I have not used Nylas but if email is a tool that is integral to your productivity, paying for a tool that helps you is not a far-fetched idea. It's the same as with text editors. There are plenty available for free but if there's one that happens to help you in your work, paying less than 0.1% of your income can hardly qualify as excessive.

At $7/month, if this tool saves you 10 minutes a month, it's worth it.

Maybe I'm weird, but it's worth more than 10min/month to me not to have another recurring charge on my CC, before the amount of money is even considered.

It is worth if it weren't a subscription model. People are reluctant to have another monthly bill. Give me a price for the package and be gone with it.

$12/month now

$12 per month is steep for an email client.

Especially one that is getting access to all your data. I would expect it to be one or the other. If I'm paying you, I should have absolute privacy.

In this day and age, open source tools are usually more private than their closed source counterparts. Usually. But, they also usually require you to do extra configuration or setup to get the privacy benefits

Agree.

I agree.

I do really like Nylas, it's mostly a pleasure to use.

But I'm using it with Gmail which costs me like $2pm for 100GB storage; the core (with I think 20GB?) is free (at the point of use, blah-blah advertising).

Is Nylas, the thing through which I access my free/almost-free email really adding $12pm value? I'm not so sure.