Shortwave Pricing: Complete Breakdown 2026
Shortwave is an AI email client for Gmail, built by former Google Inbox engineers. It costs $18 per seat per month on Pro, and $30 to $120 per seat on the team plans.
Prices below were checked against Shortwave’s own pricing page on August 6, 2026.
Key takeaways
- Pro is $18 per seat per month. Team plans run $30 (Business), $45 (Premier) and $120 (Max).
- There is no annual rate. Shortwave publishes a single monthly price per plan, so any source quoting a discounted annual figure is quoting something the vendor no longer lists.
- The free tier is real but personal-only: 90-day search history, capped AI, and no team features.
- No Enterprise tier is published, though Shortwave will discuss custom arrangements.
- Gmail and Google Workspace only. Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, iCloud and IMAP are not supported.
How much does Shortwave cost?
| Plan | Price | AI search history | Threads per search | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 90 days | 15 | Personal Gmail, capped AI, no team features |
| Pro | $18 / seat / month | 3 years | 50 | AI web browsing, personalized AI writing |
| Business | $30 / seat / month | 5 years | 50 | 3 AI filters, team collaboration |
| Premier | $45 / seat / month | unlimited | 100 | 10 AI filters, 2x AI usage and context tokens |
| Max | $120 / seat / month | unlimited | 150 | 50 AI filters, 6x AI usage, 3x context tokens, 1:1 training |
Every plan is billed monthly, per seat. Paid plans come with a 14-day free trial, and when it ends the account drops to the free plan rather than locking you out, so your mail stays reachable.
Business is the tier most teams land on, since it’s the first one with collaboration.
Is Shortwave free?
There’s a free tier, and it’s aimed at one person on a personal Gmail account. You get basic AI on a limited quota, 90 days of search history, and up to 15 threads per AI search. Team features are absent.
The 90-day window is the constraint that matters. Shortwave’s best feature is asking your mail history a question in plain language, and on the free plan that history stops three months back.
Two traps on Shortwave’s pricing page
Both of these produce wrong numbers in published comparisons, so they’re worth knowing before you check any source against ours.
The individual and business plans sit behind a toggle, and only one side renders at a time. The server-rendered HTML contains the business side alone. Read the page without flipping the toggle and the $18 Pro tier looks discontinued. It is not.
There is no monthly-versus-annual toggle at all. Shortwave lists one monthly rate per plan. Annual Shortwave prices circulating elsewhere, including figures we published earlier, describe a structure the vendor no longer uses.
What do Shortwave’s AI limits mean day to day?
Shortwave meters AI with daily caps that reset the next day. That makes cost predictable, and it puts a ceiling on heavy use. Someone working a large inbox can exhaust the allowance by early afternoon and lose the AI exactly when the day gets busy.
The only remedy is a higher tier, which you would be buying for capacity rather than for any new capability. Premier doubles AI usage and context tokens against Business; Max multiplies usage sixfold. Read those tiers as throughput, not as features.
Does Shortwave work with Outlook?
No. Shortwave supports Gmail and Google Workspace only. If your team runs Microsoft 365, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud or any IMAP provider, the product is off the table regardless of price.
It also sits on top of Gmail rather than replacing it. Your mail stays in your Google account, and canceling returns you to standard Gmail with no migration and no data loss. That lowers the risk of trying it considerably.
Who should pay for Shortwave?
Pro at $18 is worth it for one person on Gmail whose main complaint is finding things: natural language search across three years of history and thread summaries are the features people actually keep using.
Business at $30 makes sense once several people work the same conversations and you want shared threads, comments and assignment.
Premier and Max are capacity purchases. Move up when you’re hitting the daily AI cap, rather than in search of a feature.
Look elsewhere if you’re on Outlook, if you need a published annual rate for budgeting, or if what you want is workflow automation. Shortwave hands that to a Tasklet partnership rather than building it natively, so those automations live in a separate product.
Where we fit
We build this+that.
Shortwave makes one Gmail inbox faster to work. We read Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and WhatsApp Business as one stream, pull the requests and commitments out of what arrives without anyone configuring it, and run workflows on messages as they land. Extracted work lands in DoBox with an owner and a link back to the source message.
Two points for Shortwave. Its AI search over years of mail history is better than anything we offer for finding an old thread. And if you are one person on Gmail who simply wants a faster client, we are not the product you want. We are free for 30 days, including 3,000 credits. then $35 per user per month, or $29 billed annually, with 3,000 credits a month per person, with no credit card, if you want to compare them side by side.
If you are weighing the two specifically, our comparison page covers where each fits.
Frequently asked questions
How much is Shortwave per month?
Pro is $18 per seat per month. Business is $30, Premier $45 and Max $120, all per seat per month. There is a free personal tier at $0.
Does Shortwave offer annual billing?
No. Shortwave publishes a single monthly rate for each plan and no annual discount. Any annual Shortwave price you find elsewhere is out of date.
Is there a Shortwave Enterprise plan?
No published tier. Shortwave will discuss custom arrangements for larger deployments, but nothing is listed with a price.
Does Shortwave work with Microsoft Outlook or Office 365?
No. Gmail and Google Workspace only. Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, iCloud and IMAP are unsupported.
Can I try Shortwave’s paid features first?
Yes, a 14-day free trial on paid plans. When it ends the account drops to the free plan, so you keep your mail and lose the advanced features.
What happens to my email if I cancel?
Nothing. Shortwave is a client on top of Gmail rather than a mail host, so your messages stay in your Google account and you return to standard Gmail.
Why do some sites say Shortwave costs more or less than this?
Two reasons, both from its pricing page. The individual and business plans sit behind a toggle that renders one side at a time, which hides the $18 Pro tier, and older sources quote annual rates that Shortwave no longer publishes.