How Much Does HEY Email Cost Per Year?

HEY is priced as one decision: you pay for the full inbox or you do not use it. There is no free tier, no ad-supported version, and no feature paywall dividing a cheap plan from an expensive one. What the money buys is not more storage or better filters — it is a specific email workflow, and the annual number is what that workflow costs when the vendor is not selling something else on the side.

That shape of pricing frustrates readers used to Gmail's zero, and it answers an honest question when you count what free email is actually paid for with — attention, an ad audience made out of your inbox, and a set of assumptions about who is allowed to read the mail. This post answers how much HEY email costs per year, with the current numbers verified on hey.com, then does the work the number alone cannot: whether it is the right trade for you.

The short answer#

As of August 2026, HEY sells three shapes of subscription. HEY for You, the personal plan, is $99 per year for one @hey.com address and includes calendar, 100 GB of storage, and the full Screener, Imbox, Feed, and Paper Trail workflow. HEY Family covers up to five @hey.com addresses under one billing account for $179 per year total. HEY for Work adds custom domains at $12 per user per month, with the first user billed at $10 per month.

There is no permanent free plan. HEY runs a 30-day trial that does not require a credit card, and the Work plan has no trial itself but gives new domain owners 30 days to complete setup. If you stop paying, the account closes: the address stops receiving mail. Paid customers can set up forwarding to another address before they leave so that senders who still have the HEY address do not silently fall off the map.

Criteria that actually decide whether $99 is worth it#

The annual number is easy to quote. The harder question is which readers get their money's worth. Six criteria decide it, and they are the ones the marketing page does not walk you through in order.

• Do you want the @hey.com address, or do you need a custom domain? Personal HEY is @hey.com only. A custom domain moves you to HEY for Work at a per-seat monthly rate, so a single freelancer on their own domain is on the Work plan, not the Personal one.
• Do you want HEY's Screener, Imbox, Feed, and Paper Trail workflow specifically, or do you want a bring-your-own-workflow client? HEY's opinion is the product. If you already work a triage system you like, you are paying $99 to swap it for someone else's.
• Does your mail live in one provider, or across several? HEY does not connect to your existing Gmail or Outlook account. It is a provider itself. If you keep several mailboxes for different roles, HEY is a fourth address on top, not a layer over the three you have.
• Is your mail mostly conversations, or mostly automated traffic — invoices, receipts, calendar pings, alerts? HEY's Paper Trail is built for exactly that split. A reader whose inbox is 90 percent alerts gets more from Paper Trail than a reader who lives in threads with clients.
• Is privacy from ad-funded architecture a purchase criterion? HEY was built by 37signals partly as a public argument against ad-funded email. If that argument matters to you, the $99 buys the argument as much as the software.
• Do you want the triage done by you, or by an agent you approve? HEY is a very sharp manual tool. It is not an AI client that drafts replies, screens senders on your behalf, or writes a nightly brief.

How HEY's pricing compares to adjacent options#

Comparing prices across email tools directly is a category error, because they package different things. A better comparison is the shape of what you pay for. HEY packages workflow plus provider plus address into one flat annual number. Ad-funded free email splits the same job across your attention and an ad audience. Paid hosted providers charge a per-seat annual number for the mail itself and expect you to bring your own workflow. Layered assistants sit on top of the mail you already have and price per seat as well.

The table below shows the shape, not the current numbers for competitors — those move, and any figure printed here would be wrong within a quarter. Check each vendor's pricing page for the current amount before you decide.

A worked example: two years of HEY, priced honestly#

Take a solo consultant who currently uses a free @gmail.com address, gets about 100 messages a day of which maybe a fifth are real conversations, and wants the Screener workflow specifically. What does HEY actually cost over two years, honestly counted?

Year one is $99 for HEY for You. Year two is another $99, assuming the price has not moved. That is $198 over two years for the personal plan on a hey.com address. If they want their existing custom domain instead — which most consultants do, because the domain is part of how clients recognise them — the arithmetic is different. HEY for Work at $10 per month for the first user is $120 per year, or $240 over two years, for a single seat on their own domain.

That is only the cash side. The non-cash costs of the switch are real and worth writing down. Migrating away from the @gmail.com address means notifying every client, every SaaS login, every recurring vendor. HEY does not import mail from Gmail in the traditional IMAP-copy sense — you can forward incoming mail during the transition, but old threads stay in Gmail. Any workflow you have built out of Gmail labels, filters, or extensions does not follow you. That is not a HEY criticism; it is the shape of moving providers.

The comparison, priced honestly, is not $0 versus $99. It is the workflow value of HEY's Screener and Paper Trail, minus the migration cost, against whatever your current setup already gives you for free — and against a layered assistant that lets you keep the Gmail address and add screening on top for a separate per-seat fee.

Red flags to know before you subscribe#

None of the following are dealbreakers on their own, but they surprise readers often enough that the honest thing is to name them before you pay.

• Personal HEY is @hey.com only. If you want a custom domain, you are on the Work plan at a monthly per-seat rate, even as a solo user.
• HEY is a walled workflow, not a standards-first mailbox. There is no traditional IMAP client access to the inbox. You use HEY through HEY's clients.
• HEY is not multi-provider. It cannot read your Gmail, your Outlook, or your Fastmail. If you keep several mailboxes, HEY becomes one more, not a unifier.
• If you cancel, the address stops receiving. Paid customers can set up forwarding to another address before leaving. Do that first, or senders will fall silent.
• HEY Family covers five addresses on the same billing account for $179 per year total, which is cheaper than five personal seats — but the addresses are @hey.com, not custom-domain.
• There is no ad-supported free version and no discounted student or open-source tier. The 30-day trial is the whole free experience.

What we would pick, and why#

HEY is a strong buy for one specific reader: someone who wants a whole opinionated inbox built from the ground up, is willing to move their address, and finds the Screener, Imbox, Feed, and Paper Trail workflow genuinely closer to how they want to work than what Gmail gives them. Ninety-nine dollars a year is a fair price for a piece of software with an opinion that clear, and 37signals has built the Screener harder than we have — if a first-time-sender approval gate is the single feature you would pay for, buy HEY.

HEY is a worse buy for a different reader. If your address is already known to hundreds of contacts and moving it is a real cost, if you keep mail in more than one provider, or if what you actually want is an assistant that triages the mail on your behalf rather than a sharper manual tool, HEY's flat $99 is buying you the wrong shape. That reader is better served by keeping their existing provider and layering triage on top.

That layer is what we build. AI Emaily is a client that connects to your existing Gmail, Outlook, or IMAP account and runs an approval-first agent over it: it screens new senders, quarantines newsletters and receipts, drafts replies you approve before send, and keeps an audit trail of what it did. We charge per seat, and where a HEY subscription buys workflow plus provider plus address in one number, we sell only the workflow layer. You keep your address, your provider, and your existing archive. We build AI Emaily; the disclosure is here because a decision guide on a vendor site should be one.

The honest ranking depends on what you are actually buying. If you want a provider with a strong opinion and are willing to move to it, HEY wins. If you want an assistant on top of the provider you already have, we do. If you want ad-free email but no opinion about how to work it, Fastmail or Proton Mail is a better fit than either of us. Say which one your situation is before you decide the price is high.