In short: CleanEmail helps you organize, remove, label, and archive groups of emails in your account. Instead of focusing on individual emails, CleanEmail segments your mailbox using smart rules and filters.
We're very strict about privacy and data: we don't keep, sell, or analyze your data for the purposes beyond our public features. Our privacy policy is in the bottom of every page and it clearly explains what we do with data and what data we collect.
situations like this is what makes it really hard for others in this space to survive. I run https://clean.email (and we don't store/retain/sell any data, just charge people to use it) and the biggest issue we have is lack of trust because of news like this.
although every day someone would still email with a question "why you are not free like unroll.me".. sigh.
I understand that you don't retain user emails, and that's good, but do I understand that your service has somewhere a database of OAuth bearer tokens that provide direct access to the email archives of everyone who has signed up for your service? How do you protect that? I would be terrified.
yes, that is correct. we actually started without keeping refresh tokens and only using access tokens – but they expire really fast and google api randomly stops accepting them so we had to start keeping refresh tokens as well.
they are encrypted and can only be decrypted by "scan" and "action" (delete, trash, etc) jobs, job servers are not exposed to the outside and can only be accessed via the private network via ssh using access keys and only from a specific node which has those keys. keys are password protected. access to that specific node is restricted to a set of known public ip addresses. database and job servers are different servers of course. database servers are also only accessible within the private network.
the only thing that's publicly exposed is a load balancer.
to access anything else we log in to the "gateway" instance which we access by ip only and it does not have any domain name associated with it.
with all that – I am very open to ideas about protecting that further.
All job servers are stateless by design and easily disposable/replaceable with a fresh build so we don't back them up. we don't back up user data either – it's deleted within 24 fours (or immediately on request). the only thing backed up is a table with refresh tokens which are encrypted and decryption keys are not backed up with it.
Could you explain the limits of the free plan? Interested in trying this out but it's not clear what I'll get it and if/when I'll be forced to pay. That said, I understand the value in paying for such a service instead of selling off all my data.
We have them on the "about" page – https://clean.email/about – but we are actually working on a separate page right now. as I said above – we can and should do better putting our policies front and center.
I clicked, I read your value prop, I just can't see myself paying $95+ /year for less obnoxious email in my inbox. It's really not that big of a problem to me.
ugh. I have "Yearly pricing to the homepage" sitting in my to-do list for a few weeks :) so – there's yearly pricing (and it starts with 14.99 / year (I know, this looks really weird, but it took us some time to get to this pricing).
now, whether it's valuable enough to justify the price – depends a lot on how you use your email. we've got users managing 3-5 accounts with hundreds of thousands of emails each and they use our labeling/organization more than removal. think of it as of a way to act upon a group of emails no matter what the size of the group is.
(and I kinda think our website is not really good at communicating this – our traffic is mostly coming from android app right now and we've been putting website work off. who knew!).
You offer plain and simply ask for 8€ per month per account.
That's simply a ridiculous amount of money for 99% of the people, what you have but we can't see is part of the problem, not the trust, the price is just not worth for what you offer, so, don't complain about "not a single new customer from 50 clicks".
Hey, quick fix: Just make Yearly the default option when the page loads, since the yearly options are the best price. Users to your site may just scroll through without clicking anything and only see the monthly prices (like I did).
this sounds like a great idea from the rational standpoint, but our data says otherwise. we've seen a conversion increase and generally more people started buying when we enabled monthly prices and again when we made them default. I have a few theories to back it up – but generally speaking pricing perception is emotional, not rational. looking at our prices you'd assume no one buys monthly, but about 40-50% of people do :)
Yea I'm certainly not eager to sign up for another service like this after finding out that the last one I used sold my data. It's getting really tough to trust third party services with your data these days.
my point exactly. I was just discussing this with a friend – there's really no way for us to prove that we don't keep or don't sell the data we get access to (aside from clearer tos/policies).
and it's even scarier with iCloud for example – they don't have oAuth and people need to enter their passwords to scan/clean. (they do have "app-specific" passwords though but looks like people have hard time figuring those out.)
fair point – this is something we consider doing before expanding to b2b market. but:
my day job is in ecommerce (I work as a product manager at FastSpring) and I used to work on CleanMyMac at MacPaw – had to work with trust in both. it's somewhat unexpected but people who are buying software for themselves usually don't care about PCI compliance, audits, and other artifacts of "institutional validation". they care about a "norton secured" badge, proper language, recommendation from a person they know, a review at the website they read, "that green thing with the lock in my browser".. we're now at the phase where we are trying to find the right combination.
just to be clear – it's very different from project to project and depends on the audience. what I'm saying is that we're making decisions emotionally mostly based on our prior experience and rely on internal "thermometer" to tell us if what we're seeing is trustworhty.
When dealing with sites where high trust is required I think people would much rather see an independent audit or compliance with a (legit) security accreditation than a Norton badge, however, most of the time this is not offered, so we make do with the crappy badge, a recommendation, or gut instinct.
Having said that, I deal with independent audits in my job, and they're not all that reassuring.
Pardon my ignorance or perhaps its just that I've become jaded, but outside of circumstances with dire/sever consequence such as laws, regulations, etc how does an independent audit (legit accreditation or not) verify what happens after the audit is done and the auditors long gone?
How does an independent audit detect out of band taps (swapping binaries, re purposing archives/backups, mirroring, etc) on infrastructure the auditor wasn't monitoring before the audit? logs? but more importantly amortized or not the customer eventually pays for all this activity that at the end of the day is more fluff than substance (in terms of what the customer can actually verify)
In the end doesn't all this come down to just another form marketing?
Please note, that I recognize that there are many scenarios where an independent audit would add value. I just don't think it adds anything that social validation doesn't already add when considered from the perspective of a consumer to whom the infrastructure behind the service is unavoidably opaque.
I don't see how that indicates a lack of trust. People may not be in the mood to change, or need to do more research before they do, especially since it is very late in the evening for the Western world.
Also, it's only been 30 minutes since your first post, and 50 is a small sample size.
(full disclosure – I work at FastSpring as a Product Manager)
Really sorry to see Kagi go. I think they had their reasons to close overnight and I really hope everyone will get the payout in full. End of an era..
Thanks everyone who mentioned FastSpring as a possible alternative – we are indeed way closer to Kagi than Stripe. We are (and Kagi were) what is called an MOR (Merchant On Record) and that's why we collect all the taxes, handle compliance, multiple payment methods and everything else that makes platforms "convenient" for a smaller business and "hands off" approach to all those issues. Stripe is (without deeper explanation) a payment processor (which means you are responsible for taxes/fraud) and their rules are stricter.
With that said, if you are not afraid of development work and tax/fraud/compliance issues don't bother you Stripe would be the best/most customizable/integrate-able option (with the exception of their Java API as we learned above :)
If you would still like "hands off" approach and let someone handle your taxes, compliance, payment methods etc I would recommend going with FastSpring. As it was mentioned, we are very supplier-friendly and will help you get up and running. We also have new cool APIs/Webhooks so give us a go if you are looking for a replacement.
