Team Email Cost Calculator

How we calculate

The model has three constants and three inputs. The constants are 1 minute per email, 250 working days a year, 8 hours a day, so a working year is 2,000 hours. The inputs are yours: team size, emails per person per day, and the average annual salary.

• Hours per person per year = emails per day × 1 minute × 250 days ÷ 60
• Hourly rate = average salary ÷ 2,000 hours
• Cost per person = hours per year × hourly rate
• Annual email cost = cost per person × team size
• Full-time equivalent = team hours per year ÷ 2,000

One minute per email is a floor, not a measurement. Deleting a newsletter takes five seconds; answering a client takes ten minutes; the average across a real inbox lands somewhere above a minute. Salary is base salary, not loaded cost, so the true figure is higher than the one on screen. If you want a conservative number to put in front of a manager, this is it.

What it adds up to

Per person, the figure looks manageable: an hour or so a day, a few thousand a year. Multiply it by the team and it becomes a salary, then two. The full-time-equivalent line is the one to read first: it says how many people, in effect, your company employs to process email.

The hours are not spent writing. Most of them go to triage (what is this, is it for me, does it need an answer), to re-reading threads to find the one decision buried in them, and to the context switch back to the work that was interrupted. The reply itself is a small share of the minute.

The equivalences above put the yearly figure next to things a company actually buys. They are assumptions, not statistics: each tile shows the unit cost it is built on, so you can swap in your own.

What an agent changes

Advice on email usually stops at habits: batch it, unsubscribe, use templates. Those help, and they depend on every person on the team keeping them up. An agent that sits in front of the inbox changes the volume that reaches a human in the first place. Five things it takes off the pile:

1. Triage before anyone opens the inbox. Every incoming message is read, labelled and sorted: needs an answer, needs a decision, for information, noise. People open a short list, not a feed.
2. Drafted replies, sent by a human. For the messages that need an answer, a draft is waiting, written from your templates and from the thread's context. Reading and correcting a draft takes a fraction of writing one.
3. Archiving and unsubscribing by rule. Notifications, receipts, newsletters and automated reports are filed where they belong, or unsubscribed, without a person touching them.
4. Processing windows instead of notifications. Nothing interrupts. The sorted list is ready at the times you choose, so the context switch happens twice a day rather than forty times.
5. Routing to the right person or tool. A request for a quote goes to the CRM, a bug report to the ticketing tool, a contract question to the person who handles contracts, each with a summary. Someone still decides; nobody forwards.

The system runs on your infrastructure or on a dedicated server, connected to the mailbox and the tools you already use, and every message it sends goes out under a person's name after that person has read it. Run the calculator with the volume that would remain after triage to see the difference.