CloudMagic's Newton Email Service Shutting Down Next Month

The premium email service Newton is officially shutting down on Sept. 25. The company founder and CEO Rohit Nadhani explained in a blog post that they failed to find a suitable business model to keep Newton afloat and they also had a hard time with the tough competition from free services.

“It was a tough business decision. We explored various business models but couldn’t successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term. 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,” Nadhani said in his Medium post. “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.”

Nadhani thanked all of Newton’s users and he expressed his gratitude toward everyone who worked on making the service what it is today. The founder also confirmed that they have already disabled new sign-ups for Newton and that the company will no longer renew current users’ monthly subscriptions effective immediately.

“We will also refund the annual subscriptions on a pro-rata basis. We are working with the App Store, and Play Store authorities, to set up partial refunds. We will be publishing instructions to claim your pro-rata refunds no later than Sept. 18, 2018,” Nadhani said. CloudMagic, the company that runs Newton, will continue to operate and will now be focusing on “new and innovative projects.”

Newton, which was originally called CloudMagic, launched in 2013 as a free third-party email service that provided features like automated inbox organization, according to The Verge. In 2015, Newton introduced a “Pro” subscription service that cost $10 a month or $100 a year. The “Pro” service only lasted four months and Newton became free once again.

That changed in 2016 when CloudMagic was renamed to Newton and it included a mandatory $50 subscription for a year. It still featured a free trial that only lasted for two weeks. Last month, Newton brought back its $10 monthly subscription pricing along with the $100 yearly subscription, according to Android Authority.

It’s possible that Newton failed because of the over-saturation of email apps in the market. CloudMagic may have also made the crucial mistake of offering a service that’s completely free, then later making its users pay for a subscription to gain access to all of its most useful features.