortwave) make it actually achievable instead of a fantasy. The mental clarity from an empty inbox is legitimately valuable when you're making 100 decisions per day.

Collaboration becomes critical once you have a co-founder or early employees. Instead of forwarding emails back and forth ("can you handle this customer question?"), you need shared inboxes or easy delegation. Apps like Missive and Front are built for this. Gmail's forwarding and CC hell doesn't cut it.

The mobile experience has to be excellent. Founders are responding to email from coffee shops, between meetings, on the train, late at night from the couch. If the mobile app is clunky, missing features, or slower than desktop, you'll avoid checking email on the go. Which means either your responsiveness suffers or you're chained to your laptop. Apps like Superhuman have invested heavily in mobile because they understand this.

Bottom line? Specialized email apps for founders aren't a luxury, they're infrastructure. If email is eating 2-3 hours of your day and causing constant stress, spending $30/month to fix that is probably the best money you'll spend. The ROI is obvious when you do the math on your hourly value.

What Makes a Good Email App for Founders

After testing pretty much every email client that claims to be fast or powerful, here's what actually matters for startup founders.

Speed is everything. The app needs to load instantly, search needs to be instant, switching between messages needs to be instant. Every click or keystroke that adds 200ms of lag compounds over hundreds of emails per day. Superhuman obsesses over this and it shows. Gmail's web interface feels sluggish by comparison. If the app makes you wait, you'll get frustrated and avoid processing email.

Keyboard shortcuts that actually work. You should be able to archive, reply, schedule, snooze, search, all without touching your mouse. The shortcuts need to be well-designed (not random combinations) and comprehensive. Most founders I know who use Superhuman cite the keyboard shortcuts as the main reason they stick with it. Once you learn them, email processing becomes mechanical and fast.

Smart filtering and triaging. Not all email is equally important. Customer questions need immediate attention. Newsletter spam can wait or get deleted. Investor updates need thoughtful responses. Apps that help you quickly separate signal from noise (HEY's screener, Superhuman's split inbox, Shortwave's AI summaries) save massive amounts of time and mental energy.

Excellent search. Founders are constantly hunting for old emails. "What did that investor say about our metrics?" "Where's the contract from that partnership?" Search needs to be instant and accurate. Natural language search ("emails from John last month about fundraising") is even better. Gmail's search is functional but slow and clunky.

Mobile app as good as desktop. You're checking email on your phone constantly. The mobile experience can't be an afterthought or a stripped-down version. Full keyboard shortcuts on iPad, same speed as desktop, same features. Superhuman and Spike both nail this. Apple Mail and Gmail don't.

Snooze and scheduling features. Some emails need responses but not right now. Snooze lets you defer them to later when you have time or context. Scheduled send lets you write responses at 11pm but send them at 9am so you don't look insane. These workflow features are critical for founders managing email across weird hours.

Simple, clean design. You don't need 50 features you'll never use. The interface should be minimal, focused on the actual email content, not cluttered with buttons and widgets. HEY's approach of stripping everything down to essentials works well. Front's shared inbox features are powerful but the UI gets messy.

What doesn't matter: advanced customization, tons of integrations, project management features bolted on. Founders need to read and respond to email fast, not build workflows in their email client. Keep it simple.

Superhuman

Best Email App for Founders (If You Can Justify the Cost)

Superhuman is the email app every founder has heard about, and for good reason. It's stupidly fast, the keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive, and the whole experience is designed around hitting inbox zero. It's also $30/month, which is expensive for email but worth it if you're drowning in messages.

The speed is legitimately impressive. Superhuman loads instantly, switching between emails is instant, search is instant. There's zero lag anywhere in the app. This sounds minor until you've processed 100 emails in Superhuman versus Gmail and realized you saved 20 minutes just from the app not making you wait. The team behind it obsesses over performance and it shows.

