Kite is winding down.

We started Kite at the end of 2024 to build better search for email. We wanted to make it easy to find the people, decisions, files, and threads buried in your inbox. We're shutting it down today.

1.Gmail caught up.

We thought better email search could be a strong wedge. Gmail is now adding AI search, summaries, drafting, and replies directly into the inbox. ChatGPT and Claude can also connect to Gmail. The feature we were building is moving into products people already use and already pay for.

2.The permissions are too sensitive.

To work well, Kite needs access to email bodies, attachments, threads, contacts, and history. That is a lot to ask. It also means restricted Google scopes, security review, compliance work, and recurring third-party security assessments. We could handle that for a much larger product. We could not justify it for inbox search alone.

3.Email is not enough context.

The answer people want is often not only in email. It may be in a calendar invite, a doc, a Slack thread, a CRM note, a contract, or a meeting transcript. An email-only search product can be useful, but it will miss too much on the hardest questions. The best product here needs access across the whole workspace.

4.There is no real data moat.

A lot of AI products get better because they can learn from usage and proprietary data. Email is different. Workspace data is private user data, and Google's policies limit using it to train or improve generalized AI models. That is good for users. It also means we do not get the compounding advantage we would need.

5.Email AI has a serious security problem.

Inboxes are full of phishing, spoofing, hidden HTML, hostile attachments, and prompt-injection attacks. An AI that reads email has to assume some messages are trying to trick it. Doing this responsibly means deep security work, not just better search. We were not building the company that problem deserves.

Useful was not enough. For a product with access to your inbox, Kite had to be clearly better than Gmail's native AI and the major assistants. We did not see a path to that.

What this means for you

Shutdown: Extension works through the wind-down, then we deprecate it.
Sign-ups: Closed today. Waitlist cleared.
Refunds: Auto-refunded for the unused part of your plan. Nothing to do.
Your data: Email us to export or delete it any time. We purge the rest within 30 days of shutdown.
Gmail access: OAuth token revoked at shutdown. Inbox access drops automatically.

Thank you

You gave us access to your inbox. That's not a small ask. Thanks for trusting us with it.

Email is still broken. AI will still change it. Kite just won't be the company to carry that forward.