About Rythm. Built to give your inbox back.
Rythm is an email paywall for Gmail and Outlook, a bouncer for your inbox. People you know walk right in. Unknown senders pay a small cover charge you set, and the money settles straight to your wallet. We never hold the money, and you don’t need a new email address.
The why
Traditional spam filters are probabilistic. They try to guess what’s real. That’s a difficult question to answer well, and as reported by Keepnet Labs, AI-generated messages are now 24% more effective than human-written ones at getting past content-based filtering.
Rythm takes a different angle. We don’t try to tell real from fake. Rythm is a bouncer. We check whether the sender is on your guest list, and if not, whether they paid a small cover charge. Both are things you control. An email written by a human or by AI is treated the same way. If the sender cared enough to pay, the message comes in. If they didn’t, it waits for your review. Rythm filters for intention, not content.
Economics, not algorithms.
Who we are
Rythm was founded in 2025 by Sean Dudgeon. We’re a small team building in public. Sean writes the Rythm blog and ships the product alongside a handful of collaborators. No venture-scale growth targets. No ads. Just a product that earns its keep.
We’re based on the idea that your inbox should be yours, not a channel sold to whoever pays the most for your attention this quarter.
What we believe
Your attention is valuable. You shouldn’t have to give it away to strangers who decided your address was a good target.
Your inbox should be yours. Not sorted by an algorithm that decides what matters. Not gated by a provider who decides what reaches you. Your venue, your rules.
A bouncer should have all muscle and no curiosity. Rythm reads just enough to check for a payment proof, then forgets. No training data. No behavioral profiling. No selling what the bouncer overheard at the door.
How we make money
Two sources, both explicit and both aligned with you:
- Subscription. $1.65/month. That’s the entire customer relationship.
- Keep the change. When an unknown sender pays a cover charge, Rythm sets aside a small buffer to cover network fees for moving the money. Anything left over stays with Rythm. Per payment, this is fractions of a cent.
We don’t sell data. We don’t run ads. We don’t store email content. Our incentives are: make the product good enough that you stay.
Your inbox, your rules.
$1.65 a month. Cancel anytime. No new email address.
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