Point vs Shortwave

Shortwave is an AI email client that lives on Google, and its paid tiers sell AI capacity rather than features. Point is an AI email client for a small firm, and it reaches Microsoft 365 as readily as Gmail. So the opening question is not which one is better. It is whether Shortwave can get at your mail at all.

• Shortwave needs a Google account to sign in. Its own help page marks Microsoft 365 and Exchange as not supported, and Outlook.com as forwarding only with no sending from your address. Checked 7 August 2026.
• Its three business tiers cost $30, $45 and $120 a seat a month. What climbs between them is almost entirely AI: a larger daily allowance of assistant requests, a stronger model, longer AI search history, more AI filters.
• Everyone on a Shortwave team has to sit on the same tier, so the person in your firm with the largest appetite for AI sets the bill for all of you.
• Point connects to Gmail and to Microsoft 365, writes its sorting back into the real mailbox, and puts how far it may act on a level you set for each kind of work, starting where it prepares and you approve.

Will Shortwave connect to the mail your firm already has?

Settle this before anything else, because for a lot of professional-services firms it ends the comparison in about a second.

Shortwave signs you in with Google. Its pricing FAQ, checked 7 August 2026, says the app “connects natively to Gmail & Google Workspace accounts”, and its help page for other providers answers the blunt version of the question outright: “Can I use Shortwave without Gmail at all? No. Shortwave requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account to sign in.”

There is a documented route in from elsewhere, and it is fairer to describe it than to skip it. You forward your mail to a Gmail address, teach that address to send as your real one over your provider’s SMTP with an app password, then sign in to Shortwave with the Gmail account. On that page, checked the same day, Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail and Zoho carry a tick for full support. Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live carry a warning: forwarding only, no sending from your address. Microsoft 365 and Exchange carry a cross, and the note under it reads “not supported at this time. Shortwave only works with Gmail and Google Workspace. We do not have a timeline for Microsoft support, but it’s something we’re aware of.”

An accounting practice on Microsoft 365 is therefore not looking at a workaround with some rough edges. It is looking at a product it cannot buy. That is not a knock on Shortwave, which has never claimed otherwise and documents the limits honestly. It is a fit question, and it is the cheapest one on this page to answer: open your mail settings and look at what is behind them.

Point takes either. A Microsoft 365 mailbox and its calendar arrive the same way a Google one does, your address stays exactly where it is, and the sorting is written back into the mailbox rather than kept in a separate app, so a thread you clear in Point shows up archived in Outlook when you go looking for it. What the first week actually involves, whichever way you go, is in switching to an AI email client.

If the tiers are not feature ladders, what are they?

Shortwave’s pricing page, checked 7 August 2026, lists three business tiers: Business at $30 a seat a month, Premier at $45, Max at $120. One hundred and twenty dollars a month for an email app reads like a typo, and it is not. The reason repays a minute of reading, because it tells you what the money is actually for.

Go down the comparison table and hardly any of what changes is a feature you could put your finger on in the interface. What changes is how much artificial intelligence you are allowed to spend.

• Which model answers you. Shortwave lets you pick an intelligence level and names them on the page: Basic, Standard, Advanced and Expert. Business gets Standard, Premier gets Advanced, Max gets Expert.
• A daily allowance of assistant requests. Business is listed as “more usage”, Premier as twice that, Max as six times.
• How far back AI search reaches. Five years on Business. Unlimited above it.
• How much mail one AI search may consider. Fifty threads on Business, a hundred on Premier, a hundred and fifty on Max.
• How many AI filters you may keep. Three, ten, or fifty. These are the standing rules that label, archive, delete or star new mail against a prompt you wrote in plain words.
• How much context a single answer gets. Standard, then double, then triple.

That is a meter wearing the clothes of a price list. Most software sells you a capability and then lets you use it as hard as you like; here the capability is broadly the same at every rung and the ration is what you are buying. It makes the usual question, why does an email client cost this much, into a better one: how much of this are you going to get through? Shortwave publishes enough to answer it, which most vendors do not.

Point’s own price is per seat and is not published while it is in private beta. Comparing tiers, add-ons and seat counts across the whole category is a job for what an AI email client costs, not for a page about two products.

How much AI would your firm actually get through in a day?

Shortwave prints the numbers, which is to its credit and makes this answerable rather than a guess. From the pricing FAQ, checked 7 August 2026: “The Pro plan allows for roughly 75-150 AI requests per day on the Standard intelligence level, the Business plan roughly 150-300, Premier plan ~300-600, and the Max plan ~900-1800.” The same answer adds that Advanced consumes one and a half times the quota of Standard and Expert three times as much, and that requests at the Basic level are not counted against you at all.

So the ladder is one number seen from four angles, and the division is worth doing yourself. Business allows 150 to 300 Standard requests, which at Expert intelligence is 50 to 100 of them, since Expert costs three times as much per request. Max allows 900 to 1800 Standard, or 300 to 600 at Expert. Four times the Business price, then, buys six times the allowance whichever model you choose to spend it on, plus the right to spend it on the best one.

