Most of our issues with email stem from poor product decisions. From people who don't know any better; from people who don't care; but also from people whose incentives are fundamentally misaligned with the goal of their users.

We are used to email clients being free. This is great in many ways, but it also reminds us that, as the saying goes, “when we are not paying for a product, we are the product”. Let’s face it: any free email client that has required substantial monetary investment is either selling you or waiting to sell itself. Because that’s another issue with beautiful, carefully crafted email clients (and there have been quite a few): they all end up being bought and shut down.

With Tempo, we want to take a different path. We will be successful if we can create a product that a sufficiently large group of people wants to pay for. We are inspired in this attempt by stories like the one of Posthaven and their refreshingly honest tagline: “You pay. We keep the lights on”.