HEY Email Pricing 2026: Every Plan, the Real Cost, and Who Each Fits
· Sovattha Sok
HEY email pricing 2026 — HEY for You ($99/yr), HEY for Work ($12/user/mo) and HEY for Families ($179/yr) broken down. What each plan includes, the premium-address surcharges, the 30-day trial, and how Agentys at $16.99/mo adds AI drafting without switching email providers.
HEY by 37signals sells three flat plans — HEY for You at $99/year, HEY for Work at $12/user/mo, and HEY for Families at $179/year — with a 30-day trial and no free tier. We break down exactly what each price buys, the premium-address surcharges nobody mentions, and the one cost that never appears on the pricing page.
The Three HEY Plans: For You, For Work, For Families
Paying for email at all is a reaction to a real problem. Mail reliably eats a large slice of the average professional's week, and when it does, a better client stops being a luxury and starts looking like a sensible purchase — which is the bet HEY makes. HEY launched in 2020 from 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, with a deliberately confrontational premise: email is broken, and rearranging folders will never fix it. So they rebuilt the whole thing from the protocol up. The pricing is as opinionated as the product. There is no per-feature upsell ladder, no Pro-versus-Premium tier-splitting, and no free plan at all. You pick one of three flat prices, you get the entire feature set that plan includes, and you commit for a year. As verified on hey.com/pricing in May 2026, the lineup is: HEY for You at $99 per year, HEY for Work at $12 per user per month, and HEY for Families at $179 per year for up to five people (37signals, 2026).
HEY for You is the individual plan, and it is what most people mean when they say they are on HEY. The $99 per year works out to roughly $8.25 per month, but you never see a monthly charge — it is one annual payment, and there is no month-to-month option, so the smallest commitment you can make is a full year. That fee buys a personal @hey.com address, 100 GB of storage, the HEY Calendar, the HEY World personal blog, native apps for web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, automatic spy-pixel blocking, and the entire organizational system the product is known for. The thing you will not find anywhere on the price tag is AI. No draft generation, no reply suggestions, no thread summaries. 37signals' position is that good email is written by a human, and they have held that line while most of the market shipped AI assistants — a choice that matters when you compare the bill to what newer tools include.
HEY for Work is $12 per user per month, and it is the version that runs on your own company domain — you@yourcompany.com rather than a @hey.com handle. It carries everything in HEY for You except the @hey.com address and the HEY World blog, then layers on the team features: multi-user management, thread comments visible only to colleagues, private internal notes on emails, and email aliases. Solo operators get a small break here. The first user is discounted by $2 a month, so the first seat lands at $10/month and every additional seat is the full $12. Watch the billing cadence, because it flips: HEY for Work is billed monthly, while HEY for You is annual-only. HEY for Families closes out the lineup at $179 per year for up to five people total — you plus four family members — each with their own @hey.com address, calendar, and independent account. Five separate HEY for You seats would run $495 a year, so for a household standardizing on HEY the family plan saves more than $300 annually.
What $99 a Year Actually Includes
Flat pricing only makes sense if you know what the flat fee covers, and HEY's value is in the system, not a feature checklist. The centerpiece is the Imbox — the deliberate misspelling signals that not everything deserves to land there. Only senders you have explicitly approved reach it. Everything else is held by the Screener, a first-contact queue where each new sender waits until you decide, once, to let them in, route them to the Feed, send them to the Paper Trail, or block them. The Feed is a scrollable lane for newsletters and content you read when you have time; the Paper Trail quietly collects receipts, confirmations, and transactional mail you rarely open but occasionally need. Classify a sender once and they stay classified — there is no algorithm silently re-sorting your mail the way Gmail's tabs do.
