Shortwave Pricing 2026: Business, Premier & Max Plans Compared
· Sovattha Sok
Shortwave pricing 2026 — Business ($24/seat/mo), Premier ($36/seat/mo) and Max ($100/seat/mo) plans compared. No free plan, 14-day trial. AI quotas, history limits, who each tier is for, and how Agentys at $16.99/mo covers Gmail and Outlook without switching clients.
Shortwave dropped its free plan — paid tiers now start at $24/seat/mo (Business) and reach $100/seat/mo (Max), all billed annually. We break down every tier, what the AI quotas actually mean, where the Gmail-only wall costs you, and whether the price holds up in 2026.
Shortwave Plans 2026: Business, Premier, Max & Enterprise
Shortwave is an AI-powered email client built by a team of former Google engineers — many of whom shipped Gmail's Inbox app before Google discontinued it in 2019. Their goal was straightforward: take everything Inbox got right about conversation bundling, triage, and clean design, and rebuild it on top of a modern large-language-model stack. Seven years of iteration later, Shortwave is a mature product with a clear pricing structure and a focused bet on AI-driven email intelligence. As of 2026, Shortwave has no free plan. The free tier was retired and replaced with a 14-day free trial that gives full access to the paid experience — after which you must choose a subscription or lose access entirely.
The Business plan at $24 per seat per month (billed annually — no monthly option is shown on the pricing page) is the entry tier. It covers the core Shortwave experience: AI-powered natural-language search across up to five years of email history, thread summaries, AI writing assistance, autocomplete, attachment analysis, web browsing within the AI assistant, and AI-generated action items that extract tasks from long threads. Crucially, Business is quota-bound: you get roughly 150–300 Standard intelligence AI requests per day, and heavier tasks consume more of that quota than lighter ones (shortwave.com/pricing, May 2026). For most solo professionals averaging 50–80 emails per day, that daily limit is unlikely to be a serious constraint. Power users who run dozens of searches and ask the AI to summarize every new thread may hit the ceiling.
The Premier plan at $36 per seat per month is positioned as the most popular tier. It replaces Standard intelligence with Advanced intelligence — the next tier up in Shortwave's AI model hierarchy — doubles the daily AI usage quota relative to Business, expands email history search to unlimited (versus Business's five-year cap), increases the max threads returned per search from 50 to 100, raises the AI filter count from 3 to 10, and doubles the context window (2x tokens) so the AI can hold more of a conversation in working memory when helping you draft. Premier also adds priority email and video support. The context window difference is meaningful for people who use Shortwave's AI to draft complex multi-paragraph replies referencing past threads: more tokens means the AI can actually read the prior conversation before suggesting text, instead of truncating it.
The Max plan at $100 per seat per month is the professional-grade ceiling. It provides Expert intelligence AI (Shortwave's top-tier model access), six times the daily AI usage quota of Business, 150 max threads per search, up to 50 AI-powered filters, and a 3x context window. The dedicated 1:1 live training included with Max signals who this tier targets: organizations treating Shortwave as a core infrastructure tool that want hands-on onboarding for their teams, not just documentation. At $100 per seat, a five-person team pays $500 per month, or $6,000 annually — a meaningful commitment that only makes sense if email search and AI-assisted writing are central to daily operations at scale. The Enterprise tier (contact sales) adds SSO, compliance features, and custom deployment terms.
What Shortwave's AI Actually Does Well
Shortwave's most defensible feature is its natural-language email search. Most email clients — including Gmail itself — treat search as keyword matching. Type a phrase, get messages containing that phrase. Shortwave's AI search is fundamentally different: you describe what you're looking for in plain language, and the system reasons over your email history to surface the right conversation. Query "What did the contractor say about the timeline in Q1?" and Shortwave returns the relevant thread with a contextual summary of that specific exchange, not a list of every email mentioning "timeline" or "Q1." For professionals who treat their inbox as a long-term knowledge archive — consultants, lawyers, account managers, anyone maintaining client relationships over years — this capability has genuine daily value. The five-year history window on Business covers most working relationships. Premier's unlimited history is meaningful for people with decades of archived correspondence.
