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
This is a starting point, not a measurement of any real consultant's time. It assumes three client inboxes instead of one. It also assumes a freelance rate that must 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 depends on context. It needs little judgement. In most inboxes we have looked at in early beta, it is most of the time. The remaining share is judgement calls that still come back to you. This is our own working assumption, not a measured industry figure. We have not yet published usage data from our own beta to replace it.
We have not measured this figure. Every draft waits for a one-tap review until its category earns level 2. Only four categories can ever reach auto-send: meeting_confirmation, scheduling_ack, simple_ack and routing_filing. See /what-you-still-do for the full case. Twenty percent is our own guess at what that ongoing review costs you. It is not a study. 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 is our own assumption, not a citation. So is the 20% review share we subtract back out. So are the starting numbers for every preset. Every number this calculator uses, sourced or assumed, is on /the-numbers.
Where the hours 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 pile up. A short digest at a set time would return those hours to billable work instead.
Read next
Beemy is in private beta. We send invites in rolling batches. We cannot promise a date. When your invite arrives, connect Gmail. Beemy sorts your inbox in that first session.
You're in the hive. You get no email now. We write to you once, when your invite is ready.
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To join the waitlist, go to beemy.co/waitlist.