Keyboard shortcuts are the killer feature. Every action has a shortcut, and they're intuitive (not random combinations you'll forget). Archive is E, reply is R, compose is C, search is Cmd+K. You can process your entire inbox without touching your mouse. I tested this by forcing myself to use only keyboard shortcuts for two weeks, and by the end I was getting through my inbox probably 2x faster than in Gmail.

The split inbox is clever. Superhuman automatically separates "important" emails (people you email regularly, calendar invites, stuff flagged urgent) from everything else. You process the important stuff first, then batch through the rest. For founders juggling customer emails, investor updates, and team stuff, this prioritization saves mental energy on deciding what to read first.

Snooze and send later features work great. Emails you need to deal with later get snoozed to a specific time (tomorrow morning, this evening, next Monday). Responses you write at weird hours get scheduled to send at normal times so you don't look unhinged. These workflow features are table stakes at this point but Superhuman implements them smoothly.

The AI features are useful without being gimmicky. AI-powered search lets you query your inbox in natural language ("emails from investors last month about metrics"). AI drafts will write initial responses based on your writing style (hit or miss but sometimes helpful). AI summaries give you the key points of long email threads. Not revolutionary but saves time.

Mobile app on iOS is excellent. Same speed as desktop, same keyboard shortcuts (on iPad with external keyboard), same features. I probably check Superhuman on mobile 30+ times per day and it's fast enough that I don't avoid processing email on the go. The Android app exists but isn't quite as polished.

The onboarding is kind of intense. You have to schedule a 1-on-1 call with their team to set up Superhuman and learn the shortcuts. This is either great (you're forced to learn the tool properly) or annoying (you just want to try it yourself). The onboarding takes about 30 minutes and they'll customize settings for your workflow.

Downsides? The pricing is steep at $30/month ($25/month if you pay annually). That's $300-360/year just for email. Gmail is free, Outlook is free or bundled with Office. For early-stage founders bootstrapping, that's a real expense. But if email is eating 2-3 hours of your day, Superhuman probably pays for itself in saved time within the first month.

Also, Superhuman only works with Gmail and Google Workspace accounts right now. If you use Outlook/Microsoft 365, you're out of luck. And honestly, some of the social features (read receipts, tracking when people open your emails) feel a bit invasive. You can disable them, but it's part of the package.

Who should use Superhuman? Founders doing $10k+/month in revenue who get 100+ emails per day and value their time highly. If you're spending 3 hours per day on email and your hourly value is $100+, spending $30/month to cut that to 1.5 hours is obvious math. For pre-revenue founders or people with manageable email volume, it's probably overkill.

The 30-day money-back guarantee gives you time to properly test it. I'd recommend going all-in on learning the keyboard shortcuts for the full month before deciding. If you bail after a week, you won't see the full productivity gains.

Spike Mail

Best Email App for Conversational Email

Spike reimagines email as chat conversations instead of traditional messages. This is either brilliant or weird depending on how you think about email. It's free for basic use, $5/month for Pro, which is very affordable. For founders who are tired of formal email formatting, Spike is worth trying.

The conversational view is the defining feature. Instead of showing emails as formal messages with subject lines and headers, Spike displays them like chat bubbles (think iMessage or Slack). Replies stack in a thread, the UI is clean and minimal, and reading email feels more natural. For founders who treat most email like quick back-and-forth conversations anyway, this interface makes sense.

I tested Spike for about six weeks to really understand if the chat interface was useful or just gimmicky. Verdict: it's actually good for certain types of email. Quick exchanges with customers, casual coordination with team members, rapid-fire sales conversations all feel more natural in Spike than traditional email. Long formal emails (investor updates, partnership agreements) feel slightly weird but still functional.

The unified inbox combines email, team chat, and tasks in one app. You can message your co-founder directly (not via email, just internal chat), check your email, and see your to-do list all in one place. For small startups (2-5 people), this consolidation eliminates tool sprawl. Instead of Email + Slack + Asana, it's just Spike. Whether this integration is helpful or cluttered depends on your preferences.