Layered on top are the workflow tools that justify the subscription for people who live in email. Reply Later is a dedicated tray for messages you owe a response; you triage in the Imbox, flick the ones that need real thought into Reply Later, then knock them out in one focused session. That batching is the point — Gloria Mark's research found a single interruption can cost more than 23 minutes to fully refocus from (Gloria Mark, *Attention Span*, 2023), so the value of replying in one pass instead of reacting to every ping is hard to overstate. Set Aside pins emails you are actively referencing to a corner of the screen so they are one click away. The product also blocks spy pixels by default — the invisible tracking images that tell senders when you opened a message — renames threads so the subject reflects what the conversation is actually about, and merges related messages so a forwarded chain reads as one clean conversation. You get 100 GB of storage, native apps on every major platform, and the HEY Calendar bundled in at no extra charge. For someone drowning in Gmail's labels, filters, and rules, the simplicity is the product, and at the equivalent of $8.25 a month it is fairly priced for what it is.
Two pricing details rarely make it into the listicles. First, the @hey.com address you get by default is your full email address — there is no custom username vanity layer, you simply claim an available name. If you want a short, memorable one, HEY sells premium addresses as a separate line item: a three-character address (abc@hey.com) is $349/year and a two-character address (ab@hey.com) is $999/year, both well above the $99 base. Second, HEY for You is personal-use only — using it as your business address technically violates the terms; the business answer is HEY for Work at $12/user/mo on your own domain. Neither detail is hidden, but both shape the true cost for a meaningful slice of buyers who assume $99 is the whole story.
HEY for You vs HEY for Work: Which Plan Should You Pay For
The price difference between the two main plans looks small on the surface and turns out to be the most consequential decision in HEY's catalog. HEY for You is $99 a year. HEY for Work, billed monthly at $12 per user, comes to $144 a year for a single seat, or $120 if you are the first and only user claiming the $10 introductory rate. So the real gap for one person is somewhere between $21 and $45 a year — and what that delta buys is not extra features in the inbox itself but a change of address. On For Work your mail lives at you@yourcompany.com; on For You it lives at a @hey.com handle you cannot replace with a custom domain. For a freelancer or a one-person business, that distinction alone usually decides the plan, because clients judge a @hey.com address differently than they judge your own domain.
Read the fine print on HEY for You and you find a line that catches a lot of buyers off guard: it is licensed for personal use only. Running your consulting practice or your side business off a @hey.com address technically breaches the terms, and 37signals is explicit that the commercial answer is HEY for Work. That single clause reframes the comparison. If your email is ever going to carry an invoice, a contract, or a client proposal, the $99 plan is not actually on the table for you — you are choosing between HEY for Work and staying where you are. The premium-address surcharges sharpen the point further. A clean three-character handle is $349 a year and a two-character one is $999 a year, so the moment vanity or brevity matters, HEY for You stops being the cheap option and starts looking like an à la carte menu.
HEY for Families sits in a different bracket entirely. At $179 a year for up to five people, it is the only plan in the lineup designed for shared use, and the math is straightforward: roughly $36 per person per year, against $99 each if those same five people bought For You individually. The catch is that it is genuinely a family product — five @hey.com addresses, five calendars, five personal accounts — not a back-door team plan. There is no shared inbox, no admin console, no way to centrally manage a small company on it. A household that wants everyone on the same clean email gets real value; a five-person startup trying to save money should not try to run on it, because the moment you need team comments, aliases on a company domain, or centralized billing, you are back to HEY for Work at $12 a seat. Match the plan to how the mailbox will actually be used, not to the lowest headline number, and the right choice is usually obvious.
No Free Tier, Annual Commitment, and the Real Cost of Leaving
The first thing to understand about HEY's pricing is what it refuses to offer. There is no free plan — not a limited one, not an ad-supported one, none. The only way in is a 30-day free trial that requires no credit card; when it ends, you pay or you walk. That is a defensible model — 37signals does not want to monetize you with ads or your data — but it means you cannot run HEY as a permanent secondary inbox the way you can with a free Gmail account. HEY for You also has no monthly option, so your minimum spend is $99 paid as one annual charge. Whether $99/year is cheap depends on the comparison. Against a free Gmail account it is pure added cost. Against the premium email clients people actually cross-shop — Superhuman, whose email now starts at $33/user/mo on the Business plan — HEY at the equivalent of $8.25/month is dramatically cheaper for an opinionated, well-built experience.
