(A long-form note from the Filo team — pull up a chair, pour a coffee, and peek behind the curtain.)
🥱 The inbox isn't broken — it's exhausted
Email has been declared "dead" a dozen times, yet we still start and end every day in our inboxes. The problem isn't the medium; it's the modern workload we've piled on top of it:
- Promotions you never asked for drowning the one message you actually need.
- Five-thread back-and-forth that could be a one-line summary.
- Manual to-do juggling — copying dates into calendars, tagging yourself to remember follow-ups, marking as "unread" so you won't forget (and forgetting anyway).
We built Filo because we'd reached that tipping point where "managing email" felt like a second job. We wanted an inbox that does things for you, not another tool to babysit.
👉 Inbox to Done
That's the heart of what we're building with Filo. We're not just layering AI on top of your email — we're rebuilding the experience around what you actually need to do.
Every "let's catch up next week," every invoice, every confirmation, every reminder — it all points to a task. So why make you dig through threads, copy-paste dates, or mentally flag messages you'll forget anyway?
We believe your inbox should act more like a smart assistant — spotting the next step and helping you take it. That's the future we're building:
An AI-native email client that doesn't just help you read faster, but helps you act faster.
- Summarizes long emails into quick, skimmable takeaways
- Detects action items and turns them into clear, tappable to-dos
- Tags what matters, hides what doesn't, and keeps your focus where it counts
- Monitors task progress automatically — status changes, sub-tasks, and updates stay synced without you lifting a finger
Instead of juggling inboxes and task lists, Filo ties them together — automatically. When your inbox becomes your to-do list, your workflow becomes effortless.
It's not just email anymore. It's motion.
💰 Why "AI + email" is usually a paywall (and why we said no thanks — for now)
AI inference isn't free. Most startups do the reasonable thing: charge users enough to cover token costs today. We took a different gamble.
- History lesson: A 128 MB flash drive cost US $60 in 2005. Today, 128 GB costs less than a fancy latte. Compute follows the same gravity, and AI tokens are already sliding down the slope.
- Philosophical stance: Email is a basic utility — like tap water or street lighting. If your goal is mass adoption, slapping a premium price tag on every AI action means gating out the very people who need it most.
- Product focus: Every sprint spent on billing flows is a sprint not spent on making the AI smarter, faster, kinder. We picked "craftsmanship first, monetization later."
Will we ever charge? Almost certainly — servers and engineers like us still need food. But as long as token costs keep falling and we keep improving our caching magic, we can push that day further out and welcome more people in.
⚡️ What "AI-native" actually feels like in Filo
- Snapshots instead of scroll-marathons. Open a thread, see the gist.
- Noise cancellation. Promos go to the quiet corner; real people float to the top.
- One-tap To-Dos. Filo turns "let's meet Friday" into a calendar event before you can forget it.
- Chat with your inbox. Ask Filo anything — "summarize this thread," "draft a polite reply" — and it handles the grunt work for you.
No settings deep-dives, no YAML — just a mailbox that behaves.
🚀 Where we're headed next
- macOS desktop alpha kicks off this month (yep, TestFlight sign-ups welcome).
- Multi-provider support: Outlook and other major email services are on deck — bring every inbox under one roof.
- Smarter sorting: AI-powered filtering & auto-tagging that learns your habits and files messages exactly where they belong.
We need your weirdest emails 📧
Filo gets sharper every time someone forwards a 8-year-old thread or a 3 MB newsletter full of GIFs. If you're up for a little inbox spring-cleaning — on us — grab the download link below, throw your trickiest emails at it, and tell us what breaks.
(iOS today; desktop testers, we want you too.)
We'll be in the comments and Discord, listening, fixing, and occasionally celebrating with GIFs of heroic inbox zero moments. Thanks for helping us move email one step closer to effortless.
— The Filo Team
