Keep your existing email address.
Rythm connects to Gmail or Outlook in one tap. Your address stays the same. Your contacts do not have to do anything. Your filters, Priority Inbox, and tabs all keep working.
The standard play.
Email paywalls have been attempted before. The 2000s and 2010s produced a handful of services that required a new email address (a paywall.com inbox you had to migrate to) or required your contacts to install a plugin. Both models broke on adoption: nobody wanted to switch addresses, and nobody could ask their grandmother to install a sender-side tool. The recent generation (Hey.com is the most prominent) ships a manual screener: each new sender has to be approved one at a time, and you still need a new @hey.com address.
Where it falls short.
- Migration to a new email address is a days-long project. Updating every login, every subscription, every contact is rarely worth it.
- Manual screening is workload, not protection. Approving each new sender one at a time is a daily task most users abandon.
- Plugins on the sender side never had adoption. Asking a stranger to install software to email you is a hard sell.
- Most "paywall" services do not actually pay you; they use the friction without the economic component.
- Without an open payment rail, charging four cents per email is technically expensive (card fees, settlement minimums) and breaks the unit economics.
Rythm’s approach.
Three things change when the protection is economic instead of probabilistic.
Automatic guest list, not manual approval.
The list of senders who walk in at no extra cost builds itself from your contacts, sent folder, starred messages, and inbox frequency. Day one, everyone you actually know is already on it.
The cover charge settles to you.
Each unknown sender who pays attaches a small bearer payment to their email. Rythm verifies it in memory and lands it in your own wallet. We are never in the money path.
What Rythm doesn’t do here.
Rythm is an email paywall, not an email client. It does not replace Gmail or Outlook; it sits on top of them. If you want a redesigned mail client (composition workflow, reading view, keyboard shortcuts), Hey.com or Superhuman are the right shape. Rythm is the bouncer at the door for Gmail and Outlook users who like the inbox they have. The paywall side of the product is also not a way to charge real fees for email correspondence. The cover charge is sized to be friction at scale and barely friction one-on-one (about four cents by default). It is not a tip jar.
One plan. One price.
Keep your existing Gmail or Outlook. Cancel anytime.
$1.65
per month
Annual on Lightning includes one bonus month. See full pricing.
Frequently asked
Keep reading.
Email security for founders
A paywall sized for the founder cocktail of inbox attacks.
Email security for creators
A paywall for creators whose addresses leak and who get pitched daily.
What is an email paywall
A plain-English definition of the term and the difference between Rythm and the precursors.
What is economic email filtering
On the new category Rythm sits in: filtering on cost instead of content.
Email paywall vs spam filter
A comparison of the two shapes and why they answer different questions.
