Email and newsletters decision
Shortwave
A competent developer can build a narrow Shortwave-like workflow (summaries, AI search, basic triage) over several weeks, but the full paid product's compliance, broad integrations, polished cross-platform apps, and advanced automation are costly to replicate.
Visit website↗$30/mo
$360/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$100/mo12 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Shortwave alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Fetch users' mail, index messages & attachments, run LLM prompts to summarize/search/compose, present an inbox UI with triage controls and apply mailbox actions (labels/archive/send) via provider APIs
What it still won’t have
- Enterprise CASA Tier 2 compliance
- Built-in integrations and sister-product Tasklet automation
- Polished cross-platform native apps (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows)
- Deeply integrated team collaboration features (shared threads, real-time comments)
- Optimized AI usage quotas, advanced model options, and long-term search history guarantees
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
Meets the strict requirements of CASA Tier 2 compliance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 4 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Shortwave-like web app using React for the frontend, Node.js + Express for the backend, Postgres for metadata, Pinecone or Milvus for embeddings, and OpenAI/Anthropic APIs for LLM features. In scope: Gmail OAuth sync, indexing emails & attachments, embedding storage, AI-powered summaries, a searchable inbox UI with bundles and basic triage actions (label, archive, reply), and server-side job to apply scheduled delivery. Out of scope: native mobile/desktop builds, advanced enterprise compliance, multi-tenant billing, and sister-product automation. Include error handling for failed syncs and API rate limits, per-user usage accounting, and automated tests for sync, indexing, and summarize endpoints.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productShortwave — Automate your email with AI
- official pricingShortwave | Pricing
- official docsThe Shortwave Method
- open sourceeracle/OpenOutreach
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