Search is fast and the interface is clean. Spike strips away most of the clutter from traditional email clients. No ads, no promotions tabs, no overwhelming menus. Just conversations and messages. For founders who value minimalism, this focus is refreshing. You can still use traditional view if you need it for specific emails.

The mobile app is excellent on both iOS and Android. The chat-style interface actually works better on mobile than desktop in some ways, because it matches how we're used to reading messages on our phones. I found myself processing email on mobile way more often with Spike than with Gmail, just because the experience was less annoying.

Priority inbox automatically surfaces important messages and pushes newsletters and promotions to a separate section. This smart filtering works decently well, not perfect but good enough. For founders drowning in noise, having the app separate signal automatically saves mental energy.

Collaboration features are solid for small teams. You can share email threads with team members, add internal notes to emails, assign tasks based on messages. It's not as full-featured as Front or Missive for team inboxes, but for startups with 2-3 people sharing support duties, it works fine.

Downsides? The free tier is limited (1 email account, basic features). Pro is only $5/month which is cheap, but Teams tier is $8/month per user which adds up. The conversational view takes some getting used to, and not everyone loves it. Some people want traditional email formatting and Spike's approach feels too casual.

Also, some features are still rough around the edges. The calendar integration exists but isn't great. Video calls are built in but the quality is mediocre. The to-do list is basic. Spike is trying to be an all-in-one communication app, and some of the non-email parts feel half-baked.

Who should use Spike? Founders who are frustrated with formal email formatting and want something more casual. Small teams (2-5 people) who can use Spike for both email and internal chat, replacing Slack. Anyone who's tried every traditional email app and wants something fundamentally different. The free tier is worth testing for a month to see if the conversational style clicks.

Spike won't replace Superhuman for founders who need maximum speed and keyboard shortcuts. But for founders who want to rethink how email works, it's the most interesting alternative.

HEY

Best for Inbox Zero and Screening

HEY is Basecamp's opinionated take on email, and it's deliberately different from everything else. It's $99/year ($8.25/month), which is reasonable. HEY's philosophy is that email is broken and needs to be completely reimagined, not just made faster. For founders willing to change their email habits, it's genuinely interesting.

The screener is HEY's killer feature. The first time someone emails you, they go into a screening area. You decide: yes (let them into your inbox going forward), no (block forever), or maybe (paper trail for receipts and confirmations). This one decision fixes 80% of email noise. After two weeks of screening, your inbox only contains people you've explicitly allowed. Newsletters, spam, cold sales emails, all gone unless you want them.

I tested HEY for about three months and the screener is legitimately life-changing for email volume. My inbox went from 50-80 new emails per day to maybe 20-30 actually important ones. Everything else (receipts, newsletters, promotional stuff) gets auto-sorted into separate areas you can check when you want. For founders drowning in noise, this aggressive filtering is worth the price alone.

The "Imbox" (yes, with an I) is where your important email lives. It's clean, minimal, chronological. No folders, no labels, no complicated organization systems. You read emails, reply if needed, and they're marked as seen. Inbox zero happens naturally because the volume is manageable. This simplicity is either refreshing or limiting depending on how you work.

The "Reply Later" and "Set Aside" features are useful for workflow management. Emails that need thoughtful responses go to Reply Later. Important emails you want to reference (investor updates, partnership agreements) go to Set Aside as a personal filing system. This triaging happens as you process your Imbox, so you're constantly organizing without thinking about it.

The Feed is where newsletters and promotional emails live. It's chronological like a social media feed, you scroll through when you have time, and there's no pressure to process it all. For founders who subscribe to 20 newsletters but rarely read them, this separation from the main inbox is huge. Newsletters don't create guilt anymore.

Email bundling is clever. Emails from the same sender on the same day get stacked together. So if a customer sends you 3 separate questions throughout the day, they appear as one conversation. This reduces visual clutter and makes it easier to see what actually needs attention.

Downsides? HEY requires you to use a @hey.com email address, or pay extra ($199/year) to use your own domain. For founders with established business email addresses, switching is a non-starter. You can forward Gmail to HEY and reply from your original address, but it's clunky. This limitation is the main reason more founders don't use HEY.

