ActiveCampaign Pricing 2026: Plans, Cost and Contact Tiers

ActiveCampaign sells four self serve plans. At 1,000 contacts they cost $15 a month on Starter, $49 on Plus, $79 on Pro and $145 on Enterprise. Those are the numbers on the pricing page, and they are the numbers almost every roundup reprints. They are also the cheapest row of a fifteen row table, so treating them as "the price of ActiveCampaign" will understate a real bill by a wide margin.

Two things about that first row matter more than the numbers themselves. First, ActiveCampaign meters on contacts stored, not emails sent, so the bill tracks how big your database is rather than how much outreach you actually do. Second, and this is the part the roundups almost never say plainly, every published price assumes a twelve month commitment. The pricing page carries no month to month toggle at all. We checked the rendered page directly: the billing label under each plan card is hardcoded to "Billed annually," and the string "monthly" appears on that page only as the "/mo" unit next to the number.

So the honest reading of $15 is not "fifteen dollars a month." It is "fifteen dollars a month if you pay for a year." That single fact reframes most ActiveCampaign versus Mailchimp comparisons you will read, because Mailchimp publishes month to month rates by default.

There is no free plan. ActiveCampaign runs a 14 day free trial and states on the pricing page that no credit card is needed. The page also carries a results guarantee: "Grow with confidence. Guaranteed results in 30 days or your money back."

ActiveCampaign publishes fifteen contact bands per plan, which is sixty prices in total, and no roundup we could find carries the whole table. We read every one of them from ActiveCampaign's own pricing selector with the currency forced to USD. Prices are per month, billed annually.

The ladder is split across two tables below only so it stays readable on a phone. Starter and Plus first.

Then Pro and Enterprise, which is where most multi seat teams end up.

The selector's top option is ">200,000" and it does not produce a new price, so 200,000 contacts is the last band ActiveCampaign publishes. Above that the buttons switch to a sales conversation.

Read down the Starter column and you will spot the thing that makes this table worth having.

ActiveCampaign's Starter plan hits $391 a month at 25,000 contacts and stays at exactly $391 all the way to 200,000 contacts. It is the only plan in the table with a ceiling. Plus keeps climbing to $1,999, Pro to $2,135 and Enterprise to $2,415 over that same stretch.

That turns Starter into something unusual above 25,000 contacts: a flat fee. The practical effect on cost per contact is dramatic.

From 1,000 to 25,000 contacts Starter costs a remarkably steady $15 or so per thousand contacts. Then the meter switches off and the rate falls by a factor of eight. A 200,000 contact list on Starter costs the same $391 as a 25,000 contact list.

Before you get excited, understand what Starter actually is. It allows five actions per automation, limited segmentation, 15 active business goals and one user. It is a deliberately narrow plan, and ActiveCampaign has clearly decided that people who need real automation will not sit on it regardless of price. But if your use case genuinely is large list, simple broadcast, one operator, the ceiling is real and it is the cheapest published rate in this market segment.

At the 25,000 contact band, ActiveCampaign Starter costs $391 a month and Plus costs $389. The cheaper looking plan is two dollars more expensive. This is not a rounding artifact, it is what the pricing selector returns, and it happens because Starter's curve is flattening into its ceiling at the same band where Plus is still climbing normally.

Nobody should buy Starter at 25,000 contacts. For two dollars less per month, Plus gives you standard segmentation instead of limited, unlimited automation actions instead of five per automation, 25 active business goals instead of 15, and landing pages. It is a strictly better plan at a strictly lower price, in one specific band.

The gap closes gradually rather than suddenly. At 5,000 contacts Plus costs $66 more than Starter. At 20,000 it is $18 more. At 25,000 it is $2 less. Then Starter's ceiling kicks in and the relationship inverts permanently in the other direction: by 100,000 contacts Plus costs $808 more than Starter, and by 200,000 it costs $1,608 more.

