Constant Contact Pricing 2026: Cost, Plans and Fees by Tier

Constant Contact sells three self serve plans: Lite at $12 a month, Standard at $35 a month and Premium at $80 a month. Those are the prices at the smallest tier, up to 500 contacts. There is no free plan. Above 500 contacts the price moves up a published 13 step ladder that ends at $430 on Lite, $460 on Standard and $575 on Premium, and anything past 50,000 contacts is quoted by the sales team.

There is a fourth option, Multi-Account, aimed at teams and franchises that need five or more separate accounts. It has no published price and routes to sales.

Every plan includes live phone and chat support, a 14 day free trial with no credit card, and a 30 day money back guarantee. Constant Contact's own guidance is that Standard suits most small businesses, because that is the tier where email scheduling, subject line testing and automatic resend to non openers appear.

Your bill is set by which contact band you land in, not by your exact contact count. Constant Contact publishes the ladder behind a "See pricing tiers" link on its pricing page, and it is the single most useful thing on that page. Here is the Lite ladder in full, with the monthly send allowance each tier carries.

Standard is the same 13 bands at a higher price, and it is the tier Constant Contact itself recommends for most small businesses.

Premium carries the largest send allowance and includes 500 SMS messages a month.

A note on the send column. Constant Contact's pricing FAQ states the allowance is 10 times your contact tier on Lite, 12 times on Standard and 24 times on Premium. The tier table on the same page labels every one of its three tabs "10x contact tier allowance". Those two statements disagree, and we have shown the FAQ figures above because they are the more specific claim. Confirm your own allowance in your account before you plan a send volume around it.

Adding one contact past 500 raises a Lite bill from $12 to $30 a month, an increase of 150% for a single email address. That is by far the steepest step on the ladder, and it catches people who signed up at the advertised $12 and then imported a list.

The same jump on Standard is $35 to $55 (+57.1%) and on Premium $80 to $110 (+37.5%). After that first step every increase gets smaller, all the way down to +7.5% at the top of the ladder.

The pattern is worth internalizing before you pick a plan: on Constant Contact, the cheapest tiers have the most violent price movement. The first four steps on Lite (500 to 5,000 contacts) take the bill from $12 to $80, a 567% increase, while the last four steps (35,000 to 50,000 contacts) move it from $340 to $430, a 26% increase.

Because Constant Contact prices in bands, the effective rate you pay per contact depends entirely on where you sit inside your band. Land at the bottom of a band and you pay roughly twice the per contact rate of someone at the top of the same band, for the same money.

A Lite account with 2,501 contacts pays $80 a month, which is $31.99 per 1,000 contacts. A Lite account with 5,000 contacts pays the same $80, which is $16.00 per 1,000. Same bill, half the rate.

The practical consequence: a genuine list cleanup that takes you from 5,001 contacts to 5,000 cuts a Lite bill by $40 a month, and going from 10,001 to 10,000 cuts it by $60 a month, a 33% reduction for removing one address. Constant Contact bills unengaged contacts the same as engaged ones, so pruning people who have not opened anything in a year is usually good list hygiene and a real saving at the same time.

One honest caveat, because it matters. Constant Contact's Acceptable Use Policy specifically prohibits customers who "repeatedly upload and remove unique email addresses or telephone numbers, materially misrepresent the number of contacts you initially intend to include in your account upon signing up for the Services, or otherwise try to manipulate data in an attempt to circumvent our Fees or other billing procedures." Cleaning a list once is list hygiene. Cycling contacts in and out every month to stay under a band is a policy violation, and the penalty in the same policy is account termination without a refund.

If you exceed your monthly send allowance, Constant Contact keeps sending and bills the extra at $0.002 per email, which is $2 per 1,000 sends. Nothing pauses and nothing is held. That is a meaningfully different behavior from several competitors: Brevo stops sending when you exhaust your allowance, and Mailchimp's free tier holds your campaigns entirely once you pass 250 contacts.

Here is the finding that no pricing roundup carries. Because the plan's own effective send rate falls as you scale, overage is actually cheaper than your plan rate below about 2,500 contacts, and progressively worse above it.

Read practically: a small Lite account that occasionally needs more sends is better off paying the overage than buying a bigger contact tier it does not need, because the tier is priced on contacts it will not use. A large account should do the opposite and keep its sends inside the allowance, because at 50,000 contacts every overage email costs more than double the in plan rate.

Cost per 1,000 sends across the whole ladder, at the top of each band:

For scale, Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails on its a la carte rate. Constant Contact's entry tier works out to 24 times that, and its best published rate is still roughly 5 times. You are paying for the editor, the templates, the automation, the phone support and the deliverability work, not for raw sending capacity.

The gap between plans is almost flat in dollars, which means upgrading is expensive at the bottom of the ladder and nearly free at the top. Standard costs $23 more than Lite at 500 contacts, which is 2.9 times the Lite price. At 50,000 contacts Standard costs $30 more, which is only 1.07 times the Lite price.

Premium sits a flat $115 above Standard at every tier from 5,001 contacts upward, without exception. So the decision changes shape depending on list size. On a 500 contact list, choosing Standard nearly triples your bill and you should be sure you need the automation. On a 25,000 contact list, Standard costs 11% more than Lite and the automation, segmentation and reporting are close to a rounding error.

