What a shared inbox actually costs in 2026, and the four costs the pricing page leaves out

The per-seat number on a pricing page is the least useful figure in the entire decision, and it is the only one most teams compare. It tells you what one seat costs on one specific tier. It does not tell you which tier your requirements will actually put you on, how the AI is billed on top of it, or how many of your seats will still be in daily use a year from now.

We build one of the tools on this list, so read our section with the suspicion it deserves. Everything else here is arithmetic, and arithmetic is checkable. Prices are the published list rates at the time of writing, annual billing, and every vendor on this list has changed them before and will change them again.

What do shared inbox tools cost in 2026?

Published per-seat pricing, billed annually, cheapest paid tier to most expensive standard tier. Enterprise tiers are quote-only almost everywhere and are left out.

• Drag: about $12 to $24 per seat per month. A Gmail extension, board-based, the cheapest serious entry in the category.
• Keeping: about $12 to $20 per seat per month. Support-shaped, lives inside Gmail, the lower tier caps agent count.
• Missive: about $14 to $36 per seat per month. Its own app, email and chat combined, free for very small teams.
• Hiver: about $15 to $49 per seat per month. Ticket workflow inside the Gmail interface, SLAs and analytics in the upper tiers.
• Sektra: free up to 3 seats, then $19 per seat annually on Standard and $39 on Pro. Relationship memory is in every tier.
• Gmelius: about $19 to $40 per seat per month. Shared inbox plus sequences and automation, aimed partly at outreach teams.
• Help Scout: about $20 to $65 per seat per month, with contact volume affecting the bill on some plans.
• Front: $25 per seat on Starter, $65 on Professional, $105 on Enterprise. Starter is single-channel and caps at 10 seats.

Two things to notice before reading anything into the order. Monthly billing runs roughly 20 to 25 percent above these figures nearly everywhere, so a team that avoids an annual commitment is choosing to pay a quarter more for the privilege. And the spread within a single vendor is often wider than the spread between vendors. Front's own lineup ranges from $25 to $105. Which plan you land on matters more than which logo you pick.

The four costs that do not appear on the pricing page

1. The tier you actually land on

The left column is the number that gets quoted in the meeting, and it is often not the column you end up in. Entry tiers are scoped deliberately, and usually scoped well: they are built for smaller teams with simpler needs, which is why they carry seat caps, a single channel, or a shorter integration list. That is sensible segmentation rather than a trap. It just means the feature that made you start shopping is frequently one tier to the right of the price you quoted.

So price the tier that contains your actual requirement, not the tier that contains your budget. If routing rules are why you are here, find the row where routing rules appear and read the number above that column. The difference is rarely small. On Front it is the step from Starter at $25 to Professional at $65, which on twelve seats is about $5,800 a year, and Professional genuinely carries more: omnichannel, deeper analytics, and a far higher seat ceiling. The number is only a problem if you are not going to use what it buys.

2. AI priced as a separate appetite

This is the newest line item in the category and the one most likely to move between quote and renewal. Across the market, AI has arrived in three shapes: bundled into an upper tier, sold as a per-seat add-on, or metered by use. Each is defensible. Metering in particular ties spend directly to value delivered, which plenty of finance teams prefer to paying for capacity nobody touches. The tradeoff is simply that a metered line is a forecast rather than a fixed number, and forecasting your own inbound is harder than it sounds.

Our own model, stated plainly since we are on the list. Relationship memory is in every Sektra plan including the free one, because a tool whose entire point is memory should not sell memory as an upgrade. AI credits are pooled across the team rather than metered per person, which makes the bill a fixed number you choose in advance rather than a variable you discover at renewal, and means one heavy Copilot user never creates a line item their colleagues have to explain.

3. The seats that never adopt

The most expensive line in a shared inbox budget is usually a seat that is paid for in full and used lightly. It does not appear as waste in any report. It appears as a full-price seat, invoiced annually, belonging to someone who kept working in Gmail and forwards things to a colleague instead.