The AI quotas deserve honest examination. Business's 150–300 requests per day sounds like a lot, but Shortwave notes that complex operations — searching across large date ranges, generating detailed summaries of very long threads, asking follow-up questions — consume more quota than simple ones. A knowledge worker spending two hours in email per day and actively using AI search and summarization on every thread could plausibly exhaust the Business quota by mid-afternoon. Because most people check email in many short bursts rather than one long session, you tend to burn quota across the whole day without noticing. For most users the Business quota is fine. For power users, Premier's doubled quota is worth examining before assuming it will be enough.
Thread summaries are the second feature that justifies the subscription for the right kind of user. Open a 47-message project thread and Shortwave produces a structured overview: who said what, what decisions were made, what questions remain open. This is genuinely useful when you've been away for a few days and need to catch up without reading every reply. The action item extraction — which surfaces tasks mentioned in passing within a thread — is less precise but directionally helpful. The AI writing assistant offers autocomplete, tone adjustment, and contextual drafting suggestions. Shortwave's advantage over generic AI writing tools is the integration with your own email history: the AI can reference past correspondence with the same contact when helping you compose, which tends to produce more relevant suggestions than a model with no context.
The conversation bundling feature — one of Inbox by Gmail's most beloved capabilities — groups related notifications, receipts, and transactional emails together so they don't clutter your primary inbox view. Combined with AI-powered filters (3 on Business, scaling to 50 on Max), this gives Shortwave users meaningful control over what they see first. The overall UX is polished: keyboard-shortcut driven, fast to load, with a mobile app that mirrors the desktop experience closely. For Gmail users who have wanted Inbox to come back with better AI since 2019, Shortwave is the closest thing available.
Who Each Plan Is Actually For
Business at $24/seat/month fits the solo professional or small team that wants a meaningfully better Gmail experience without committing to the highest tier. The five-year history window covers most working contexts, the AI writing assistant saves time on routine replies, and the action item extraction adds a lightweight task layer on top of existing email threads. The 150–300 daily AI request quota is adequate for moderate use. Where Business starts to strain: large teams where you'd pay $24 per seat — a ten-person team hits $240/month, or $2,880/year, before moving anyone to Premier. At that scale, it's worth modeling whether the productivity gain per seat justifies the cost per seat.
Premier at $36/seat/month is the right choice if you find yourself bumping against Business limits, if you maintain relationships spanning more than five years of email history (partner-track lawyers, senior consultants, executives), or if you use Shortwave's AI writing features heavily enough that the 2x context window produces noticeably better drafts. The unlimited history is also important if your organization routinely needs to surface very old correspondence — due diligence work, contract disputes, client history reviews. Priority support justifies itself the moment you have a billing or access problem that needs same-day resolution.
Max at $100/seat/month is a specialty tool. The economics only work for professionals where a meaningful fraction of daily billable time is recovered by email efficiency gains, or for organizations running Shortwave as a shared institutional resource. A senior partner at a law firm billing $500/hour who saves two additional billable hours per week via faster search and better drafts covers the Max subscription cost in under a day. For a marketing coordinator billing internally at $40/hour, the math inverts quickly. The 1:1 live training that comes with Max is more valuable than it sounds — it's the difference between a tool that gets used at 30% of its capability and one that gets used at 80%.
Enterprise is for organizations with security and compliance requirements (SSO, audit logs, data residency), procurement processes that require custom contracts, or deployment scales where Shortwave needs to fit into an existing IT governance framework. Pricing is negotiated case-by-case.