Now hold your own week against that. Say a partner in a seven-person practice asks the assistant to condense a long chain from a client, dig out last year’s engagement letter, and prepare four replies. That is a handful of requests, not dozens. A day of leaning on it properly might reach forty or sixty. Business, at 150 to 300, is nowhere near tight for that person, and the two colleagues who use the assistant twice a week will never see the edge of it. What decides the tier is not how many people you employ or how much mail arrives. It is whether one or two of them intend to run their whole day through the assistant, and at which model. If nobody does, the upper tiers are headroom you are paying for and will not touch.

Worth noticing how different that question is from the one Point puts to you. Point’s setting is not how much AI you may consume, it is how far it may go without you. Each kind of action carries its own level: leave it where Point drafts and waits for your approval, or raise it and Point does that kind of work itself. Everything sits on review out of the box, and you promote one kind of action at a time as you come to trust it. So sorting can be handed over while anything addressed to a client stays on review, and one incoming message then splits along that line, the filing already done and marked as automatic, the reply still sitting there for you. None of it is one-way either; a level comes back down as easily as it went up.

What happens when one person in the firm needs more?

Shortwave’s billing guide answers this in a sentence, and it is the fact that matters most once you are buying for a practice instead of for yourself. Checked 7 August 2026: “All team members must be on the same plan type. Everyone on your team will have the same plan (Pro, Business, Premier, or Max) with the same features and capabilities.”

Tiers are per team, in other words, not per person. The heaviest user sets the rung for the receptionist. If one of your two partners wants Expert intelligence and the other five people would be perfectly happy on Standard, all seven of you move up: seven seats at $120 rather than seven at $30, which is $840 a month against $210. Whether the extra buys anything the other five will ever use is exactly the sum that the cost of an AI email client works through, across the category rather than for one product.

The mechanics around the rule are reasonable, and the same guide sets them out. A seat added mid-cycle is charged pro rata and a seat removed comes back as a pro-rata credit. Only owners and admins can change the plan or the card. One paid seat covers all of your own mailboxes if you sign them in on the same device, which is more generous than most, and Shortwave says plainly that a team is for paying for other people rather than for your own extra addresses.

Point also bills by the seat, added when somebody joins and taken back when they go. What it does not do is tie what the software may do to which tier you bought. The autonomy levels are settings, adjusted per kind of action, so a cautious bookkeeper who wants to see everything first and an owner who has handed over her filing can work side by side without anybody changing plan.

What can the AI read once your team shares a label?

This is where Shortwave’s team design gets genuinely interesting, and where a firm handling other people’s money should read slowly.

Its team guide, checked 7 August 2026, describes shared labels as a way to “build a shared, AI-searchable email archive that your whole team can access”, and explains the payoff: “your AI Assistant can tap into your team’s collective email history to provide smarter answers.” Around that sit live shared threads, assignees with a visible done status, private comments with @mentions, shared snippets the AI can fill in, and channels that work like internal mailing lists. For a practice that loses the thread every time somebody is on leave, that is a real answer, and a well-built one.

It also relocates a decision. Which client mail carries a shared label stops being a filing choice and becomes a confidentiality choice, because a labeled thread is readable by everyone on that label and answerable by the assistant on their behalf. That is a decision worth making deliberately in advance rather than discovering later, and it applies to any product that pools a team’s mail, Point included.

Shortwave’s own security answers are strong and better read at source than taken from a competitor. On the pricing page, checked 7 August 2026, it states that it is CASA Tier 2 compliant, that its app is verified by Google and audited annually, that data is encrypted and stored in Google Cloud, and that “No third-party LLMs are trained on your data.”

Point draws its line in a different place. The separation it enforces is between the businesses you operate, so if you run a practice and something on the side, what belongs to one is not visible from the other, and a reply leaves under the right one without you choosing an account. Alongside that, mail from a sender Point does not recognize is held back before anything reads it, so an instruction hidden inside a message from a stranger never reaches the AI. Before handing either product your client files, work through the confidentiality checks for an AI email client, which apply to us as much as to anybody.

What would you be giving up if you did not pick Shortwave?

A real list, and a firm already on Google should weigh it before deciding. All of it read off Shortwave’s own pages on 7 August 2026.

Depth of search across years of mail. AI search history runs unlimited above the Business tier, and Max will pull a hundred and fifty threads into a single AI search. If your instinct is to interrogate the archive rather than work today’s inbox, that is the reason to buy it.

Standing rules that act on their own. AI filters, from three on Business to fifty on Max, take action on new mail against a prompt you wrote yourself.

