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I really don't like services that are invite only. Just let me sign up and give you my money. It took them about a year to send me an invitation. Of course I l
by throwaway019254 4y ago
I really don't like services that are invite only. Just let me sign up and give you my money.
It took them about a year to send me an invitation. Of course I lost interest in the meantime.
- mrhands556 4y agoGmail was invite only at one point. I remember when everyone was clamoring for an invite. I wonder if it would’ve had the same success without that hype.
- IsoldesKnight 4y agoInvites weren't what got me hyped about Gmail. My Yahoo and Hotmail accounts had 2-5 MB storage limits at the time. Gmail offered a 1 GB storage limit. The idea that I'd never have to delete an email again is what had me hitting up old friends on AIM for an invite.
- iqkznnft 4y agoIronically, now that they've locked everyone in, they're demanding that you pay or delete emails. Scumbags.
- zamadatix 4y agoThey stopped giving the GB of free storage?
- dexterdog 4y agoNo, a GB is no longer that much, esp if you been with them since launch.
- antisthenes 4y ago4-5GB in 2008 is not the same as 15GB (That's their free tier, I think) in 2022. Hard drives have grown in capacity far beyond 3x in the same time period. Even more so if you consider the $/GB value rather than just max capacity.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> They stopped giving the GB of free storage? It's now 15GB, but if you use Drive or Photos it uses the same quota pool.
- alanbernstein 4y agoMy inbox is almost full, so they're hassling me about this. I did some investigation and found that over 1GB of the data in my inbox is email history quotes from a long-running email chain. Of course it's impossible to delete those without deleting each email they belong to. Conspiracy theory: Google refused to implement an option to disable inserting email quotes in responses, knowing that such an option would make more efficient use of storage space.
- wumpus 4y agoThose email chains compress really well.
- Out_of_Characte 4y agoYes but how is their size counted?
- lupire 4y agoText content of email is 0. Quota is used by attachments, which Google refuses to let you delete, because they want you tomoay for storage.
- Semaphor 4y agoAfter using GMail since they were invite only, I switched to fastmail 5 years ago: Storage is 18% full - Using 5.3 GB of 30 GB I think I have some time until I need to delete or pay.
- pembrook 4y agoIs it scumbag of them, or are we the scumbags for refusing to adopt any software unless it’s free? Would you rather they parse all your private communications for advertising profile purposes and keep it free-as-in-Facebook? It was basically a decade-plus free trial. I can’t see how that was a bad deal. I pay for email(Fastmail) because I want to support the team working on keeping my main communication channel working smoothly, and would rather not have my emails parsed by the advertising surveillance state.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago> Would you rather they parse all your private communications for advertising profile purposes At minimum, they do this for internal use.
- iqkznnft 4y ago> Would you rather they parse all your private communications for advertising profile purposes and keep it free-as-in-Facebook? Is this sarcasm? You know they literally do this, right? And even if they didn't, not doing it doesn't give them a pass to promise people something and then take it back.
- lupire 4y agoWhat are you talking about?
- tehwebguy 4y agoThey also gave them out nonstop & it stopped people from squatting addresses
- parkingrift 4y agoPeople were clamoring for an invite because it was profoundly better than anything else at the time. I browsed the Superhuman site and I can’t personally find anything compelling.
- chii 4y agocargo-culting is real in a lot of startups.
- PhoenixReborn 4y agoFWIW, I do think it's an excellent email product. However, it is generally not going to be worth the money unless you send a ton of email all the time (exec, sales person, director+ eng leader).
- dexterdog 4y agoIt's pretty useless to me. I used to live in email. Now I'm this weird greybeard wondering why nobody at the company ever emails anything.
- patmcc 4y agoI remember (very lightly) scamming someone for a gmail invite - they wanted a picture of whoever they invited, I send them one I found deep in google images. Was a strange time for sure.
- deepGem 4y agoDifferent time. They did this mostly because they knew they wouldn’t be able to sustain the demand as storage was still expensive back then. GMail was also in beta for a really long time like > 2 years.
- usr1106 4y agoInvites were easy to get. There was a site gmailinvitespooler were you just ask for one. I had zero connections and got one from there. And my migration away from the we are evil now company is still not complete :(
- jollybean 4y agoThat was an accidental marketing gimmick. G didn't have the capacity to hold up so they had to slow bleed the rollout. Lessons learned though.
- tomjen3 4y agoThat was because it was a much, much better product than everything else: we forget it today, but most other places would allow you to store only a few megabytes of email, and suddenly here is a service that allows you store several hundreds of times what you could do before. You don't need to generate hype when your product is that good. Same as you don't need to generate power for an electric car powered by an antimatter generator.
- krageon 4y agoThe success came from the fact that it was so much better than competitors (more storage, a better interface and better search. All that matters in email). The invites were just an irritating hurdle to get past to have something good.