TL;DR: Orbit runs each of your Google accounts in its own isolated WebKit session inside one native Mac window, for $89 one time instead of the $50 to $200 a year the alternatives want. It exists because you can de-Google yourself but you can't de-Google your father. The catch is that it only works as long as Google keeps letting Mac apps sign in, and passkey-only and Advanced Protection accounts already can't.

The Google Accounts I Didn't Ask For

My opinion of big tech companies has hardened over the years. Their business models turned into anti-privacy juggernauts, so I started pulling away from them. In January 2025, after using Gmail for twenty years, I downloaded my entire archive, deleted every message off their servers and moved to Fastmail. Drive went to Koofr. Search went to Kagi. Gemini got replaced by ChatGPT. I left the empty account open since it linked me to a lot of legacy logins and contacts.

Then, nine months later, I became responsible for managing the affairs of my elderly father, something that commonly happens to people in my age group. Dad's life ran through multiple Gmail accounts, personal and professional: his doctors, his investments and the guy who cuts his grass all reached him through Google, the company I had worked so hard to get away from. I couldn't ask an 80-year-old man to move house on the internet. I had to log back in.

That's the part nobody warns you about. You can de-Google yourself in a weekend if you're stubborn. You can't de-Google somebody else, and the account that drags you back in was never yours to begin with.

Browsers do this badly on purpose. Google's account switcher runs every account you sign into through a single browser session, so a security re-check on one can sign you out of all of them at once, and the account you're currently "in" is a state you have to remember rather than see. Everybody who lives this way eventually has the moment where they send, or nearly send, a message from the wrong account. Sometimes that's an embarrassment. Sometimes it's worse.

The fix is an app, and the one I recommend is Orbit from Andrew Kwak at Dearnode. It's a one-time purchase of $89. That's a steep number to look at once, and cheaper than every competitor that charges $50 a year and up.

Each account gets its own sealed WebKit session, with its own cookies and its own sign-in, so signing into one never signs you out of another. ⌘1 through ⌘9 switch between them, all preloaded, with unread badges per account. Inside each one is the real Gmail, not a rebuild through the API, so your labels, filters and keyboard shortcuts are the ones you already have. Calendar, Drive and Meet open in the right account too. I have three accounts in mine.

Why I picked Orbit

Orbit is designed around privacy. It doesn't route your mail through a server it owns. There is no Orbit account to maintain. Analytics are turned off by default. It doesn't phone home, and if Dearnode vanished tomorrow, Orbit would keep working until Google changes something on their end.

Because Dearnode has no servers to maintain, the one-time price is sustainable. Kiwi, the app I used for years with Gmail, committed what I consider an unpardonable sin earlier this year when it stopped honoring lifetime licenses it had already sold and moved every customer to $60 a year. It's not the only casualty in this category: Sidekick was absorbed by Perplexity and shut down in 2025, and Mailplane stopped selling licenses in 2021.

Orbit is written in Swift and runs on WebKit. It weighs 9.9 MB on my system, a far cry from the Electron build behind Shift.

Why it might not work for you

To his credit, Orbit's developer publishes the warnings himself rather than waiting for a reviewer to find them:

• Sign-in is per-Mac. Three machines means three sign-ins, and there's no cross-device sync.
• Accounts using passkey-only sign-in or Google's Advanced Protection Program can't sign in at all, due to a WebKit limitation.
• It's Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later. No Intel.
• It's not on the Mac App Store, because the sandbox would break the per-account isolation the whole app exists for.

And one risk that isn't Kwak's fault and isn't in his power to fix. Orbit works because Google lets a Mac app sign in and render Gmail. Google can withdraw that. It has before: Mailplane stopped selling licenses in 2021 when Google started blocking embedded browsers at the sign-in page, and Mailplane was the same idea as Orbit, Gmail's web interface in a Mac shell. The accounts Orbit can't sign in today, the passkey-only and Advanced Protection ones, are that same door already partly closed.

Kwak has built the parts he controls to fail quietly. If Google reshuffles Gmail's page, an unread badge goes stale instead of your mail breaking, because the mail was never his code. That's the right way to build this. It just doesn't help with the failure that matters, which is Google deciding one morning that apps like this don't get in anymore.

The Others

Every alternative here costs you something. Some want a subscription, some run on a browser engine you didn't ask for, and the free ones make you give up the switching and the badges.

• Mimestream is well liked, and it's also $50 a year.
• Shift is $200 a year and it's Electron. There's a free tier some people will find suitable.
• Kiwi for Gmail was my daily driver for years and it worked. Their decision to stop honoring lifetime licenses blunts any regard I once had for them.
• Ferdium is free and open source. Community-built, Electron, and it will hold multiple instances of the same service. I've run it myself. Free is free.
• Safari profiles are already on your Mac, and I've used them for this. Separate cookies and separate sign-ins per profile, no purchase, no keyboard switching, no unread badges. If you have two accounts, try this before you spend anything.

I haven't personally tested Mimestream or Shift and this information comes from their websites.

Who should buy this

Writing about a Google adjacent app doesn't mean I've reconsidered anything. Fastmail, Koofr and Kagi are still where I manage my own life. But I couldn't de-Google on my father's behalf. Pretending otherwise would have cost him his pharmacy, his insurance and his bank. His accounts aren't a preference, they're an obligation, and the software worth paying for is the software that makes an obligation easiest to manage.

If you're carrying three or more Google accounts you didn't choose, you switch between them all day, and you've had the wrong-sender scare, $89 once is a fair price for never having that thought again. There's a 14-day trial that doesn't ask for a card and a 30-day refund window, so trying it costs you an afternoon.

If you have two accounts, Safari profiles are free. If you want a real native mail client and a merged inbox, Mimestream is the app and the subscription is the tax. And if you run Advanced Protection, Orbit can't sign you in at all, which puts it out of reach for exactly the people its architecture was built to appeal to.

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