Moving from 1,000 to 2,500 contacts raises a Starter bill from $15 to $39, a 160 percent increase for 1,500 extra addresses. That is the single sharpest step in all sixty prices, and it lands on the plan most likely to be bought by someone testing the product.

The pattern is that the early steps are brutal and then the curve calms down, but unlike Constant Contact's ladder the decay is not monotonic. Plus drops to an 11.8 percent step at 10,000 contacts and then jumps back to 40.2 percent at 15,000, and jumps again to 44.3 percent at 75,000. Pro does the same thing: 10.2 percent at 50,000, then 41.9 percent at 75,000.

The practical consequence is that you cannot estimate an ActiveCampaign bill by interpolating. There is no per contact rate to multiply. You have to look up your band, and you have to look up the band above it before you commit, because a 5,000 contact import can cost anywhere from 10 percent to 44 percent more depending on where you currently sit.

Because ActiveCampaign bills on contacts, the only way to compare it to a sending platform is to convert. The send allowance is a multiple of your contact tier, and the multiple depends on your plan: Starter and Plus are both 10x, Pro is 12x, Enterprise is 15x.

For context, Amazon SES charges $0.10 per thousand emails a la carte. ActiveCampaign Enterprise at its entry band therefore costs roughly 97 times the raw sending rate, and Starter at its entry band about 15 times. You are obviously paying for automation, a CRM and a visual builder rather than for SMTP, but it is worth knowing the size of the multiple before you decide to run bulk sending through a marketing automation platform.

The rate improves enormously with scale, and Starter's ceiling makes it the outlier again.

Starter at 200,000 contacts works out to $0.20 per thousand emails, which is only twice the SES rate and cheaper per send than any other plan in this comparison. That is a genuinely strange corner of the pricing table, and it exists purely because of the $391 ceiling.

ActiveCampaign Starter and Plus both include exactly one user. The second login forces you onto Pro. Pro includes three users and Enterprise includes five.

That makes seats, not contacts, the real upgrade trigger for most teams, and the cost of that trigger scales with your list.

At 10,000 contacts, adding one colleague nearly doubles the bill. The jump buys you more than a seat (Pro adds predictive and conditional content, attribution and conversion tracking, and a 12x rather than 10x send multiple) but if all you needed was a second login, the effective price of that login is $186 a month.

The Enterprise premium over Pro behaves oddly too. It is $66 at 1,000 contacts, widens to $250 at 25,000, then narrows to just $72 at 75,000 contacts before widening again. If you are anywhere near 75,000 contacts and were considering Pro, price Enterprise as well. It is the one band where SSO and a dedicated account team cost almost nothing extra.

Search "ActiveCampaign pricing" and you will get four or five mutually contradictory figures for the same plan at the same list size. There are four causes, and none of them is that someone is lying.

1. Annual versus month to month. This is the big one. ActiveCampaign's pricing page publishes only annual commitment rates. Month to month exists at checkout and costs more, so any article that quotes a higher number is probably quoting monthly. ActiveCampaign's own material describes annual billing as saving up to 20 percent. We deliberately do not print month to month figures here because we could not read them from ActiveCampaign directly, and inventing them from a percentage would be exactly the guesswork this page exists to replace.

2. The entry band gets published as the plan price. "$15 to $145 a month" describes the 1,000 contact row of a fifteen row table. At 50,000 contacts the same four plans are $391, $609, $969 and $1,169.

3. Regional pricing pages. ActiveCampaign runs separate pricing pages for at least Brazil, Germany, Spain, France and Italy, and the currency selector offers USD, BRL, CAD, AUD, EUR and GBP. A figure scraped without forcing US locale can easily be euros or Canadian dollars.

4. Retired plan names. ActiveCampaign has renamed its tiers more than once. Articles still rank that refer to Lite, Professional and older Marketing and Sales bundle structures. The current self serve set is Starter, Plus, Pro and Enterprise.