Where the Value Breaks Down
Shortwave's most significant structural limitation is the Gmail-only constraint. There is no Outlook support, no Microsoft 365 integration, no Yahoo or IMAP access. If you work in an organization running Microsoft 365, Shortwave is simply unavailable to you. If you maintain both a personal Gmail and a work Outlook — a common configuration among consultants, freelancers, and professionals at companies mid-migration — Shortwave handles only half your inbox. Email providers remain a fragmented landscape, so Shortwave's bet that Gmail dominance justifies platform exclusivity is a reasonable strategic choice, but it's a genuine blocker for a large portion of the market.
The second structural issue is client replacement. Shortwave doesn't layer on top of Gmail — it replaces it. You move your email workflow into a different interface, lose native access to Google Chat, lose some Gmail extensions you may depend on (certain CRM sidebars, Grammarly integration, specific scheduling tools), and take on a dependency on a startup for your primary communication infrastructure. The email client market has a difficult history for independent entrants: Mailbox (acquired by Dropbox, then shut down), Inbox by Gmail (discontinued), Spark, Newton (shut down and resurrected), Astro (shut down). Shortwave is well-funded and has strong engineering, but the risk of platform dependency on a startup is real. Professionals making multi-year productivity commitments should weigh this against the genuine capability advantages.
The third gap is automation. Shortwave's AI is entirely on-demand: you ask it to search, to summarize, to help you write, and it responds. Nothing happens without your initiation. There is no between-sessions processing that scans your inbox automatically and queues draft responses. There is no priority classification that sorts your inbox before you open it. The daily quota structure makes automatic processing impractical in any case — continuous background processing would exhaust the Business quota within hours. Shortwave is built for working in your inbox. For people whose goal is to spend less time there in total, that's a different product category.
A Different Bet: Automatic Processing on Your Existing Inbox
Disclosure: this article is published by Agentys. What follows is an honest comparison — including the search job Shortwave is built for and Agentys is not.
Agentys and Shortwave are solving different halves of the same problem. Shortwave's premise: email interactions should be faster and smarter. Agentys's premise: email should largely happen without you. At $16.99 per month for the Starter plan, Agentys costs $5 less than Shortwave's Business tier and does something Shortwave cannot: it processes your inbox between sessions, preparing draft replies adapted to your communication style for each contact, sorting messages by priority before you open the app. You arrive to a curated queue, not a raw inbox.
The cross-platform coverage matters in practice. Shortwave requires Gmail. Agentys works on both Gmail and Outlook under a single subscription. Professionals who maintain dual inboxes, contractors who work across multiple clients with different email providers, and people mid-migration from one platform to the other get full coverage from a single Agentys account. There is no second tool, no second subscription.
One honest distinction: Agentys does not offer natural-language search across your email archive. If you regularly retrieve past correspondence by asking questions — "Find what the client said about scope in November" — that retrieval is a different job from drafting, and it's one Shortwave's search is built for. The two products are not competitors for the same job; they address different primary frustrations, so for someone whose day is mostly archive retrieval, a dedicated search tool covers that piece. For the job most people are actually trying to fix — the daily pile of replies — Agentys is the recommendation, because it drafts in your voice across both Gmail and Outlook and works automatically. On accuracy: because Agentys learns from your existing sent history and most people have months of it, the drafts read like you from early on and keep sharpening per contact the more you write. The 7-day trial lets you confirm that for your own inbox.
Shortwave's pricing structure is coherent. Business at $24/seat/month buys a well-built Gmail replacement with AI search, summaries, and writing assistance; Premier at $36 and Max at $100 add depth for power users and high-volume teams. The Gmail-only constraint and the client-replacement requirement are the honest costs. Finding old emails by asking questions is a genuinely different job, and Shortwave's search covers it — so if archive retrieval inside Gmail is your whole problem, that's the slice it fills. But for the problem most people actually have — getting the daily pile of replies handled — Agentys at $16.99/month is the recommendation: automatic drafts in your voice, priority sorting, and cross-platform coverage across Gmail and Outlook without switching clients. Two tools for two different problems.