MailPlane: Not Worth the Price

I have a bit of a saying. If you write good software and charge a fair price for it, people will pay. I routinely buy software for my Mac, including programs that I may or may not use over the long haul.

However, one program I recently started to use, or rather, am starting to use again, has put me in a bit of a bind.

You see, even though Mailplane is a great program that does exactly what it advertises and is very polite with my system resources, I simply cannot justify the expense.

However, I’m not some cheapskate that refuses to buy software. I am a happy customer that just dropped $100 for Screenflow, and $20 for Gyazmail (though I have since stopped using it full-time). I’m the type of customer Mac software vendors love, a small business admin with a decent-sized PayPal account and lots of discretion to buy software I need.

Still, I can’t see myself spending $25 for Mailplane. The reason is that the price point is horribly wrong and $25, though reasonable for other applications, is far too high for this app.

What Mailplane Does

Fundamentally, Mailplane is a standalone Web browser, much like one that you would create with Fluid, that only works with your Gmail account. It pulls up your Gmail account in a new window, letting you interact with it just as if you were using it in Firefox or Safari.

That alone is actually a pretty neat idea. Keeping Gmail in my browser tabs has been dangerous in the past. I can’t count the number of times I’ve accidentally navigated away from my inbox or closed the tab I was using.

But Mailplane does go a good deal beyond that, including adding the following features:

• Drag and drop file attachment
• iPhoto intergration
• Integrated screenshot function that attaches the images to your email
• On the fly image resizing
• Use email links (mailto:) with Gmail
• Download management
• Growl integration
• Address book integration

In short, Mailplane tries to take your Gmail account and turn it into a full-fledged Mac email client on par with Mail.app. It is pretty neat and it works very well for the most part (I’ve observed a minor bug with the check spelling as you type feature, but nothing serious).

In fact, as a solution, it is so elegant that it almost doesn’t seem to belong on this site. Still, whenever I consider buying a license, part of me cringes.

Mailplane, as cool as it is, can’t convince me to wire over $25.

Where Mailplane Fails

My problem with spending the money on Mailplane is pretty simple, I don’t know if I get $25 worth of features out of it. For all that Mailplane does, there are many things that it does not do or you already have without the application installed. Consider the following:

• Gmail Does All of the Work: Despite the new additions, 90% of the interface and almost all of the functionality is Gmail-driven. Gmail is free and can be access from a browser. Seems odd to pay for something you pretty much have already.
• I Don’t Send Many Attachments: Email attachments, especially image attachments, are not as common as they once were. I rarely send any images, including screenshots via Gmail so the file attachment and image features are almost completely unused.
• Official (and Free) Alternatives: Growl integration is pretty neat, but if you use Google Notifier you get Growl-like notifications for free. Also, Google Notifier can let you use mailto links with Gmail, once again for free. Likewise, the interaction with your Mac address book is strange since you can import and export contacts to and from Gmail freely.

Worse still, there are actually a few drawbacks to using this application over just accessing Gmail in your browser.

• Extra Computer Resources: Even though the program is pretty light and doesn’t leak memory, it still takes more RAM and CPU power to run two programs than one. It is that simple.
• No Ad Blocking: If you use Adblockplus or even Privoxy, you won’t be able to block the Gmail ads. Not very annoying to most Gmail users, but certainly could catch some off guard.
• Minor Bugs: Though even the new version 2 beta has fewer bugs than most “finished” projects, there are still added hiccups and problems, no matter how minor. It comes from having the extra layer on top of Gmail and interacting through it.

So, when it is all said and done, you have only a few compelling features that aren’t available for free elsewhere, minor bugs that don’t exist when using Gmail normally and a $25 price tag.

The question remains, is Mailplane really worth $25?

Comparison Software

Consider the following applications that provide similar functionality to Mailplane:

• Gyazmail is a full email client with POP and IMAP support for only $20. It is also done by a small Mac development shop.
• Thunderbird is also a full email client available for free.
• Opera is a browser that works with Gmail and has a full mail client, for free.
• Fluid is an application that can create site-specific browsers, much like what MailPlane is, for free. It can even be used to add Growl notifications and badges.
• Prism works like Fluid for Firefox and is also free.
• GMDesk is an Adobe Air-based application that allows users to maintain Gmail, Google Calendar and more. It is also free.

In short, every application that does something comparable to what Mailplane does is either free or priced much less than it. In fact, when a similar Mac developer can build an entire standalone email client, no leaning on GMail, and price it five dollars cheaper than Mailplane, clearly something is up.

Mailplane may have some great features. But not enough to justify buying it, at least for me.

Conclusions

Mailplane is a great app. There is not much debate about that. If you like Gmail now, you’ll probably like Mailplane and you’ll probably prefer using it over using Gmail in a browser tab.

I really like this application and wish that I could continue using it. But, I can’t.

By the time you read this, my Mailplane demo will have expired and I’ll have moved on to either using my Fluid App or just running it in a tab again.

It is very frustrating for me though. The developers seem to have done a great job building the app, but have completely overshot the price point. Whether they think the app is worth more than it is or they have some kind of marketing strategy behind it, I don’t know.

Normally, I would just wait for the app to go on sale or become part of a bundle. However, over the next few weeks, I’m going to get very used to not using Mailplane. Meaning my desire to plunk down any cash will fade very fast.

Perhaps I am the only one that feels this way, but I just don’t see how the features of Mailplane add up for me.