The learning curve is real. HEY's approach is so different from traditional email that you need maybe 2 weeks to fully adjust. Some people love it after adjustment, others bounce off because it's too opinionated. The 14-day trial gives you time to decide, but barely.

Keyboard shortcuts exist but aren't as comprehensive as Superhuman. Search is good but not amazing. The mobile app is solid but not as fast as Superhuman's. HEY optimizes for inbox zero and screening, not for speed demons processing 200 emails per day.

Who should use HEY? Founders who are tired of email noise and want aggressive filtering. People willing to change their email address to @hey.com or pay extra for custom domains. Anyone who's tried Superhuman and thought "this is fast but I'm still drowning in volume." The $99/year pricing is very fair, cheaper than most alternatives.

HEY won't work for everyone because it's deliberately opinionated. But for founders whose main email problem is volume and noise (not speed), it's one of the best solutions available.

Missive

Best for Founders with Small Teams

Missive is designed for teams sharing email, which makes it great for founders with a co-founder or early employees. It's $14/month per user (or $10/month annually), which is mid-range pricing. If you're coordinating on customer support, sales, or partnerships with 2-5 people, Missive is probably the best option.

The shared inbox model works well for startups. You connect a shared email address (support@, sales@, hello@), and everyone on the team can see incoming messages. You can assign emails to specific people, add internal comments on threads, see who's working on what. This coordination eliminates the chaos of forwarding emails or using CC hell.

I tested Missive with a small team (3 people) managing customer support. The visibility into who's handling what message was genuinely helpful. No more duplicate responses because two people didn't know the other was replying. No more dropped messages because everyone assumed someone else was handling it. For founders scaling beyond solo, this coordination is critical.

The internal chat feature is useful. You can @mention team members within email threads to discuss how to respond, share context, or delegate. This keeps the conversation in one place instead of switching to Slack to discuss, then back to email to respond. Less context-switching, less mental overhead.

Rules and automation help with triaging. You can set up rules to automatically assign certain emails to specific people (customer questions to support person, sales leads to founder doing BD). For small teams processing decent email volume, these automations save time and prevent things from falling through cracks.

The UI is clean and reasonably fast. Not Superhuman-level speed, but faster than Gmail's web interface. Keyboard shortcuts exist and cover most actions. Search works well. The overall experience is polished enough that you're not fighting the tool.

Missive also supports multiple communication channels beyond email. You can connect SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, and manage them all in one interface. For consumer startups talking to customers across multiple platforms, this unification is helpful. You're not checking 5 different apps for messages.

Mobile apps on iOS and Android are solid. You can process shared inbox messages on the go, see who's handling what, add comments. Not quite as polished as the desktop experience but functional enough for quick triage between meetings.

Downsides? The per-user pricing adds up quickly. With 5 team members, you're paying $50-70/month ($600-840/year). For early-stage startups watching costs, that's significant. Gmail is free, even for shared accounts with multiple people accessing them.

The tool is overkill if you're a solo founder. All the collaboration features don't matter if there's no team to collaborate with. Stick with Superhuman or HEY if you're flying solo.

Some features feel half-baked. The calendar integration exists but is basic. The task management is minimal. Missive does email collaboration really well, but the adjacent features aren't as polished.

Who should use Missive? Founders with 2-5 person teams sharing email responsibilities (customer support, sales, partnerships). Startups that need visibility into who's handling what messages. Teams currently using Gmail with messy forwarding and CC hell who want better coordination. The 15-day free trial gives you time to test with your team and see if the workflow improvements justify the cost.

Missive is one of the few email tools designed specifically for the awkward phase between solo founder and large team with formal support structure. If you're in that phase, it's worth serious consideration.

Front

Best for Scaling Startups with Customer-Facing Teams

Front is the most powerful shared inbox tool, designed for teams that need serious email coordination. It's expensive (starts at $19/month per user, scales up to $59/month for advanced features), but for startups with dedicated support or sales teams, the ROI is clear.

