# What is your inbox actually costing you?

> See the hours and dollars your inbox costs you a year, shown with the maths, and how much a triage-and-drafting assistant could realistically hand back.

Canonical: https://beemy.co/inbox-cost/ · Last updated: 2026-09-18

Calculator

The average worker receives 117 emails a day (Microsoft WorkLab, 2025, measured across Microsoft 365 tenants). Plug in your own numbers below to see what that costs you specifically, in hours and dollars, this year. Sources and assumptions are at the bottom of the page.

3 min read

Your numbers

Per year

Show the maths

## Where these numbers come from — no black box.

### The time

Hours/day × working days = hours/week on email. Add recurring reports and newsletter/news reading, then multiply by 52 weeks. No hidden multipliers.

### The $40/hr default

A placeholder for the value of your time, yours to adjust. Move the slider to match your own rate, and the rest of the maths follows it.

### The 60% reclaim

Triage (read, classify, decide, draft a first pass) is repetitive and context-dependent rather than judgement-heavy, and it's most of the time in most inboxes we've looked at early in beta. The remaining share is judgement calls that still come back to you. This is our own working assumption rather than a measured industry figure, and we haven't yet published usage data from our own beta to replace it with a real one.

### The 20% review share

We have not measured this figure. Every draft still waits for a one-tap review until its category earns level 2, and only four categories (meeting_confirmation, scheduling_ack, simple_ack, routing_filing) can ever reach auto-send — see /what-you-still-do for the full case. Twenty percent is our own guess at what that ongoing review still costs you, not a study of it. Move the slider to your own number; this default exists to be replaced. See [what you still do](https://beemy.co/what-you-still-do) for the full case.

Want the deeper argument for why triage (not raw hours) is the real cost? Read [the real cost of email overload](https://beemy.co/blog/the-real-cost-of-email-overload/).

**Sources & assumptions:** the 117-emails-a-day figure above is Microsoft WorkLab's own 2025 telemetry; the 60% reclaim rate, the 20% review share we subtract back out, and every preset's starting numbers are our own assumptions, not citations. Every number this calculator uses, sourced or assumed, is on [/the-numbers](https://beemy.co/the-numbers).

Starting points

## Or start from a role like yours.

### Founders

Investor updates, customer replies, and no EA yet. Start from a founder's week.

### Team managers

More 1:1s than hours in the day. Start from a team manager's week.

### Working parents

Two inboxes that can't mix. Start from a working parent's week.

### Consultants & freelancers

Three client inboxes and invoices nobody else chases. Start from a consultant's week.

That's ~312 net hours a year. Get them back.

Last updated 18 September 2026