Beemy · beemy.co
Printed from beemy.co/inbox-cost/for/consultants/
Calculator · Consultants & freelancers
Three clients, three inboxes, three voices to keep straight, and invoices nobody chases but you. Start from a consultant's week below, then move every slider until it matches yours.
Starting point: Consultants & freelancers
A starting point, not a measurement of any real consultant's time: three client inboxes instead of one, and a freelance rate that has to cover its own overhead. Every slider below is yours to move. See the numbers for how we picked it.
Your numbers
Per year
Show the maths
Hours/day × working days = hours/week on email. Add recurring reports and newsletter/news reading, then multiply by 52 weeks. No hidden multipliers.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Where the hours actually go
A new client always opens with the same question about timelines and what's included. The answer barely changes between clients, yet writing it out fresh each time still takes real effort. A drafted answer, adjusted for that client's own tone, cuts most of that effort away.
A client's payment stays outstanding, and there's no accounts team to chase it up. Either the reminder goes out today, or the invoice waits quietly for another month. A drafted nudge, ready to send with one click, removes the excuse to keep putting it off.
A client's monthly report needs numbers pulled from a full month of scattered notes and old emails. None of it is hard to find on its own, but gathering it together always eats an evening. Pulling those notes together automatically would turn an evening's work into a quick read-through.
A handful of industry newsletters and forums promise to keep a freelancer current on the market. Reading them properly on top of billable work rarely happens, so most weeks they just pile up. A short digest at a set time would return those hours to billable work instead.
Read next
Beemy is in private beta. Join the waitlist and go from connect to a quiet, triaged inbox before you close your laptop tonight.
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To join the waitlist, go to beemy.co/waitlist.