The shared inbox features are more sophisticated than Missive. You can set up multiple shared inboxes (support@, sales@, partnerships@), create assignment rules, set up SLAs to track response times, build workflows for common scenarios. For founders scaling customer support beyond a few people, these features become essential.

The analytics and reporting are excellent. Front tracks response times, volume trends, which team members are handling what, customer satisfaction scores. For founders who need to understand support metrics or prove to investors that customer success is under control, these dashboards are valuable. Gmail gives you nothing, Front gives you everything.

Workflow automation is powerful. You can create rules that automatically tag messages, assign them to specific people based on keywords or sender, send canned responses, escalate urgent issues. For teams processing hundreds of support emails per day, these automations save massive amounts of time.

Collaboration features are comprehensive. Internal comments on threads, @mentions, shared drafts where multiple people can edit a response before sending. For complex customer issues that need input from multiple people (engineering, product, sales), this coordination keeps everything in one place.

Front integrates with tons of tools. CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot), support tools (Zendesk, Intercom), Slack, project management apps. For startups with established tooling, Front can pull data from those systems directly into the email interface. Less context-switching, more information available when responding.

The downside is complexity. Front has so many features that the learning curve is steep. Onboarding a team takes time and training. The UI can feel cluttered compared to simpler tools like Missive or Superhuman. For small teams (2-3 people), Front is probably overkill and the complexity isn't worth it.

Pricing is the other big downside. At $19-59/month per user, a team of 10 costs $190-590/month ($2,280-7,080/year). That's enterprise software pricing. For early-stage startups, this is hard to justify. But for later-stage startups doing $1M+ ARR with real customer support needs, it's a rounding error compared to the value.

Mobile apps exist but are clearly secondary to desktop. You can triage on the go, but the full power of Front requires a computer with a big screen. This makes sense given the target audience (support teams sitting at desks), but founders who need mobile-first email will be disappointed.

Who should use Front? Startups with 5+ person teams managing high volumes of customer-facing email. Companies that need real analytics on support performance. Teams that have outgrown Missive and need more sophisticated automation and reporting. The 7-day trial is barely enough to evaluate, but it gives you a sense of the feature set.

Front is the tool you graduate to when email management becomes a real operational challenge. If you're still in the "founders responding to customers directly" phase, stick with simpler tools. If you're scaling a support organization, Front is probably worth the investment.

Shortwave

Best AI-Powered Email for Founders

Shortwave is a newer email app focused on using AI to help you process email faster. It's free for basic use, $7/month for Pro. The AI features are genuinely useful, not just marketing hype. For founders interested in AI helping with email, Shortwave is the most polished option.

The AI summaries are the standout feature. Long email threads (10+ messages) get automatically summarized with key points and action items. Customer support threads, investor conversations, partnership negotiations, these often span dozens of messages. Reading the AI summary first lets you quickly understand context before deciding how to respond. I tested this extensively and the summaries are accurate maybe 80% of the time, which is good enough to save time.

AI search is more sophisticated than traditional keyword search. You can query your inbox in natural language ("emails from customers about billing issues last month") and Shortwave understands intent, not just exact matches. For founders with years of email history, finding old messages becomes way easier.

AI drafts will write initial responses based on the context of the email. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're generic and useless. I found them helpful for routine responses ("thanks for reaching out, here's a link to our docs") but not for anything requiring nuance or personality. The drafts save time on boilerplate but you'll still write important emails yourself.

The traditional email features are solid. Fast search, keyboard shortcuts, snooze and schedule send, clean interface. Shortwave feels like a modern email app that happens to have AI features, not an AI experiment that barely functions as email. This balance is important because the AI stuff is supplementary, not the core experience.

Bundles automatically group related emails (newsletters, receipts, social notifications) and collapse them so your inbox stays focused on important messages. This smart filtering works well, similar to HEY's approach but less aggressive. You're still seeing everything, just organized better.