One more note on sourcing. ActiveCampaign's pricing page displays a star rating and a review count. We have not reprinted those, here or anywhere else on this site, because a vendor's own summary of its reviews is marketing rather than a specification. The prices above are specifications, and every one of them came from ActiveCampaign.

No. ActiveCampaign's Anti-Spam Policy prohibits sending to any contact who did not opt in through your own process, and it is unusually explicit about what does not count as consent. This matters if you found this page while pricing an outbound tool, because the cheapest plan in the world is worthless if the account gets reviewed and shut off.

The relevant clauses are short and worth reading in full. On lists, section 1.3 says: "We do not allow any form of paid, rented, borrowed, etc. lists. If you did not directly get permission to send emails to a subscriber you cannot use our hosted email marketing service."

On imports, section 1.2: "Importing subscribers who have not directly requested emails from you in the past (using your own opt-in process) cannot be imported."

And then the line that settles the question, from section 1.4: "Please note that simply getting someone's business card is not an acceptable opt-in and you cannot import or send to emails that you have obtained from business cards."

We have now read the acceptable use terms of most major sending platforms for this site, and that business card sentence is the strictest single consent standard in the set. Constant Contact says an event registration or a social follow is not consent. Mailchimp bans purchased, rented, third party and co-registration lists. ActiveCampaign rules out a business card handed to you in person at a conference. A prospect list scraped or bought is not a close call under that policy.

Enforcement runs through bounce, unsubscribe and complaint monitoring. Sections 3.1 through 3.3 all use the same phrase, that accounts with abnormal rates "may be put under review," and ActiveCampaign states it obtains complaint data directly from ISPs. The Terms of Service (last updated December 23, 2025) add that ActiveCampaign may "suspend, restrict or terminate your access to or use of the Services if we suspect, in our sole discretion," a policy violation.

The Anti-Spam Policy itself carries a last updated date of September 8, 2021, which is worth noting only because it means this is settled long standing policy rather than a recent tightening.

A detail that almost never appears in ActiveCampaign pricing coverage: Postmark, the transactional email provider, is an ActiveCampaign product. Postmark's own site carries "Made with love at ActiveCampaign" and a copyright line reading "© ActiveCampaign, LLC, 2026" in its footer.

That is useful if you are shopping the ActiveCampaign ecosystem, because the two products meter in opposite ways and suit opposite jobs.

If your actual problem is application email (receipts, password resets, notifications) then Postmark's pricing starts at $15 for 10,000 emails a month and is a far better fit than a contact tier. If your problem is outbound prospecting, neither ActiveCampaign nor Postmark is built for it, and both have terms that discourage it.

ActiveCampaign now sells WhatsApp as a separate channel alongside email, with its own contact selector. The published entry prices at 1,000 WhatsApp contacts are $99 on Plus, $99 on Pro and $218 on Enterprise. There is no Starter option for WhatsApp.

The oddity is that Plus and Pro cost the same $99. On the WhatsApp only tab the plan tier makes no difference to price at the entry band, which is not true anywhere in the email table.

The bundle numbers come from a tab with its own contact selectors (WhatsApp contacts on the combined tab start at 5,000, not 1,000), so read the bundle row as an entry price for the combined product rather than as a like for like sum of the two rows above it. WhatsApp credits are separately described in the Terms of Service as non transferable and non refundable, and ActiveCampaign states you will receive no refund if Meta suspends your WhatsApp Business Account.

Entry price alone is a poor comparison because these products meter different things, but it is the number people search for, so here it is with the meter attached.

ActiveCampaign is the most expensive entry point of the three contact ladder platforms, and it is the only one of the three whose published price requires an annual commitment. In exchange it has by a clear margin the strongest automation builder and the only real CRM in that group. Whether that trade is worth $2 a month more than Constant Contact depends entirely on whether you will use the automation.

If you want the same treatment for the other two ladders, we have read them the same way: Mailchimp's twenty band ladder and Constant Contact's thirteen bands are both mapped in full, including the steps that catch people out.