This cost tracks one variable more than any other: whether the tool asks people to work somewhere new. Tools with their own workspace, Front and Missive among them, give teams that do move a genuinely unified place to work, with email, coordination, and in Missive's case chat all in one window, and teams that want that consolidation get real value from it. The question is not whether the destination is good. It is whether your particular team will move, and that is answerable from evidence rather than optimism. Ask how many tools this team has been rolled onto before and how many of those rollouts fully took. That number predicts your effective per-seat cost better than anything on the pricing page.

4. The rollout

Workflow engines have to be configured before they pay off, and configuration is somebody's week. A tool with deep routing, SLA policies, and multi-team escalation carries a setup cost on top of the license, because someone senior tunes it and someone keeps maintaining it afterward. For teams whose inbound genuinely moves between departments that investment returns quickly, and the honest alternative is doing the same routing by hand forever. For a team of eight working a single queue, the same investment mostly sits idle. Same tool, same quality, different return.

The same team, priced three ways

Take a ten-person client-facing team, annual billing, and price the plan they would actually need rather than the cheapest one on offer.

• Front Professional at $65 a seat: $650 a month, $7,800 a year. Starter would be $3,000, but it is single-channel and caps at exactly 10 seats, so the eleventh hire forces the jump.
• Help Scout mid-tier around $40 a seat: roughly $4,800 a year, with contact volume a variable to watch on some plans.
• Hiver mid-tier around $29 a seat: roughly $3,480 a year, more if SLAs and advanced analytics push you up a tier.
• Sektra Pro at $39 a seat: $390 a month, $4,680 a year. Standard at $19 caps at 5 seats, so a team of ten is on Pro.
• Drag or Keeping near the bottom of their ranges: roughly $1,440 to $2,400 a year, which is genuinely the cheapest way to put shared labels and assignment on a Gmail inbox.

The honest read on that table is that Sektra is not the cheap option. Drag and Keeping are cheaper and will stay cheaper, and if the entire requirement is shared labels and assignment inside Gmail, they are the rational purchase and we would rather you heard that from us. Front Professional sits at the other end, where the gap is roughly the cost of a junior hire, which is the right trade when cross-department routing is a daily reality and an overpayment when it is not. Every tool on that list is priced sensibly for the job it was built to do. The expensive mistake is buying a good tool for a job you do not have.

Where Sektra sits, and where it does not

Sektra is a shared inbox that syncs two-way with your team's Gmail, so nothing migrates and the mail keeps living in Gmail. Setup is a Google sign-in of about 90 seconds. You get the collaboration essentials, including assignments, mentions, internal notes, and collision detection so two people never answer the same client.

What justifies paying above the floor of this market is the layer underneath, and it is worth being specific rather than atmospheric about what that layer does. Sektra reads the Gmail history you already have and maintains a live record for every client: each commitment made in either direction and when it comes due, each client question still waiting on an answer including the ones buried inside threads that already got a reply, and each relationship's normal contact rhythm, so an account that falls below its own baseline is flagged while the silence is still a question rather than a resignation. An AI Copilot answers any question about any client from that same history, which turns where do we stand with Meridian into something you ask a system instead of a colleague. Because the record is read backward through mail you already have, it is populated on day one, including for relationships years older than the tool.

What it is not is a workflow engine. If your requirement is elaborate routing across five departments with SLA escalation policies, Front is the stronger tool for that job and buying Sektra for it would be a mistake in the other direction. Full row-by-row breakdowns live on the comparison pages, and the pricing page has the current plan details in case this article has aged since publication.

How to price your own decision

• Find the feature you are actually buying, then find the tier that contains it. Price that tier. Ignore the entry column entirely.
• Multiply by the seat count you will have in eighteen months, not today, and check the seat cap on that tier before you do.
• Ask how AI is billed, in writing: bundled, per seat, or per use. Metered pricing is not automatically worse, but it is a forecast rather than a number.
• Estimate the seats that will be lightly used. If the tool asks people to work somewhere new, weigh your team's track record honestly, multiply your per-seat rate by that count, and treat the result as part of the price.
• Add the rollout. If someone has to design workflows before the tool earns its keep, that is a week of salary in the first year and a recurring tax after.
• Then run a two-week trial on real mail before signing anything annual. On Gmail this costs you nothing, because your mail is not moving either way.

The cheapest tool is the one that solves the job you actually have. Price the job first, and the column you should be reading stops being a judgment call.