What you get for the money, by plan:

Prepaying 12 months saves up to 15%, which takes Lite to $10.20, Standard to $29.75 and Premium to $68 a month at the entry tier. Those figures are exactly 85% of list price, so the discount applies cleanly across the ladder rather than being a promotional teaser rate that reverts.

Nonprofits do better. Constant Contact gives a 20% discount for prepaying six months and 30% for prepaying 12 months, and states plainly that there is no nonprofit discount if you pay monthly. To qualify in the United States you must send a federal Letter of Determination for 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) status. Constant Contact says explicitly that Tax Pay ID paperwork does not count, and that you should not buy a prepay plan before your nonprofit pricing is confirmed, because the discount cannot be applied retroactively to a plan you already purchased.

The SMS add on is priced separately and is not part of the plan discount conversation. Premium includes 500 messages a month. On Lite and Standard, SMS starts at $10 a month for up to 500 messages with higher tiers above that. Add ons like SMS change your monthly total on top of the contact tier.

These two are the most compared products in small business email, and almost every comparison you will find puts three entry prices side by side and stops. Both vendors actually publish a full contact ladder, so here is the like for like comparison at matched contact counts, using each vendor's mid tier plan.

The two ladders cross at around 15,000 contacts. Below that Mailchimp is consistently cheaper, by 43% at 500 contacts and by 16% at 10,000. At 15,000 contacts Constant Contact becomes cheaper, because Mailchimp's steepest step is crossing 10,000 contacts, where its Standard plan jumps from $135 to $230, a 70.4% increase for 50% more contacts. By 25,000 the two are identical at $310, and above that they stay within a few percent of each other.

Three differences that matter more than the dollars. Constant Contact keeps sending when you exceed your allowance and bills $0.002 an email; Mailchimp bills a contact block instead. Constant Contact has a 30 day money back guarantee; Mailchimp does not offer one. Mailchimp bills on the highest contact count reached during a cycle, so importing and deleting a list in the same month still costs you; Constant Contact bills on your tier. We have not reproduced either vendor's own review score or star rating here, because neither is something we can verify.

Constant Contact's Acceptable Use Policy, last modified July 22, 2026, prohibits sending to any list the recipients did not directly consent to. If you are pricing Constant Contact for outbound prospecting, the answer is not that one tier is too expensive. The answer is that no tier permits the use case.

The operative sentence, quoted directly: "You agree not to send messages through the Services to distribution lists, newsgroups, publicly available press or media addresses, email addresses or telephone numbers that are purchased, borrowed, third-party or any other lists that have not directly consented to receive communications, promotions or advertisements from your business."

The same policy bans "emails or Texts to addresses obtained through internet harvesting methods or other methods such as scraping or harvesting", which covers essentially every way a prospecting list gets built. It also closes the doors people usually try next. Constant Contact states that it is not sufficient consent if a person "participates in a survey or registers for an event, clicks Like on your Facebook page, or follows you on Twitter". And it prohibits setting up "multiple accounts for any individual or organization in order to send substantially similar content" unless you are part of a franchise, which rules out splitting sends across accounts.

The enforcement language is not soft. Constant Contact reserves the right to "terminate your access to or use of the Services, disable your account or access to the Services, and remove all or a portion of your content, in each case at any time, with or without notice and without refund."

To be straight about it, a researched B2B prospecting list is not the same thing as a purchased list, and CAN-SPAM does not require prior consent for commercial email in the United States the way opt in marketing platforms do. But Constant Contact's contract is stricter than the law, and that contract is what governs your account. If outbound is what you are doing, you want a tool built for it rather than a newsletter platform whose terms you would be breaking on day one. That is why choosing the right SMTP for cold email is a different decision from choosing an email marketing plan.

Search this topic and you will get $12, $35, $80, $10.20, $29.75, $68 and a scattering of numbers that match nothing on the vendor's site. All of them can be defended, which is exactly the problem. Four causes, all checkable:

That last one causes the most confusion. Constant Contact has renamed its tiers more than once, and articles written against the older Email and Email Plus structure, or the Core and Plus structure, are still ranking. If a page you are reading mentions those names, its prices are not current.

The region issue is real and easy to trip over. Constant Contact's pricing page declares alternate versions for en-US, en-CA, en-GB, en-AU and en-NZ. Every figure on this page was read from the en-US page with US locale headers, so all prices here are USD.

Constant Contact is a good fit if you own a permission based list, you want phone support, and your sending is campaign shaped: newsletters, events, promotions to people who asked to hear from you. Live phone and chat support on every plan is genuinely unusual at $12 a month, the event marketing tools are better than most competitors bother to build, and the 30 day refund removes most of the risk of trying it.

It is the wrong buy in three situations. First, outbound prospecting, for the policy reasons above. Second, very high send volume against a small list, where you are paying contact tier prices for send capacity you could buy for a fraction elsewhere. Third, a developer sending transactional email, where a dedicated API service is both cheaper and better suited.

If you are comparing on cost per email rather than cost per contact, our cold email software pricing comparison lines up the sending focused tools on the same basis, and the Amazon SES pricing breakdown shows what raw sending actually costs when you strip the marketing platform out.