Popular email app Newton to shut down on September 25, 2018

Popular email app Newton is shutting down on September 25, 2018, marking the end of the subscription-based service after five years.

Cloudmagic founder and CEO Rohit Nadhani said in an official blogpost that "they explored various business models but couldn’t successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term"

The bootstrapped app which claimed to have 40,000 paid subscribers, was priced at $50 per year until last month when it moved to a $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.

Nadhani, however, said the market for premium consumer mail apps is not big enough, and faced competition from "high quality" free apps from Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

"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" he said.

Newton started off as a free email app Cloudmagic in 2013 and gained popularity due to its cross-platform nature and several features that were superior from then default email apps.

Eventually, it launched paid subscriptions in 2015 before rolling it back and revamping the app as a subscription-based email app Newton in September 2016.

With the impending shutdown, Nadhani said they are now disabling new sign-ups and not renewing monthly subscriptions effective immediately.

The company will also refund the annual subscriptions on a pro-rata basis and are working with the App Store and Play Store to set up partial refunds, instructions for which will be put up by September 18th, 2018, Nadhani added in the blogpost