It’s now slightly more than a year ago that the new license key model for MailMate was announced. You can follow the link if you want to know more about why I decided to make this change.

In this post I’ll try to provide a short update on how it’s going with the new model even though the transition is not yet complete. I haven’t released an official non-beta 2.0 update which means that some users haven’t updated to a version of MailMate which enforces the new model. But I do believe most users are either using the latest public beta of MailMate or one of the many test releases. All new users, more or less, are forced to fetch the latest public 2.0 beta.

Most of the existing users of MailMate have old license keys which means that they were not really encouraged to start a subscription until 6 months after the announcement linked above. This is when the “Free Mode” button would be displayed for the first time. In practice, this resulted in a considerable bump in the number of subscribers in July of 2025. I’m hoping to see a similar bump when MailMate 2.0 is no longer in beta.

I’ve previously described the transition to the new pricing model as a huge gamble because I would no longer be selling license keys for $50. This was the majority of the revenue generated. So far, this gamble has paid off since I’ve had an increase in revenue when comparing 2025 to 2024. It does not correspond to what one (where I live) would expect from a full time job, but it does mean that I’m going to continue full time development in 2026. I believe that is good news for MailMate users and I’m really thankful for all of the, new and old, MailMate development patrons/subscribers.

Some users might have noticed that I haven’t uploaded any test releases of MailMate for quite a while (more than 2 months). This is not because I’ve not been working on MailMate. It’s because I’ve been working on some broad changes to very old core parts of MailMate, in particular, related to parsing/editing of emails and memory management. This should, when everything works again, help fix some old issues and likely also improve performance and decrease memory usage.

I should also mention that the ongoing potential issue with Gmail OAuth2 support has not been resolved. It’s still possible that OAuth2 support for Gmail might change or even cease to work at some point in the future as also noted in the previous blog post.