Shortwave AI: What Each Plan Actually Meters
Shortwave is an email client built around an AI assistant, and it sells that assistant by the tier. Every plan has AI. What changes as you pay more is not a list of features you unlock but a set of dials that get turned up, which makes Shortwave unusually hard to compare against email apps that simply gate a feature on or off.
The useful question here is not “does it have AI.” It is what gets metered, because that is what decides whether the plan you pick will feel generous or cramped a week in.
The five plans
Shortwave splits into individual and business pricing, with a 14-day free trial.
| Plan | Price | Sold as |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Basic intelligence, limited AI |
| Pro | $18 / seat / mo | Personal users who need the basics |
| Business | $30 / seat / mo | Everyday AI productivity |
| Premier | $45 / seat / mo | Advanced intelligence for complex workflows |
| Max | $120 / seat / mo | The most powerful models and features |
The jump from Pro to Max is nearly seven times the price, and none of it is about gaining a feature the lower plan lacks entirely.
The five things Shortwave meters
This is the part worth understanding before you pick.
1. Intelligence tier. Shortwave labels the model quality itself: Basic on Free, Standard on Pro and Business, Advanced on Premier, Expert on Max. You are buying answer quality, not just quantity.
2. Daily AI usage quota. Limited on Free, standard on Pro and Business, 2x on Premier, 6x on Max. There is a daily ceiling on every plan including the $120 one.
3. Threads per AI search. This is the sleeper limit. When you ask Shortwave a question about your mailbox, it reads a bounded number of threads: 15 on Free, 50 on Pro and Business, 100 on Premier, 150 on Max. Ask “what did we agree with this client” across a two-year relationship and the plan decides how much of that relationship the answer is based on.
4. Search context tokens. Standard, then 2x on Premier, 3x on Max. How much of what it retrieved it can actually reason over at once.
5. AI filters. 3 on Business, 10 on Premier, 50 on Max. These are the standing rules that sort your inbox, so this is the dial that governs how much ongoing automation you get.
Add those together and the honest summary is that Shortwave’s higher plans buy a more thorough assistant rather than a differently shaped one. That is a defensible way to sell AI, and it does mean the cheap plan and the expensive plan can give materially different answers to the same question.
Two smaller limits worth noting: AI search history runs 90 days on Free, 3 years on Pro, 5 years on Business and unlimited above that, and the Free plan appends a “Sent with Shortwave” signature to your outgoing mail.
What the assistant is good at
The searching-and-answering side is the strongest part, and it is the reason people stay. Shortwave treats your mailbox as a corpus you can interrogate in plain language rather than a list you scroll. Ask what a customer’s outstanding issues are, or what you promised in a thread last quarter, and it retrieves and synthesizes rather than returning a keyword match.
Around that sit the expected pieces: AI autocomplete, instant summaries, attachment analysis, AI memory, saved prompts, personalized writing that adapts to your voice, and AI-powered inbox organization through bundles, splits and auto-applied labels.
Shortwave says the automation part is a different product
Here is the thing Shortwave puts on its own pricing page, which does more to define the product’s edges than any review could.
Directly beneath the plan comparison: “Looking for 24/7 workflow automation? Shortwave integrates with our sister product Tasklet to automatically draft replies, add team comments, and connect to 3,000+ apps.”
That is a vendor telling you plainly that the always-on, cross-app half of the job lives outside the email client. It is a fair and unusually honest thing to publish, and it confirms what the plan table already implies: Shortwave’s AI is something you use while you are in your inbox. The work that has to happen when you are not there is a separate purchase and a separate tool.
The always-on half, in one place
If you have got this far because you want the mailbox handled rather than searchable, the tool you want fires on events instead of waiting in a tab.
Carly runs in the cloud on triggers: an inbound email, a calendar event, a CRM change, or a schedule. Nothing of yours needs to be open. It sends on both Gmail and Outlook rather than stopping at a draft, connects natively to 260+ apps across 45+ categories, and reaches anything else with a public API through your own key pasted at carlyassistant.com/integrations. It also gets its own email address, so clients and teammates can hand it work directly instead of going through you.
The kind of thing that covers:
- When a lead emails, enrich them, create the CRM record, and reply with a booking link.
- When a thread goes quiet for four days, chase it and log the chase.
- Every Monday at 8am, assemble last week’s numbers and send the summary.
Carly is free for Zapier-style workflows, with AI agents from $35/month, so a workflow that mostly moves data and occasionally thinks stays predictable to run.
The two are complementary rather than competing. Shortwave makes the time you spend reading email far better. Carly covers the work that should not require you to be reading email at all.
For the wider comparison, Shortwave alternatives has the field, and Shortwave vs Superhuman is the head to head people ask for most. Superhuman AI covers how that side has changed since the Grammarly acquisition.
FAQ
Is Shortwave AI free? There is a free individual plan with basic intelligence, a limited daily AI quota, 90 days of history, a 15-thread ceiling per AI search, and a “Sent with Shortwave” signature on your outgoing mail. Paid plans start at $18 per seat per month.
What is the difference between Shortwave’s Premier and Max plans? Both are about degree rather than features. Premier is $45 per seat per month with advanced intelligence, 2x usage, 100 threads per search, 2x context and 10 AI filters. Max is $120 with expert intelligence, 6x usage, 150 threads, 3x context and 50 filters.
How many emails can Shortwave’s AI read at once? Between 15 and 150 threads per AI search depending on plan. This is the limit most people hit without noticing, because a thin answer looks like a wrong answer rather than a truncated search.
Can Shortwave automatically reply to emails for me? Shortwave points that job at Tasklet, its sister product, which it says handles 24/7 workflow automation and connects to 3,000+ apps. The email client itself is built around assisting you while you work in it.
Does Shortwave work with Gmail and Outlook? Shortwave is built on Gmail. If you need one assistant acting across both Gmail and Outlook, and acting on triggers rather than in a client, Carly is the shape that covers it.
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