• by Ray Schultz , August 8, 2018

CloudMagic Inc. has given up on the idea of a premium email app. It is sunsetting Newton, a paid app with 40,000 paid subscribers, effective September 25.

The firm will disable new sign-ups and will not renew monthly subscriptions. Pro-rated subscription refunds, which are available through the App Store, and PlayStore, must be claimed by September 18.

“It was a tough business decision” writes Rohit Nadhani, founder and CEO CloudMagic, in a blog post. “We explored various business models but couldn’t successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term.”

Nadhani adds: “It was hard; the market for premium consumer mail apps is not big enough, and it faces stiff competition from high quality free apps from Google, Microsoft, and Apple.”

CloudMagic, an “entirely bootstrapped” company with zero VC funding, will “continue to operate and the incredible team will be focusing on new and innovative projects,” Nadhani continues.

The company was launched in 2013, and attracted over 4 million users to its free app. It relaunched as Newton in 2016 with a $50 subscription fee.  In between, it toyed with a $10 fee for a short-lived “Pro” service, according to International Business Times. 

Newton was usable on iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Chrome OS, and offered features such as “snoozing and scheduling messages, undo messages, sender profiles, read receipts and a send-later feature,” EndGadget writes.

Nadhani concludes: “We put up a hard and honest fight, but it was not enough to overcome the bundling & platform default advantages enjoyed by the large tech companies.”