Gated – Review, Features, Pricing

This week’s exclusive is about Gated – a one-of-a-kind email filtering service that reduces clutter by leaps and bounds.

That said, if you are one of the regulars on ‘Productivity Land,’ you know how we review stuff. It isn’t your usual run-of-the-mill items that go through our review process. The bravado is to be on the lookout for innovations based on an ‘out of the box’ mentality.

In that order, Gated is definitely one of a kind.

At its core, it’s a simple but high effective email filtering service to keep your inbox clutter-free – and that too, with a twist.

Read On…

What Is Gated?

Gated is a simple tool that integrates with your Gmail or G-Suite platform to keep the spam and unwanted emails out.

Do you know how people are told to follow the ‘In with the good one; out with the bad one‘ mantra at Yoga centers?

Well, Gated is just like that, but created to be more practical to address various touch points simultaneously.

An early Gated user and Engineering Manager at Calendly came up with the product’s tagline ‘The Noise Canceling Headphones for Email’ – with an agile approach to helping users focus on what matters.

Just to give you a little bit of backdrop on Gated, it is a recently incepted service. About 10 months ago, the Bay Area-based startup was founded as the brainchild of Andy Mowat – entrepreneur, angel investor, and GTM leader at 3 unicorn companies. Cofounder Melissa Moody led partnerships with major global advertisers over 14 years at Google.

How Does Gated Push Back Against The Unwanted Email Assault?

‘Assault’ is an odd choice of word(s) because of the sense of misinterpretation it carries. However, ever since technology advanced and notched up collaboration tenfold, there has been an equal number of spammers on the upfront.

To that effect, your Email isn’t secure – as in, someone, somewhere from a marketing agency, knows your email address, and you will eventually get unsolicited emails. When the email trend wasn’t as popular, direct marketers used to call people on their landline numbers. Yeah, that was unsolicited too.

Marketers got tech-savvy decades later; the usual unwanted cold call fiasco turned into unsolicited emails about the new car insurance you must sign up for.

Anyhow, the sheer volume of Emails causes dissonance among people who actually look forward to receiving the most relevant Email. While the anti-spam measure is great for keeping stuff at bay, a decent percentage of unwanted emails still manages to slip through the cracks.

So, keeping those things in mind, Gated was founded to combat the email assault in a very creative way.

Stopping Unwanted Emails At The Source

Gated stops unwanted emails at the source by setting itself up as a media between the email sender and the potential email receiver.

The service is set up by allowing Gated to integrate with your Gmail account. It’s a one-off setup that creates a low-priority folder in users’ inboxes. Meanwhile, Gated also goes through the email patterns to identify regular contacts, so they aren’t filtered in the next iteration of incoming unsolicited emails.

The next time unwanted emails or new contacts try to send an email to the person’s email account, they get a cordial message prompting them to make a small donation to a charity of the Gated user’s choosing.

Keeping in view that the charity is set at, let’s say, a bare minimum of $2, 70% of it goes to the non-profit, while the remainder of the payment goes to Gated.

What matters most is that Gated comes with a minimal marginal “cost” at the hands of email senders. The payments sustain three things simultaneously:

• Email receivers who want to focus only on a communique that matters!
• Senders who are not bots and don’t mind donating to charity for the greater cause
• Finally, non-profits with hundreds of unique cases that are deserving of our love and support

Pricing:

• Gated is available for free.

On pricing, things might seem a little hunky-dory for Gated and the power users out there, especially since the platform recently secured $3 million in a seed funding round. However, a few setbacks can potentially pose as ‘blockers.’

Part of the vision of Gated is that everyone (not just those who can pay) should have the ability to protect their inboxes and their attention. As of right now, there also aren’t any paywalls or microtransactions to ask regular users for any payments.

Whatever the cost of doing business and maintaining infrastructure/ server/ maintenance fee, it comes through email senders looking to connect to the receivers. Let’s say a person is trying to get in touch with an HR recruiter from a popular company who also happens to have Gated set up on their Gmail account; the sender will have to pay a small fee to get through the door.

