ActiveCampaign Buyer's Checklist: 26 Questions, Six With No Published Answer

ActiveCampaign is unusually easy to research and unusually easy to get wrong. The vendor publishes more hard numbers than any product we have measured, and its pricing page shows fewer of them than most. This list is what to establish before you sign, grouped by where the answer lives.

Twenty-six questions. Six have no published answer anywhere we could read, and those six are marked.

Billing term

1. Which billing term is the price you were quoted? Every figure on the pricing page is the annual rate. Month to month costs between 16.9% and 21.6% more, median 20.1% across the thirty-two combinations we measured^[3], and the page has no toggle.

2. Did anyone mention commit annually, pay monthly? It is worth up to 10% off and the pricing page never names it. The only vendor page that does is the help-centre article about cancelling^[7].

3. If you take the annual term, do you know it cannot be paused? Pausing is three months maximum, once every twelve months, "monthly plans only", and explicitly not available on commit annually, pay monthly^[12].

4. Do you know the annual term cannot be cancelled without a phone call? The terms grant self-service cancellation, but a commit-annually plan "must contact our Customer Experience team to cancel"^[7].

## Contacts

5. Which contact band are you actually on? The page offers twelve. The catalogue carries forty-eight on the middle tiers and forty-nine on Enterprise^[3]. The band is what you pay for.

6. Do unsubscribed, unconfirmed and bounced contacts count? Yes, and the vendor publishes it: "All contacts, regardless of their list status, count towards your contact limit", for accounts created on or after 3 November 2025^[11]. Older accounts count only active contacts.

7. What happens when you reach the limit? Sending stops, billing does not change. "Once you reach your contact limit, you will not be able to send any email campaigns until you upgrade your account"^[9]. Automations keep running with their send steps skipped.

8. Is auto-upgrade on? If it is, the terms say fees "increase immediately according to usage", pro-rated, and every renewal after that is at the new amount^[5]. Check the setting rather than assuming the default.

9. Can you lower the limit yourself later? No. "If you need to decrease your contact limit, please contact our Customer Experience team"^[10].

10. 🔴 Is there any pro-rated credit when you go down? No published answer. Pro-ration appears in the vendor's terms only in the direction that increases fees.

Sending

11. How many emails does your plan include? A multiple of the contact limit: ten times on Starter and Plus, twelve on Professional, fifteen on Enterprise^[2].

12. 🔴 Which rule applies when you exceed it? Genuinely unsettled. The terms say sending stops until the next calendar month^[5]. The help centre says you are charged half a cent an email and sending stops only at three times the limit^[8]. Get this one in writing.

13. When does the allowance reset? Also two answers: the calendar month in the terms, your billing cycle in the help centre. For anyone not billed on the first of the month, those are different days.

14. Do you know about the warning thresholds? In-app notifications at 75%, 90% and 100% of capacity, and an email to the primary admin at 75% and 100%. Users with billing permissions do not get that email, which is worth knowing if your finance person is not the primary admin^[8].

## Seats

15. How many seats are included? One, one, three and five from Starter up^[3].

16. Does your team fit? Starter caps at two seats. Every other tier caps at nine hundred and ninety-nine. An extra seat is ten dollars a month or ninety-six dollars a year, so two people on Starter at the entry band is two hundred and seventy-six dollars for the year.

The add-ons

17. 🔴 What does the Pipelines enhanced CRM add-on cost? No published answer. The page marks it "Available add-on" and the vendor's own billing catalogue carries an empty price ladder for it on all three tiers^[3].

18. 🔴 What does the Sales Engagement enhanced CRM add-on cost? No published answer, on the same footing.

19. 🔴 What does Custom Reporting cost? No published answer. It is "Available add-on" on Plus and Professional and "Included in plan" on Enterprise.

20. Do you need a pipeline at all? If you do, you need an add-on. Pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring are each marked "Included in add-on" on every tier that offers them^[2].

21. What does SMS cost, and do credits roll over? Twenty-one dollars a month for a thousand credits in the catalogue, and "Unused SMS credits do not rollover to the next month"^[3].

22. 🔴 What does the AI Activities add-on cost as such? No published answer. The catalogue has an Activities meter with zero included units on every tier, from a dollar a month for two hundred, and the page never connects the two.

## Leaving

23. Do you know there are no refunds? "As a policy, our company does not provide partial or full refunds"^[6]. No window, no guarantee, no exception.

24. Have you run a test export? Contacts to CSV, free and self-service, with custom fields, lead scores, deal scores and tags, on a link valid for seven days. "Contact notes cannot be exported"^[13].

25. Do you know automations have no file export? The only published way to take one out is a share link, which carries none of the campaigns, lists, scores, deals, pipelines, events or whitelisted domains it references^[14].

26. Do you know when access ends? At cancellation. "Upon cancellation or termination, you will not have access to or be able to restore any Contact Data", and the terms separately state that the service "does not serve as a repository for Contact Data"^[5]. Export first.

