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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!).