Wavebox: what the free tier covers

Anyone pricing up a browser that keeps multiple accounts signed in at once is really asking a narrower question than the pricing page answers. Not what does it cost, but whether the free plan will hold for the particular setup in mind, and if not, when it will stop holding. That is a question about limits and about a date, not about a monthly figure.

What follows covers the published numbers, the exact point where the free plan runs out, and the parts of the billing arrangement that are easy to miss until the first renewal.

The trial and the free plan are not the same thing

These get conflated constantly, and the difference matters for planning.

The trial is 7 days of the Pro tier, started without entering a credit card. At the end of those seven days, nothing is charged. The account moves down to the free Basic plan, which has no expiry date at all. So there are two free things on offer: a short period with everything unlocked, and an indefinite period with a defined set of limits.

One detail makes the trial more useful than it first appears. Anything added during those seven days, including apps and saved links, becomes available again on upgrading later. Building a realistic setup during the trial and watching where it exceeds the Basic limits costs nothing and produces a real answer rather than an estimate. A cautious trial, kept deliberately small to avoid losing work, produces no information at all.

What the free plan allows

The pricing page lists Basic as including two groups with two apps in each, one extension, and one dashboard.

In practical terms that is enough to stay signed in to two separate mail accounts, work and personal, with a small number of pinned apps arranged around them. The download page describes the same allowance in plainer language, as continuing to use the product for free with two Gmail accounts.

It is worth noticing that the published wording is not identical everywhere. The plan card counts groups and apps. The pricing page answer about the free version describes two groups and two spaces. The download page counts mail accounts. These describe the same allowance from different angles, but anyone whose decision depends on an exact count should confirm it inside the application rather than from any single page, including this one.

The important structural point is that this is a genuine free tier rather than a time-limited demo. A setup that fits inside those limits can stay there indefinitely without a payment method on file.

Where the ceiling arrives

The free plan does not degrade gradually. It stops at three specific boundaries, and most people hit one of them within a few months rather than on day one.

Situation	Covered by the free plan
Work mail plus personal mail	Yes
A third client or context added	No, exceeds the group limit
Ad blocker plus password manager	No, only one extension allowed
Same setup restored on a second machine	No, cloud sync is a paid item
More than one dashboard	No, one is included
Two people sharing an arrangement	No, that is the Teams tier

The third client is the most common trigger, and it is also the most predictable. Someone whose work grows by one client per quarter, needing one group per client, can name the month the limit will bite. That number is a better basis for a decision than any comparison of features.

The second most common trigger is quieter. One extension sounds generous until the list is written down, because an ad blocker and a password manager together already make two. The product does ship a number of capabilities built in, which reduces how many extensions are needed, so the honest test is to list the extensions actually relied on today rather than assuming the worst.

The third trigger only appears at the wrong moment. Cloud sync is a paid feature, so a free setup lives on one machine. Nobody notices until a laptop is replaced and the arrangement has to be rebuilt by hand.

What a year of Pro costs

Pro is listed at $8.33 per month, paid annually. Twelve of those months land at roughly $100 for the year, and that same round figure appears in a customer quote on the vendor's own download page, which is a useful corroboration of the annual total.

That $8.33 is the only Pro figure printed on the pricing page. The download page mentions that a subscription can be taken monthly or annually, but a monthly rate is not published alongside the annual one, so any monthly figure quoted elsewhere should be verified in the application before being used in a budget.

What Pro removes is the list of limits above. Unlimited spaces, groups and apps. All extensions rather than one. Cloud sync. Unlimited dashboards. In other words, the paid tier is not a different product with extra features so much as the same product with the counters switched off, which makes the upgrade decision unusually simple: either the counters are in the way or they are not.

Prices are quoted in US dollars. For anyone paying in another currency, the amount charged moves with the exchange rate, so a figure converted today is an approximation rather than a fixed annual cost. Plan boundaries and what sits behind each one are set out in Pricing.

What the one extension limit really costs

The single extension allowance on the free plan reads as the harshest limit on the list, and its actual weight depends on something most comparisons ignore.

A number of capabilities that usually arrive as extensions are built into the product itself. The site puts the count at more than twenty built-in, alongside access to the Chrome Web Store for everything else. Where that overlaps with a reader's current list, the free plan's single slot stretches further than the number suggests. Where it does not overlap, the slot is gone immediately.

The way to settle this is arithmetic rather than argument. Write down every extension currently relied on, then mark the ones whose job is already covered without installing anything. Whatever remains is the real demand. A reader left with one item has a free plan that works. A reader left with three has a paid plan, and knows why, which is a better position than upgrading on a general feeling that the free version is restrictive.

The dashboard limit deserves the same treatment. One dashboard is included on the free plan and the count is unlimited on Pro. For someone who keeps a single overview page, that ceiling never arrives. For someone who wants one per client, it arrives on the second client. Neither of those readers is served by a general statement about whether the free tier is generous.

This is the pattern across the whole price list: the limits are counters rather than missing capabilities, so the honest question is always how many, never whether.

When the Teams tier is the right answer

Teams is listed at $12.50 per month per user, and it includes everything in Pro plus a set of items that only make sense with more than one person involved: shared dashboards, a connection feature between members, a live component, and consolidated billing.

The last of those is the one that decides it in practice. Two people on individual Pro subscriptions pay less per head than two people on Teams. What they do not get is one invoice, one place to add and remove people, or a shared arrangement that new joiners inherit. For a two person operation that difference may be worth nothing. For an agency adding a contractor every few months, the administrative cost of individual subscriptions grows faster than the price gap.

A reasonable rule is to stay on individual subscriptions while the arrangement is personal, and move to Teams when someone other than the user is expected to reproduce the setup. Which services can be configured this way at all is listed under Supported apps.

Discounts, refunds, and getting out

Three parts of the commercial arrangement are published and easy to overlook.

A 70 percent discount is offered for full-time education, for people working in education, and for non-profit organisations. It is not applied automatically. The stated process is to start a 7 day trial using an education address or a .org address, then email support to claim it. Anyone eligible who subscribes first and asks later has made the process harder than it needed to be.

A 30 day money back guarantee is offered, described as no quibble, with refunds handled by emailing support. That effectively extends the evaluation window well past the seven day trial, provided the calendar is watched.

Cancellation is done inside the application, under the billing section of the account area, rather than through a support request. Checking where that control lives before subscribing is a small habit that avoids an unpleasant search later.

The four things to re-check before paying for any tool

Price is only one of the facts that can change on a subscription, and it is not the one that causes the most disruption. Four are worth confirming directly on the vendor's own pages before committing.

Whether the product is being discontinued. Whether new signups are still open, since some products keep serving existing customers while closing the door to new ones. Whether the operator has changed, because support arrangements and roadmaps often change with it. And whether the price has moved since the article being read was written.

On the published pages at the time of writing, the first three show nothing unusual. Downloads and trials are open to new users with no waitlist, there is no discontinuation notice, and the site footer names the operator as Wavebox (Bookry Ltd), with a United Kingdom address in Bangor. The pricing page also describes the company as independently funded and profitable, which is a claim from the vendor rather than a verified figure, and should be read as such.

Price is the item on that list most likely to have moved by the time this is read, so the figures above are a starting point for a check rather than a substitute for one. Common questions about plan boundaries are collected in the FAQ.

What to change first

Count the contexts that need to stay signed in at the same time, and count the extensions genuinely in use. If both numbers are two or fewer, the free plan is the answer and no decision is needed today. If either number is already three, the useful next step is working out the month it became three, because that date is what the subscription is actually buying back. The reasoning behind giving each app its own independent window is set out by SpaceDeck.