Capability

27. Which tier carries the feature you came for? The catalogue lists eleven entitlements on Starter and fifty-six on Plus^[3], so the first step up is the big one. Landing pages, site messages, contact scoring, combined segment logic, custom branding, custom user permissions, database sync and AI content generation all begin at Plus. If any of those is on your list, Starter is not a cheaper version of what you want.

28. Do you need predictive sending or attribution? Those begin at Professional, along with conditional content, the automations map, split automations and the premium ecommerce connectors for BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify Plus.

29. Do you need single sign-on, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Zendesk? All four are Enterprise-only entitlements in the catalogue^[3]. So is the custom object schema.

30. Have you checked the two fixed ceilings on Starter? Five lists and five actions per automation, both with maximum units equal to included units^[3]. These are not bands. They do not move.

31. Is Zapier in your plan? Worth asking explicitly. The catalogue carries a Zapier entitlement on the Plus tier and on no other, while the pricing page lists Zapier among its integrations with no tier marked^[2]. The two vendor sources disagree and we do not know which is current.

## Integrations and migration

32. How many of the 1,056 apply to you? The vendor's own marketplace counts 1,056 apps and integrations, which is the largest catalogue we have measured by an order of magnitude^[16]. It also classifies each one by who built it and by sync direction, which is more than most vendors publish.

33. Can you tell which ones your tier can use? Not from the page. The marketplace offers a plan filter, but the server returns the same total for every plan, so the per-tier count is not obtainable. Check the specific integrations you need against the tier, not the total.

34. Is the API on your plan? Yes, on every tier including Starter, along with webhooks. So is the Pipedrive integration, which is the one named CRM connector present at the entry level.

35. What are you migrating from, and what comes with it? Worth asking because of what leaves behind: automations have no file export anywhere in this product, so whatever you build here stays here in practice.

Two more worth asking even though they are answered

Your list quality. Suspension is automatic on complaint rates: "our system automatically places your account under review", and while a review is open "your campaigns will not send until the issue is resolved"^[15]. The anti-spam policy that governs this bans paid, rented and borrowed lists outright and states that "simply getting someone's business card is not an acceptable opt-in"^[17]. That policy is stamped September 2021, five years older than the terms beside it.

The trial's real limit. Fourteen days, no credit card, one user, features matching Professional, and one hundred email sends^[14]. A hundred sends is enough to test the builder and not enough to test deliverability, which is the thing a third of the unhappy reviews argue about.

## Deliverability, in more detail than most vendors give you

This deserves its own pass, because it is the only area where ActiveCampaign can switch your account off without you doing anything differently.

The review policy names its triggers individually. Higher-than-normal spam complaints, where "our system automatically places your account under review". Too many bounces found during campaign approval, which the vendor says "can indicate that your contacts list may not have properly opted in". Link patterns such as several redirects or shorteners. A chargeback, or a payment the vendor cannot verify. And an import that does not look opted in^[15].

The consequence is not a warning email and a grace period. It is immediate: "If your account is under review, your campaigns will not send until the issue is resolved." The vendor does say that advance notice goes out first, to the address in the account email field, which is worth checking is a mailbox somebody reads.

The policy underneath all of that is stricter than most and unusually concrete about where lists come from. Paid, rented and borrowed lists are banned outright. Offline collection needs "documented proof of the subscribers giving you permission", and the policy states that "simply getting someone's business card is not an acceptable opt-in"^[17]. There is a prohibited content list with no exceptions allowed.

Two things follow for a buyer. If your list came from anywhere other than your own opt-in, say so during the trial rather than after the first import. And note the date on that policy: September 2021, against terms of service updated in December 2025 and an account-review article updated this month. The rules that can suspend you are the oldest document in the set.

What good answers look like

A useful way to run this list is to sort the answers into three piles.

The first pile is published and specific, and ActiveCampaign has more of it than any product we have measured. The overage rate, the warning thresholds, the reset rule, the seat caps, the export columns, the pause limits, the trial ceiling and the answer on unsubscribed contacts are all written down, dated, and findable in minutes. When a vendor publishes the expensive answer — and "all contacts, regardless of their list status, count" is the expensive answer — that is a signal worth weighting.

The second pile is published twice, differently. There is one item in it and it is the send limit. Treat a contradiction between a vendor's terms and its help centre as unresolved rather than picking the friendlier version, because the terms are the document that governs.

The third pile is the six unpublished answers, and five of the six are prices. That is the pattern to notice: this vendor publishes mechanics generously and prices selectively. The mechanics tell you how the product behaves. The prices tell you what it costs. You need both, and only one of them is on the page.

## The shortest version

If you are buying ActiveCampaign, three numbers decide your cost and only one of them is on the page: the tier, the contact band and the billing term. Get all three in writing, along with the send-limit rule and the price of whichever add-on carries the feature you came for. Then run an export in month one and open the file.

One last thing, and it is the cheapest insurance on this list. The trial is fourteen days with no card, and the hundred-send ceiling means it will not tell you what you most need to know about an email platform. So use the trial for the builder, the segments and the automations, and ask the deliverability questions in writing instead. There are no refunds, so the trial and the written answers are the whole of your protection.