Cancelling HEY Email? What to Switch To in 2026 (Honest Guide)
· Sovattha Sok
Cancelling HEY in 2026? An honest guide to what you lose (the Screener), what replaces each piece, and how to keep your existing Gmail or Outlook address — SaneBox, Superhuman, Shortwave, and Agentys compared.
HEY built the most opinionated inbox of the decade — the Screener, the Imbox, no folders. People still leave it, usually for two honest reasons. This guide covers what you lose by cancelling, what genuinely replaces each piece, and the one option that keeps your existing Gmail or Outlook address intact.
Where HEY Users Actually Go: Four Honest Options
Stay on Gmail or Outlook and add a triage layer (SaneBox). This is the cheapest, lowest-risk move and the most popular landing spot for ex-HEY users with an identity problem. You keep your address, your folders, and your existing client; SaneBox studies which senders you actually read and quietly files the rest into a SaneLater folder you check on your own schedule. It is the closest thing to HEY's calm without a new mailbox. SaneBox is provider-agnostic and runs $7/mo (Snack), $12/mo (Lunch), or $36/mo (Dinner) depending on how many features you want (SaneBox pricing page, 2026). What it will not do is draft replies or replicate the Screener's explicit one-time approval; it sorts statistically, not by permission.
Switch to a faster client (Superhuman). If the HEY pieces you valued were speed and keyboard-driven flow rather than the philosophy, Superhuman is the obvious destination. It is a polished, fast client over your existing Gmail or Outlook with split inbox, snippets, and AI-assisted writing. Superhuman was acquired by Grammarly in 2025 (announced July, closed October, around $825M, with Rahul Vohra staying on as CEO). Email plans run from Starter at $30/mo ($25 billed annually) up to Business at $40/mo ($33 annual) (Superhuman plans page, 2026). It keeps you fast, but it is a tool you operate, not one that drafts your replies for you automatically.
Move to an AI-native client (Shortwave). Shortwave rebuilds the Gmail experience around AI: thread summaries, an AI assistant that can search and draft, and bundled organization. For a HEY user who liked the idea of a rethought inbox but wanted modern AI inside it, Shortwave is the natural heir. As of 2026 there is no permanent free tier (a 14-day trial only), with paid plans beginning around $24/seat/mo on annual billing (Shortwave pricing page, 2026). It is Gmail-first, so Outlook-only users are out, and like the others it does not gate first-time senders the way the Screener does.
Agentys: For the Ex-HEY User Who Will Not Change Address
The fourth option is the one that fits the most common ex-HEY profile: someone who liked the calm but cannot keep an @hey.com address and is frustrated that HEY never drafts anything. Agentys does not ask you to migrate. It connects to your existing Gmail or Outlook over OAuth, leaves your real address and your client untouched, and works automatically as a background layer. There is no new inbox to learn and no identity to abandon, which is precisely the migration cost that stops people from leaving HEY in the first place.
Automatically, Agentys reads the inbox, sorts it into three priority lanes, and for the messages that need a reply it writes a complete draft in your own voice, learned from how you have written to that contact before. By the time you sit down to review, the urgent mail is grouped and a draft is already sitting under each one. You read, adjust a line if needed, and send. That covers the writing half of the email problem that sorting alone leaves untouched. Agentys is $16.99/mo (Starter) or $29.99/mo ($24.99/mo billed annually, Professional), with a 7-day free trial. That is more than HEY's $99/year, but it buys drafting that HEY does not do, on the address HEY would have made you give up.
The honest limitation, stated plainly: Agentys runs as an automatic batch, not in real time. It is built for review, not for a reply two minutes after a message lands. If your work depends on instant turnaround, that real-time model is a different tool than Agentys — worth knowing before you switch. And to be unambiguous, Agentys does not replicate HEY's Screener. It triages with AI after mail arrives; it does not make you grant one-time permission before a new sender can reach you. If that gate was the single feature you loved most about HEY, no tool in this guide gives it back, and you should weigh that honestly. (Disclosure: Agentys publishes this blog, so treat this section as the vendor's own case and verify the live pricing pages yourself.)
How to Actually Leave HEY Without Losing Mail
Cancelling is the easy part; not losing years of mail and contacts is the part people botch. Do it in this order. First, set up forwarding from HEY to wherever you are landing, and keep both running in parallel for a few weeks so nothing slips through during the handover. HEY does not let you simply re-point an @hey.com address to another provider, so treat the forwarding window as mandatory, not optional. Second, export. HEY offers a full data export of your mail; download it and store it somewhere durable before you cancel, because once the account lapses, retrieval gets harder.
Third, update your reply-to address everywhere it matters: your signature, your account logins, your newsletters, and a short note to the handful of people who email you most often. This is the unglamorous tax of having used a service-specific address, and it is the strongest argument for the layer-on-your-existing-inbox options if you have not committed to a domain yet. Fourth, only then cancel HEY. Billing is annual at $99/year for individuals, $179/year for the Families plan (up to five people), or monthly at $12/user/mo for HEY for Domains ($10 for the first user), with a 30-day free trial up front (HEY pricing page, 2026); cancel before the next renewal date to avoid being billed for a year you will not use.
If you took the layer-on approach, your migration is mostly a forwarding rule and a signature edit, because your address never changed. If you moved to a new client or domain, budget a couple of weekends for the address change to fully propagate through the services that still email the old one. Either way, do the export first. The single most common regret among people who cancel an email service is discovering, months later, that an old receipt or thread they needed lived only in the mailbox they let expire.