SaneBox Pricing 2026: Every Tier, the Real Annual Math & Who Each Fits
· Alexandre Sauvageau
SaneBox pricing 2026: Snack ($7/mo), Lunch ($12/mo), Dinner ($36/mo) — annual is ~30% off ($59/$99/$299/yr), not half. Full tier breakdown, feature counts, the no-card trial, and why SaneBox filters but never drafts. Agentys at $16.99/mo adds the writing.
SaneBox runs three plans — Snack ($7/mo), Lunch ($12/mo) and Dinner ($36/mo) — but the annual discount is closer to 30%, not half, and the feature counts surprise people. Here is the full tier-by-tier breakdown, the true per-account cost, and one thing every buyer should know before paying: SaneBox filters, it never writes a reply.
Snack, Lunch & Dinner: What Each Tier Actually Includes
SaneBox sells three plans under a food-themed naming scheme, and the gaps between them are wider than the names suggest. The dividing lines are two numbers: how many email accounts you can connect, and how many SaneBox functions you can switch on. Get those two numbers right and the rest of the pricing page makes sense. Snack costs $7 per month billed monthly, connects one email account, and unlocks two functions of your choosing. Most people pick SaneLater (the core deferral folder) plus SaneBlackHole (one-click permanent unsubscribe), which together cover the bulk of inbox noise. Snack is the entry door, not a crippled demo — for a single account that mostly needs newsletters and notifications pushed out of sight, it is enough.
Lunch costs $12 per month, connects two accounts, and opens up six functions — the tier SaneBox itself flags as most popular, and the one most individual professionals land on. That jump from two functions to six is the real reason to move up: it brings in SaneReminders (follow-up nudges), SaneNoReplies (a folder tracking sent mail that went unanswered), SaneDoNotDisturb (batched delivery during focus hours), and a couple more, alongside a second mailbox. Dinner costs $36 per month, connects four accounts, and turns on every SaneBox function — SaneAttachments (cloud-saving every attachment to a folder), the full SaneFolder set, the daily SaneDigest summary, and priority phone support on top of email and chat. Dinner is built for power users juggling several inboxes, not for someone with one Gmail account.
All three plans come with the same 14-day free trial, and SaneBox does not ask for a credit card to start it — a genuinely low-friction way to see whether the filtering earns its keep on your actual mail. One structural point worth knowing up front: SaneBox is provider-agnostic. It connects over IMAP, so it works with Gmail, Outlook/Microsoft 365, Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail and almost any custom domain, and it layers on top of whatever client you already use rather than replacing it. You keep your existing app; SaneBox just reorganizes what flows into it.
The Real Cost: Annual Is ~30% Off, Not Half
Here is where a lot of write-ups get SaneBox wrong, so it is worth being precise. Paying annually does not halve the price — it takes roughly 30% off. Snack billed yearly is $59/year, which works out to about $4.92 per month. Lunch is $99/year, about $8.25 per month. Dinner is $299/year, about $24.92 per month. So the headline monthly figures ($7 / $12 / $36) drop to roughly $4.92 / $8.25 / $24.92 once you commit to a year. That is a real saving and worth taking if you already know SaneBox works for you, but it is not the 50%-off some comparison pages claim. Always check the live figure on the pricing page, because vendors adjust these.
There are two more cost levers most people miss. First, SaneBox offers biennial (two-year) billing at a steeper discount — published rates have run around $99 for Snack, $169 for Lunch and $499 for Dinner across two years, which lowers the effective monthly cost further again. Second, SaneBox runs a 25% discount for educational, non-profit and government users, applied on top of the plan you choose. If you qualify for either, the math shifts meaningfully. The practical takeaway: judge SaneBox on the *annual* number, not the month-to-month sticker, because almost nobody who keeps it pays monthly. At about $4.92/month for Snack on an annual plan, basic noise reduction for one inbox is genuinely cheap — that part of SaneBox's value is not in dispute.
It also helps to read the per-account math, since accounts are how SaneBox scales. Dinner at $24.92/month annual covers four mailboxes, so if you genuinely run four accounts that is roughly $6.23 per mailbox per month — reasonable. But if you have one inbox and only reach for Dinner because you want every feature, you are paying four-account pricing for a single account. In that one-inbox-but-wants-everything case, the value equation gets noticeably worse, and it is exactly the scenario where it pays to ask what you are actually buying for the money.
What Those Features Actually Do (and Which Tier Unlocks Them)
SaneBox has been filtering email since 2011, and that maturity shows in how its functions behave rather than in a long feature list. The anchor is SaneLater, available from Snack up. It learns which senders you engage with and quietly routes the rest into a SaneLater folder you check on your own schedule. The difference from Gmail's Promotions tab is that SaneLater adapts to *you*: drag a message back to the inbox and SaneBox marks that sender important from then on, with no rule to write. SaneBlackHole, also a Snack-tier pick, is the opposite reflex — drop a sender in once and you never see their mail again. Between those two, a single $7 Snack account already handles the two jobs most people want: defer the maybe-later, kill the never-again.
