Shortwave Email Pricing: Every Plan and What It Costs a Team

Shortwave email costs $30 per seat per month on Business, $45 on Premier and $120 on Max, all billed monthly, with a 14 day free trial on every tier and a free plan for individual use. There is no annual discount. Pricing verified at shortwave.com on August 31, 2026.

Those three numbers are the easy part. The number that actually decides which plan you need is not printed in the headline at all, and there is one requirement that makes the whole price list irrelevant for a large share of US businesses. Both are below.

Every Shortwave plan and price

Plan	Price per seat	Billing	What it is for
Free (Individual tab)	$0	n/a	Core productivity features and the AI assistant. Outgoing mail carries a "Sent with Shortwave" footer
Business	$30/month	Monthly	Standard intelligence, 5 years of AI search history, 50 threads per AI search, 3 AI filters
Premier	$45/month	Monthly	Advanced intelligence, 2x AI usage, unlimited AI search history, 100 threads per search, 10 AI filters
Max	$120/month	Monthly	Expert intelligence, 6x AI usage, 150 threads per search, 50 AI filters, 3x search context tokens

Every paid tier includes a 14 day free trial. Shortwave's billing guide states that new subscriptions are billed monthly, and the pricing page carries no annual toggle, which is genuinely unusual here. Superhuman, Missive and Microsoft all headline a discounted annual rate and charge more month to month, so like-for-like comparisons against Shortwave are usually comparing a committed price against an uncommitted one.

The meter that decides your tier, not the feature list

Here is the thing most pricing articles get wrong about Shortwave. They compare the tiers on features, conclude that Business is fine for most people, and move on. Read Shortwave's own plans-and-features table and you find that almost every feature is ticked on all three plans: AI integrations, web browsing, attachment analysis, AI memory, saved prompts, instant AI replies, personalized AI writing, inbox organization, splits and bundles are all included at $30.

What you are buying when you go up a tier is allowance.

Meter	Business $30	Premier $45	Max $120
AI model tier	Standard intelligence	Advanced intelligence	Expert intelligence
Daily AI usage quota	Baseline	2x	6x
AI search history depth	5 years	Unlimited	Unlimited
Max threads per AI search	50	100	150
Search context tokens	Standard	2x	3x
AI-powered filters	3	10	50
Standard (non-AI) search history	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited

Two of those rows change buying decisions and the rest are noise.

The five year AI search ceiling on Business. If the reason you are buying Shortwave is to ask questions across a long Gmail history, and you have been on Google Workspace since before 2021, the $30 plan cannot see the years you most wanted it to reach. Ordinary keyword search still reaches everything, but the AI reasoning that is the actual product stops at five years. For a founder or an operations lead with a decade of mail, the honest price of the thing you wanted is $45.

The 50 thread cap per AI search on Business. Ask a question that would need reasoning across a long-running client relationship, and Business reads at most 50 threads before answering. That is fine for most questions and quietly wrong for exactly the questions you bought it for, because the ones worth asking tend to span the biggest correspondence. This is the ceiling heavy users hit first, and it is not visible until you hit it.

The AI filter counts matter less than they look. Three filters is enough to route newsletters, receipts and one client, and most people never build ten. Treat filters as a tie-breaker, not a reason to upgrade.

Is Shortwave email free?

Yes, and it is easy to miss because the pricing page does not open on it. The page loads a Business tab showing only $30, $45 and $120. Next to it sits an Individual tab, and the personal plans live there.

Three separate places on Shortwave's own site confirm a free plan exists, checked August 31, 2026: the pricing page description reads "Get started for free, upgrade when you're ready", its FAQ carries the question "Can I use Shortwave for free?", and the billing guide states that Shortwave is free to get started with core productivity features and the AI assistant included. The cost is a signature. Mail sent from a free account carries a "Sent with Shortwave" footer, which Shortwave has described as the trade that funds an advertising-free free tier.

For business use, read that as a trial rather than a plan. A promotional footer on every message to a client is not a small thing, and it is the reason the free tier does not really compete with the $30 one for company mailboxes.

One caution on numbers you will find elsewhere. Several of Shortwave's older blog and help pages still describe plans named Personal, Pro and Business, which no longer match the live Business, Premier and Max lineup. Any article quoting a specific dollar figure for a "Personal" plan is quoting a structure that has changed, so treat it as unverified. We are not publishing a personal-tier figure here, because we could not render that tab and a number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number.

The requirement that makes the price list irrelevant for many US teams

Shortwave works only with Gmail and Google Workspace. Outlook.com, Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts are not supported, stated directly in Shortwave's documentation. Microsoft requires OAuth2 for third-party mail access, and the Gmail mechanism Shortwave would rely on does not support it.

