Shortwave Pricing and Shortwave Email Pricing per Seat for Every Plan

Shortwave costs between $18 and $120 per seat a month, depending on the plan, and there is a Free plan at $0. The pricing page splits plans into two tabs. The Individual tab shows Free and Pro ($18, "personal users who just need the basics"). The Business tab shows Business ($30), Premier ($45, marked most popular) and Max ($120). All prices are in US dollars.

The yearly column is simply twelve monthly payments, because that is how Shortwave bills. Its FAQ says it offers monthly billing and no one-time purchase, and its billing guide says "New subscriptions are billed monthly." Some price trackers, such as usagepricing.com, report that Shortwave raised every paid tier on June 30, 2026 (from $14, $24, $36 and $100), which is why older reviews quote lower numbers. The figures above are the ones Shortwave shows today.

Most of Shortwave's inbox features (splits, bundles, delivery schedules, todos, read statuses, snippets, follow-up reminders) appear on every paid plan. What climbs with price is the AI: the model behind the assistant, how many requests you get a day, how many email threads it can read at once and how far back AI search reaches.

Shortwave names the models. Basic is Claude Haiku 4.5, Standard is Claude Sonnet 4.6, Advanced is Sonnet 4.6 with adaptive thinking and Expert is Claude Opus 4.6 with adaptive thinking. In practice, Business is the plan for a person who leans on AI search and replies every day, Premier is for someone who asks the assistant to work across long threads, and Max is for people who want Opus-level answers all day.

Every request to the Shortwave AI assistant counts toward a daily quota, and the quota is the real difference between plans. Shortwave's FAQ gives approximate daily numbers at the Standard level: Pro about 75 to 150 requests, Business 150 to 300, Premier 300 to 600 and Max 900 to 1,800. Advanced mode uses 1.5x the quota and Expert mode 3x. Requests at the Basic level do not count at all.

Because the multipliers stack with the plan, the number of "smart" requests is lower than the headline. These are our calculations from Shortwave's published ranges.

The ranges are wide because Shortwave says usage "varies based on the complexity of the request": more integrations, broader searches, more tools and longer conversations burn more. To check where you stand, Shortwave tells users to ask the assistant "How much quota have I used?". The practical takeaway is that Max buys you Opus, not volume. Run Max at Standard level and you get roughly 900 to 1,800 requests a day, but at Expert level it is closer to Premier's Standard allowance.

Shortwave bills per person on a team, and its billing guide is explicit: "All team members must be on the same plan type." Seats you add mid-cycle are prorated, and removing a seat gives a prorated credit on the next bill. These are our calculations on Shortwave's list prices.

The same-plan rule is the number to watch. A 10-person team on Business pays $3,600 a year. If two of those people want Max for Opus answers, the team cannot mix plans inside one team, so the whole team moves to Max at $14,400 a year, four times the bill for two upgrades. The workaround Shortwave's own rules allow is separate teams with separate billing, which also splits shared labels and shared threads.

One thing works in your favor. A single paid seat covers all of your own email accounts: Shortwave says to sign the extra accounts in on the same device, and warns not to add your own extra accounts to a team, because "Teams are only for paying for other people."

Shortwave's AI filters label, archive or star new mail, but anything that runs on its own beyond that (drafting replies automatically, adding team comments, connecting to 3,000 apps) is pointed to its sister product, Tasklet. Tasklet is priced separately on tasklet.ai, which we read on October 21, 2026.

Tasklet's monthly ladder works out to a flat $0.0025 a credit at every size, and one-time top-ups cost $5 per 1,600 credits (about $0.0031 each) with a $25 minimum, valid for a year. So a 5-person team on Shortwave Business plus Tasklet Starter pays $150 plus $25, or $2,100 a year, for a faster inbox and an automation layer on top.

Shortwave is an email client, so the closest comparisons are other clients and inbox assistants that sit on top of Gmail or Outlook. This table uses each vendor's own pricing page for the plan a small team would buy.

Shortwave is read on October 21, 2026, Carly on October 19, Fyxer and Superhuman on October 15. For the full Fyxer rate card see Fyxer pricing, for Carly's credit add-ons see Carly AI pricing, and for a side-by-side of the two most-compared tools see Fyxer vs Superhuman pricing. The inbox clients are bought per person because each person gets a faster inbox. The last row is priced differently because it buys a process, not a seat.