Mela vs Superhuman

Superhuman's feature set is built around inbox throughput and automation: Auto Drafts writes replies in your voice from inbox context, Split Inbox and Auto Labels triage incoming mail, Auto Archive removes marketing and cold pitches before you see them, and Daily Briefs consolidates deadlines and meetings. Go is the proactive layer — agents built with a no-code visual builder or plain chat, plus an Agent Store of 100+ pre-built agents. Per the latest news, Go 1.0 adds custom proactive agents across your writing surfaces, agents now run inside Slack, and new connectors pull in Outreach, Apollo, Typeform, Amplitude, Snowflake, and Zapier. Docs (formerly Coda) adds an AI workspace with MCP drafting briefs and tables into documents, and Grammarly is embedded.

Mela does one narrow job: getting recipes out of the web and books into a collection you cook from. An in-app browser previews any recipe it detects, a sharing extension captures recipes from other apps, and text recognition scans cookbook pages. It subscribes to recipe blogs and auto-extracts into a Feeds inbox. Cooking features are the differentiator: full-screen cook mode with enlarged type and dimmed non-active steps, tap-to-check ingredients, multiple timers, and multiple recipes loaded for a menu. Calendar holds meal plans; Reminders holds groceries. There is no overlap with Superhuman — not one shared capability.

Superhuman is subscription software with three products bundled: Mail, Docs, and Go. The vendor positions it as replacing separate mail, docs, and AI-writing subscriptions, and explicitly flags budgets under roughly $25 per user per month as a poor fit — so treat it as a per-seat suite cost, not a single-purpose email tool. The value math only works if you actually use the bundle: Auto Drafts, split inbox, and Go agents for the inbox side, Docs for the document side, plus connectors to Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Zoom, Teams, and a growing list including Outreach, Apollo, Snowflake, and Zapier. Teams with no Slack or CRM anchor get little from the connector story and should not pay suite pricing for email alone.

Mela is a paid app, not a subscription-seat product, and its entire storage model runs through iCloud, Calendar, and Reminders — Apple services you likely already pay for or get free. It has no account system and collects no data, so there is no per-seat scaling, no admin console, and no hidden cloud bill. The cost comparison across these two products is meaningless: one is priced per knowledge worker per month for triage and automation, the other is a one-time-style consumer app purchase for a personal recipe library. Budget decision frameworks for one do not transfer to the other.