I have a full-time job, but love building productivity tools in my spare time. Some time ago, my dad told me that his Gmail account was full and asked whether I could help. I built a simple app for him, and later decided to make it into a product. With the recent news that Google is discontinuing free storage for photos, more and more people are facing a similar problem.

Unattach (https://unattach.app) is a desktop app for downloading and/or removing Gmail attachments from many emails at once. You can use it to free up your Google storage, which is shared between Gmail, Photos and other Google apps. For most people, using Unattach is cheaper than buying more Google storage; for tech-savvy users, it’s free.

The hardest thing about Unattach has been balancing user trust and commercial potential. The app requires edit permissions to the user’s Gmail account in order to remove attachments. Therefore, it is important to establish trust between myself and the user. Many users felt significantly more at ease if they could build the app from source (or at least knowing that they could), in addition to the app being certified by Google. On the other hand, the more revenue I receive from the app, the more incentive I have to continue supporting it.

The model I ended up with involves sharing the source code (under a restricted Shared Source license: https://github.com/rokstrnisa/unattach), so tech-savvy users can build and run it for free, and offering pre-built installers for a fee. That is, the software is free and the source is shared (though it's not “open source”), and users pay for the convenience of installers. The model has been working reasonably well.

Users of Unattach are generally very happy with it, so I wanted more people to know about it. I launched the app on ProductHunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/unattach) earlier today, and am now sharing it with HackerNews.

Happy to answer any questions you may have!