This fee is more of a goodwill gesture to help deserving cases from various non-profits that could surely get by with the spirit of kindness during these pressing times.

Are There Any Challenges To Prevent Gated From Expanding?

Other than the price-related challenge, there aren’t any major monetary setbacks.

On technical aspects, one issue potentially prevents the software from working at full throttle.

Gated currently integrates with Gmail accounts only. The founders report that building for other email platforms is on the roadmap for the product. That’s a large chunk of untapped revenue that could catapult the company to new forefronts.

Design Philosophy:

• Comes with an easy-to-understand intuitive interface.
• Designed to offer a secure email experience with a unique method of protecting users’ ability to focus.

Gated’s Target Audience and Ideal Team Size?

• Target audience: Anyone who gets a lot of inbound Emails. Initially, Gated was built with B2B buyers in mind – marketers or executives who manage a budget and are being sold too heavily. However, we’re also seeing new audiences (like journalists and real estate agents) who get massive amounts of inbound Emails resulting in email overload.

• Gated is currently designed for individual use on work or personal email accounts. We see the product being used by people at companies from 10-1K employees.

What Are The Future Prospects For Gated?

Since Gated is looking to go through rapid expansion, Mowat is reportedly inclined to work with Microsoft and other companies for integration. If the move is sanctioned, it will open the floodgates to many opportunities, benefiting email users on both ends.

Gated also plans to develop a working B2B relationship where marketers engage with the Gated company to develop a budget for allowing sales teams to send out a specific number of emails each month.

Above all, if you are wondering about the Email Sent to Email Opened ratio, there’s good news.

According to various recent surveys Gated conducted, 60% of email senders have no qualms about paying a nominal fee to ensure that their emails make it to the receivers’ inbox.

These email senders either have a great idea, something essential to share, or genuinely want to collaborate.

At the same time, 40% of the donated emails are more than likely to be read because they are diverted to receivers’ inboxes on high priority.

Additional Information About Gated

Mobile Apps (if any)

• N/A: Users can log in to Gated via an online site on any device

Customer Support and Documentation

• Link to help guide and documentation:
  • Email for customer support:  support@gated.com – direct email support for now, and heavy presence on social to answer questions.
  • Help Center: https://support.gated.com/
  • On-site FAQ page: https://www.gated.com/faq

Social Media:

• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/66318775/
  • Twitter:  https://twitter.com/gated_email
  • YouTube channel here
  • Nascent Social
    1. Insta:  https://www.instagram.com/gated_email/
    2. TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@findyourfocus
    3. Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/GetGated

App Integrations and Open API

• No current API integrations are available.

Security

• On-premise installation? Gated works securely in the cloud. You authorize with your Google credentials which you can revoke at any time via Google
• Highlight at least security 3 measures you take to make user data secure.

The email contains sensitive conversations. The founders have worked at leading public companies to ensure that user emails are treated in the best way possible.

• User emails never leave your server: Gated only analyzes headers to determine what’s essential.
  • Gated never looks through email content: Only TO/FROM information is used to determine how to route emails. Gated never looks, analyzes, reads, or stores the contents of emails.
  • No access to end users’ credentials: You authorize your own Google credentials, which you can revoke at any time via Google.
  • Gated Privacy Policy: See our full privacy policy here.

• Local Backups? NO
• Are dedicated servers available? Yes
• SAML? Yes / No  
• SSO?    Yes, via Google
• Data export Yes & deletion?   No export. Deletion upon request

Why you should use the ‘Gated’ email security and mail productivity tool, and not any other service?

Gated is loved by professionals from several industries to get organized, declutter the inbox, and make the email management process more secure. Its feature set and integration with Gmail make it a well-rounded tool to make you better organized this year.

What do you think of Gated and how does it help you organize your personal and professional life? Let us know in your comments below, or write to us at steve@productivityland.com.

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