A way in that costs nothing. The pricing page carries a Business and an Individual view, and the Individual one holds a Free plan and Pro at $18 a seat a month. Free is genuinely limited, with basic intelligence, ninety days of history, fifteen threads per AI search and a “Sent with Shortwave” line on your mail, but it exists and you can live in it. There is also a 14-day trial of any tier, and Shortwave suggests trying the highest one you are curious about. Point has no free tier and publishes no price during the private beta.

Years of shipping. Shortwave is a mature product with paying teams and a long changelog behind it. Point is still in private beta. Count that gap honestly, because it is a real one.

Automation past the inbox. Its pricing page points at a sister product, Tasklet, for drafting replies, adding team comments and connecting to 3,000-plus apps.

If you are on Google Workspace, and what you are equipping is one person who wants a powerful assistant sitting over their own Gmail, Shortwave is a strong buy and Point is not trying to beat it at that.

Is the decision already made for you?

For a good share of the people reading this, yes, and it is more useful to say so than to stage a contest.

If your firm runs on Microsoft 365, Shortwave is not on the table. Your real choice is between Point and the other clients that speak Microsoft, and nothing above should be read as a mark against Shortwave inside the world it serves.

If you are on Google Workspace, it is a genuine choice, and it comes down to two questions. How much AI do you intend to consume, and how much of the work do you want done rather than assisted?

Choose Shortwave if one or two of you will use an assistant hard, if what you keep wishing for is the ability to ask five years of mail a question and get an answer, and if a single tier shared by everybody suits how you buy software.

Choose Point if your mail lives on Microsoft, or if the trouble is not how fast you answer but how much is still waiting for an answer, or if you want the level of independence set per kind of action instead of per plan, or if you run more than one business and need them kept apart. A tour of everything it does is on the benefits page, and Point is the shortest version of the argument.

New to the category, or wondering whether a whole client is overkill next to an assistant plugged into the mail you already run? What an AI email client is settles the definition, and client or assistant draws that second line.

Common questions

Does Shortwave work with Outlook or Microsoft 365?

Not for Microsoft 365 or Exchange. Shortwave’s help page on other providers, checked 7 August 2026, marks those as “not supported at this time” and says it has no timeline for Microsoft support. Consumer Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live can be forwarded into a Gmail account and read in Shortwave, but you cannot send from the original address that way. Point connects to Microsoft 365 mail and calendar directly.

Does Shortwave have a free plan?

Yes, though you have to find it. The pricing page opens on its Business view, which shows only the $30, $45 and $120 tiers. Switch it to Individual and a Free plan appears alongside Pro at $18 a seat a month. The FAQ on the same page, checked 7 August 2026, confirms it: “Our Free plan gives you access to our core AI and productivity features.” Free is capped at basic intelligence, ninety days of search history and fifteen threads per AI search, and adds a “Sent with Shortwave” line to your mail.

Why is there a $120 plan for an email app?

Because the tier is an AI allowance rather than a feature set. Checked 7 August 2026, Max buys the strongest model, roughly six times the daily request quota of Business, unlimited AI search history, fifty AI filters and three times the context per answer. Read that way it is a bill for consumption, and the honest question is how much of it you would use.

Can different people at my firm be on different Shortwave plans?

No. Shortwave’s billing guide, checked 7 August 2026, says everyone on a team carries the same plan with the same capabilities. So one person who wants the top model moves the whole practice up, which is worth pricing before you commit.

Which suits an accounting or tax firm better?

Point, in most cases, and the first reason is dull rather than clever: a great many of those firms run on Microsoft 365, where Shortwave cannot follow. After that it is a question of what the software is for. Point is built so that less reaches you needing a decision, with an independence level you set for each kind of action, quarantine for mail from senders it does not know, and separation between the businesses you operate.

Is Point a Shortwave alternative?

It is, and for firms on Microsoft it is one of the few honest answers to that search. Both are full AI clients rather than add-ons, so they replace the app you read and send from. They aim at different readers, though: Shortwave at somebody who wants to ask a lot of a powerful assistant inside Google, Point at an owner who wants fewer things left needing her by the end of the day.

The short version

• Shortwave requires a Google sign-in. Microsoft 365 and Exchange are marked unsupported on its own help page, checked 7 August 2026, so for many professional firms this is over in one question.
• Its tiers ration AI rather than unlock features: model level, daily request quota, search history, filters and context, at $30, $45 and $120 a seat a month.
• Its published quota, 150 to 300 Standard requests a day on Business and triple the cost per request at Expert, is enough to work out which rung you would actually need, and for most small firms the answer is the bottom one.
• A Shortwave team all buys the same tier, so the heaviest AI user in the practice sets everybody’s bill.
• Point runs on Gmail or Microsoft 365, writes its judgment back into the mailbox, keeps the businesses you operate apart, and puts how far it acts on a level you set per kind of action, starting on review.

Which of the two suits you is mostly a question about your own mail. Design studios and training providers have theirs described in full, alongside everyone else Point is built for.