There is a documented workaround for other providers, including Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail and Zoho: forward the mail into Gmail and work it there. It technically covers Outlook as well, but the cost is that your replies go out from the Gmail address rather than the address your clients recognize. For a business mailbox that is usually disqualifying.

So before you compare a single price: if your company runs on Microsoft 365, this product is not a shortlist item. Price Microsoft 365 Copilot instead at $18 per user per month on annual billing, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business licence, or look at Superhuman Mail, which supports both Gmail and Outlook. We cover the trade-offs in full on the Shortwave email client review.

What Shortwave costs a real team

Per-seat pricing hides the number you actually approve, so here it is annualized. Shortwave has no annual discount, so these are simply twelve months at the monthly rate.

Team size	Business $30	Premier $45	Superhuman Business $33 (annual)	Missive Business $36 (yearly)
1 person	$360/yr	$540/yr	$396/yr	$432/yr
5 people	$1,800/yr	$2,700/yr	$1,980/yr, less 15% for teams of 5+	$2,160/yr
10 people	$3,600/yr	$5,400/yr	$3,960/yr, less 15% for teams of 5+	$4,320/yr

Superhuman and Missive figures verified at their own pricing pages on August 16, 2026. Missive Starter is cheaper again at $14 per user per month billed yearly for up to five users, which is the cheapest serious option in this group if a shared mailbox is what you need.

The interesting line is the five person row. Shortwave Business at $1,800 and Superhuman Business at $1,980 before its teams discount are close enough that price should not decide between them. What should decide it is that Superhuman supports Outlook and Shortwave does not, and that Shortwave is better at searching a large mail archive while Superhuman is better at moving through a high volume of new mail quickly. Buy for the constraint, not for the $180.

Automation is a separate product now

Worth knowing before you price a tier for a capability it does not carry. Shortwave's pricing page points workflow automation at a sister product called Tasklet, described as 24/7 automation that drafts replies, adds team comments and connects to more than 3,000 apps. So if your requirement is automation beyond AI filters, the answer is a second subscription rather than a higher Shortwave tier, and you should price it separately rather than assuming Max covers it.

This matters because it clarifies what Shortwave's $30 to $120 actually buys: a smarter place to read, search and sort mail. It does not buy the work the mail creates. That distinction is worth holding onto, because a lot of inbox spending is really an attempt to solve a downstream problem. If what fills your mailbox is supplier attachments that somebody then retypes into accounting, no email client fixes that, and the cheaper fix is to pull the numbers off those receipt and invoice attachments into a spreadsheet automatically rather than to upgrade the software you read them in.

How Shortwave's pricing compares

Tool	Free plan	Entry paid	Top standard tier	Mailboxes
Shortwave	Yes, with a "Sent with Shortwave" footer	$30/seat/mo Business	$45 Premier ($120 Max)	Gmail and Google Workspace only
Superhuman Mail	None	$25/member/mo Starter, annually	$33/member/mo Business, annually	Gmail and Outlook
Missive	None, 30-day trial, no card	$14/user/mo Starter, yearly, up to 5 users	$36/user/mo Business, unlimited users	Most providers, shared inbox model
Microsoft 365 Copilot	None	$18/user/mo annually, plus a M365 Business licence	$30/user/mo on E3/E5	Outlook and Microsoft 365

Shortwave figures verified August 31, 2026. Superhuman and Missive verified August 16, 2026. Copilot verified at microsoft.com August 18, 2026. Full context on each is in the best AI email assistant roundup, and the Superhuman numbers are broken down in how much Superhuman costs.

Which Shortwave plan should you buy?

Start free if you are one person on a personal Gmail account and you can live with the footer. It is a working product, not a countdown, so you can take as long as you need to decide.

Buy Business at $30 if you are on Google Workspace, your mail history is under about five years, and you mostly want better search, summaries and a few automatic filters. This fits most buyers and it is the right default.

Buy Premier at $45 if either of the two ceilings applies to you: your Gmail goes back more than five years and you want the AI to reach all of it, or you routinely ask questions that span long client relationships and 50 threads per search is not enough. Do not buy it for the model upgrade alone. Buy it for the history and the depth.

Buy Max at $120 only if you have measured that you are hitting the daily usage quota on Premier. Six times the allowance is a lot, and paying nearly three times Premier on the assumption that you will need it is how software budgets get wasted. Run Premier for a month first.

Buy none of them if you are on Microsoft 365, because you cannot connect. And buy none of them if your inbox is already under control and what is actually piling up is the work the messages commit you to: the meeting nobody booked, the document nobody filed, the follow-up nobody chased. A faster, smarter inbox does not shrink that pile, because the pile is not made of messages. That is a different category of tool and a different purchase.

All Shortwave pricing, tier metering and platform support in this article verified at shortwave.com and shortwave.com/docs on August 31, 2026. Vendors change prices without notice, so check before you buy.