The mobile app is good on iOS, functional on Android. AI summaries work on mobile which is useful for quickly catching up on long threads when you're away from your computer. The speed is decent, though not Superhuman-level.

Collaboration features are basic. You can share threads with team members, but Shortwave isn't designed for full team inbox functionality like Missive or Front. This is more a personal email app with some light sharing capabilities.

Downsides? The AI features are useful but not revolutionary. They save time on the margins (maybe 15-20 minutes per day for high-volume users), but they won't transform your email workflow the way Superhuman's speed or HEY's screening does. The free tier is limited (AI features have usage caps), so heavy users will need Pro at $7/month.

Shortwave only works with Gmail and Google Workspace right now. If you use Outlook/Microsoft 365, you're out of luck. The keyboard shortcuts exist but aren't as comprehensive as Superhuman's.

Who should use Shortwave? Founders who are curious about AI for email but don't want to pay $30/month for Superhuman. People who deal with lots of long email threads that are tedious to read. Anyone looking for a modern email app with smart features at a reasonable price. The free tier is worth trying for a month to see if the AI summaries actually save you time.

Shortwave won't replace Superhuman for speed demons or HEY for people with volume problems. But as a middle-ground option with useful AI features at a fair price, it's a solid choice for founders.

How to Choose the Right Email App

Picking an email app as a founder depends on your specific situation. Let's make this simple.

What's your email volume? If you get 50-100+ emails per day, you need something faster than Gmail. Superhuman is the gold standard for speed. If you get 20-50 per day, HEY's screening or Shortwave's AI summaries might be more valuable than raw speed.

What's your budget? If you're bootstrapping, start with Shortwave (free or $7/month) or Spike ($5/month). If you're doing $10k+/month in revenue and email is eating your time, Superhuman's $30/month is justified. Free email apps (Gmail, Outlook) work but you're paying with time instead of money.

Are you solo or do you have a team? Solo founders should use Superhuman, HEY, or Shortwave. If you have a co-founder or 2-5 employees sharing email, use Missive. If you have a real support team (5+ people), use Front. Don't pay for collaboration features you won't use.

What's your main email problem? If it's speed, get Superhuman. If it's volume and noise, get HEY. If it's coordination with a team, get Missive. If it's long threads you don't want to read, get Shortwave. Match the tool to your actual pain point, not just features that sound cool.

How important is mobile? If you're processing most of your email on your phone, Superhuman and Spike have the best mobile apps. Front is desktop-focused and clunky on mobile. Most tools are somewhere in between.

Do you need to use your existing email address? HEY requires @hey.com or paying extra for custom domains. Every other tool on this list works with your existing Gmail or Outlook account. If you have an established business email, this might rule out HEY.

My default recommendation for most founders: try Shortwave first (it's free), then upgrade to Superhuman if you need more speed and polish. If email volume is your problem, try HEY. If you have a team, try Missive. Don't overthink it, just pick one and use it seriously for 2-3 weeks to see if it actually improves your email workflow.

The worst thing you can do is research email apps for a week instead of just trying one. They all have free trials, and switching email apps is annoying but not impossible. Pick one, commit to learning it properly, and you'll know within a month if it's worth keeping.

Email apps for startup founders need to prioritize speed, inbox zero, and minimizing time spent on messages. The default apps (Gmail, Outlook) were built for corporate employees, not founders processing 100+ messages per day while trying to build a business.

Top picks: Superhuman for maximum speed if you can justify $30/month, Spike for conversational email at $5/month, HEY for aggressive filtering at $8.25/month. For teams, Missive is the best shared inbox tool. Free option? Shortwave with useful AI features.

The ROI calculation is straightforward. If the app saves you 5 hours per month and you value your time at $100/hour, spending even $30/month is obvious math. Most founders waste way more than 5 hours per month on email, either processing messages slowly or drowning in noise.

Start with a free trial, use it seriously for 2-3 weeks, and track whether it actually speeds up your email workflow. If yes, keep it. If no, try another. Don't overthink this, just pick one and get back to building your startup.