The pricing also tells you who each plan is for. HEY for You ($99/year) fits an individual who wants a clean personal inbox and is comfortable on an @hey.com address — freelancers, people consolidating away from a cluttered Gmail, anyone who values the Screener enough to change their address for it. HEY for Work ($12/user/mo, $10 first user) fits a solo founder or small team that wants the same system on a professional domain; the monthly billing and first-user discount make it low-commitment to start. HEY for Families ($179/year for five) is the value play for a household — at roughly $36 per person per year it undercuts five individual seats by more than $300. If you are a single user weighing For You against For Work, note that For Work costs $120-$144/year versus $99, so you pay a modest premium for the custom domain and team features.
Then there is the cost that never appears on the pricing page: leaving. With HEY for You, your identity becomes your @hey.com address. If you later cancel, you do not just lose a subscription — you lose the address, and every contact, login, and account tied to it has to be migrated again. HEY does not import your existing Gmail or Outlook history when you join, and your old provider does not vanish, so during any transition you are effectively running two inboxes. HEY for Work softens this because you keep your own domain, but you are still moving your mail backend off Google or Microsoft and rewiring the integrations — Calendar invites, single sign-on, meeting links — that assumed your old provider. The subscription is cheap and honest. The switching cost, in time and lock-in, is the real number to weigh, and it runs in both directions: getting in, and getting back out.
A Different Trade-Off: AI on Your Existing Inbox
A quick disclosure before the comparison: Agentys publishes this blog, so treat what follows as our own product's pitch and weigh it accordingly. Agentys sits on the opposite side of the HEY trade-off. Rather than asking you to move to a new provider, it runs as a layer on top of the Gmail or Outlook inbox you already use — no @hey.com handle, no migration, no forwarding rules. Your address, your integrations, and your full mail history stay exactly where they are, and Agentys adds processing on top: it sorts incoming mail into three priority lanes (the same instinct behind HEY's Imbox, Feed, and Paper Trail, minus the platform switch) and drafts complete replies in your own voice for the messages that need one, so a queue of ready-to-send responses is waiting when you sit down.
On paper HEY wins the monthly line item — about $8.25 a month against Agentys at $16.99/mo for the Starter plan, or $29.99/mo ($24.99 billed annually) for Professional, with a 7-day free trial. But the two products are not really competing for the same dollar. HEY sells you a redesigned inbox with strong organization, and you still write every reply by hand. Agentys leaves your inbox looking the way it always has and instead writes the first draft of your replies for you. Which one is worth more depends on where your time actually goes: organization shortens the hunt for an email, but it does nothing about the minutes spent composing the answer, and for most people the composing is the heavier cost. The honest distinction is that Agentys deliberately keeps your existing inbox in place rather than giving you HEY's clean-slate feeling — your Gmail or Outlook stays visually unchanged, which is by design, because Agentys focuses on writing rather than redesigning the interface. If the goal is to claw back the hours email eats each week, drafting addresses that more directly than any sorting system can. Both offer a trial, which is the only way to feel the difference rather than read about it.
HEY's pricing is one of the most honest in the category: three flat numbers, the full feature set in each, and a 30-day trial with no card on file. The sticker — $99, $144, or $179 a year — is rarely the figure that should decide it. The figures that should are the ones HEY does not print: that HEY for You is personal-use-only, that a short address can quietly add $349 or more, and that the day you leave, your @hey.com identity leaves with you. If a redesigned, no-AI inbox on a new address is genuinely what you want, HEY is fairly priced and worth the trial. If your real cost is the time spent writing replies rather than organizing them, a tool that drafts on the inbox you already have — Agentys among them — answers a different question, and the 30 free days HEY gives you is the cheapest way to find out which question is yours.