Move up to Lunch and the functions get more active. SaneReminders lets you BCC a time-coded address (such as 2days@sanebox.com) when you send a message; if no reply lands in that window, SaneBox returns the thread to your inbox so a follow-up never slips. SaneNoReplies is the passive version — a folder that automatically tracks every sent email still waiting on an answer. SaneDoNotDisturb holds incoming mail during hours you set and delivers it in one batch, which is the single most useful function for anyone whose focus gets shredded by notifications; research by Gloria Mark of UC Irvine found it takes over 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption (Fast Company, 2013), so batching delivery protects far more time than the few minutes the emails themselves take.
Dinner turns on the rest: SaneAttachments strips attachments to a cloud folder so they are searchable in one place; SaneDigest sends a once-daily summary of everything SaneLater caught, so you clear low-priority mail in one pass instead of all day; and the full SaneFolder set lets you spin up custom training folders. None of this is flashy, and that is rather the point — SaneBox is plumbing for your inbox, and good plumbing is invisible. The honest read is that the leap from Snack to Lunch (two functions to six, plus a second account) is the upgrade most professionals feel, while the leap to Dinner is mostly about *more accounts* and a few power-user folders, not a dramatically smarter product.
The One Thing No Tier Buys: SaneBox Never Writes a Reply
Before you weigh Snack against Dinner, settle the question that decides whether any SaneBox tier is the right purchase at all: SaneBox filters, it does not write. There is no AI drafting at any price point, no reply suggestions, no tone or voice learning, no generated text. SaneBox uses behavioral pattern-matching to decide *where* an email goes; it never produces an email. It will move a newsletter to SaneLater and remind you that a client hasn't answered, but it will not draft the reply to that client's proposal, and no upgrade unlocks that capability — Dinner has every SaneBox function and still writes zero words on your behalf.
For a lot of buyers that is completely fine, and you should not pay for drafting you do not need. If your inbox pain is volume and clutter, filtering alone can claw back real time — email reliably eats a sizable share of the average knowledge worker's week, so anything that thins the stream before you read it has value. But notice what filtering does and does not touch. It cuts the *reading and sorting* tax. It does nothing about the *writing* tax — and for most professionals, composing replies is the larger of the two costs. SaneBox makes the inbox calmer to look at; it does not make it shorter to answer.
So the buying question is not really 'Snack or Dinner.' It is 'is my bottleneck finding the right emails, or responding to them?' If it is finding them, SaneBox is an easy yes and Snack or Lunch is probably all you need. If it is responding to them, then no SaneBox tier — not even the $36 Dinner plan — touches the part of your day that actually hurts, and the smarter spend is a tool that drafts.
Price Per Outcome: Where Agentys Fits the Picture
Set the prices side by side on the outcome they buy, not the label. SaneBox Dinner is $36/month monthly (about $24.92 on annual) for filtering across four accounts and zero drafting. Agentys is $16.99/month ($24.99/month on the Professional plan with annual billing) and does the sorting *and* the writing. Like SaneBox, Agentys triages every incoming message into three buckets — Action (needs a reply), Info (read when convenient) and Noise (newsletters, promotions, automated alerts). Where SaneBox stops at the folder, Agentys keeps going and drafts a complete reply for each Action email, matched to how you actually write to that specific contact, ready and waiting when you open your inbox.
The blunt comparison: SaneBox's top tier costs nearly double Agentys's entry plan and still writes nothing. That is not a knock on SaneBox's filtering — its filtering is excellent, and it does a genuinely different job (Agentys is not an IMAP filter). If a tidier inbox is the *only* thing you need, SaneBox covers that narrow slice. But for most people the thing eating the evening is *writing the replies*, and paying $36 for Dinner to organize mail you still have to answer by hand is hard to justify when Agentys organizes it and drafts the answers too, for less.
A practical note on how Agentys learns: its voice-matching draws on your existing sent history, so because most people have months of sent mail, the drafts read like you from early on and keep sharpening per contact the more you write. Both tools offer a way to try before you commit (SaneBox's 14-day no-card trial, Agentys's 7-day trial), and honestly the only way to know which problem is yours is to run your own inbox through each. Disclosure: Agentys publishes this blog, so weigh the comparison with that in mind — but the SaneBox prices and the fact that it does not draft are verifiable on SaneBox's own pages, not our opinion.
SaneBox is a mature, reliable filter, and its pricing is fair once you read it correctly: three tiers split by accounts and feature count, with annual billing taking roughly 30% off. But be clear about what it is — it thins the stream of mail before you read it and never writes a word back. Filtering is a narrow, different job; if it is genuinely all you need, SaneBox does it well. For most people, though, the hours disappear into *composing replies*, and even the $36 Dinner plan leaves that untouched. A tool that drafts in your voice, for less than Dinner, is the spend that moves the needle — which is why, for the reply problem itself, the recommendation is Agentys. Run your own inbox through both trials and let the time you save decide.