ActiveCampaign for Agencies: Who Holds the Account Decides Everything Else

An agency buys this product twice: once for itself and once, repeatedly, on behalf of clients. ActiveCampaign is built for both, and the two paths have different economics that the pricing page does not separate.

OUR TAKE: The white-label and permissions machinery an agency needs starts at the Plus tier, not the entry one. The more important decision is structural: whether client accounts sit under you or under them, because that choice determines who can cancel, who can export and who is on the hook when a list goes wrong.

The two models, and why the choice is commercial

ActiveCampaign's own documentation acknowledges the reseller path explicitly. The cancellation article states that "If your account is under an ActiveCampaign service provider, you must contact them for further assistance with the cancellation process"^[7].

That sentence is the whole model in one line. If the account is under you, your client cancels through you. If the account is theirs and you have a seat, they cancel without you.

Neither is wrong, and the trade is obvious once stated. Pick one deliberately. Holding the account gives you retention and billing control and makes you responsible for the list. Sitting on the client's account gives you neither and costs you nothing when it goes wrong.

The vendor also publishes a minimum advertised price policy, which exists precisely because resellers exist. It binds them to "the prices listed for each individual plan, tier, and contact amount at ActiveCampaign's pricing page"^[2]. If you are reselling, you are not discounting the licence; you are charging for your work on top of it.

## What the agency toolkit is, and where it starts

Four entitlements matter and all four begin at Plus, in the vendor's own catalogue^[3].

Custom user permissions, so a client sees their own data and not your templates.

Custom branding and custom branded forms and landing pages, so what the client's audience sees carries their identity rather than the platform's.

A custom account domain, recorded in the catalogue as the CNAME entitlement, which is the piece that makes links and pages look like the client's own.

And label management, which is the housekeeping layer once you are running more than a handful of campaigns across accounts.

The entry tier has none of those. Not one. It has eleven entitlements in total^[3], and it caps at two seats, which is already too few for an agency account with a client contact on it.

Seats, which are the agency's real meter

Plan	Seats included	Seat maximum
Starter	1	2
Plus	1	999
Professional	3	999
Enterprise	5	999

From the vendor's catalogue^[3]. An extra seat is ten dollars a month or ninety-six dollars a year.

The shape to notice is that Plus includes one seat and allows nine hundred and ninety-nine. So an agency on Plus with a team of four is paying the plan plus three seats, which is three hundred and sixty dollars a year on top, while Professional includes three and costs three hundred and sixty dollars a year more than Plus at the entry band.

That is a genuine coin flip at four people and tips to Professional at five, before you count the capabilities Professional adds. Run your own numbers.

## Pricing a client account honestly

The arithmetic a client will eventually ask you to show.

Contacts	Plus, $/mo	Professional, $/mo
1,000	49	79
5,000	145	205
10,000	189	375
25,000	389	629

All annual rates^[3]. Two things to flag in a proposal.

Those are annual rates, and the month-to-month equivalents are between 16.9% and 21.6% higher. Quote the term you are actually buying.

And the contact band is the lever, not the tier. Between one thousand and ten thousand contacts the Plus plan roughly quadruples while the tier stays the same. If your client's list grows, your retainer maths has to grow with it or you absorb the difference.

The thing that stops a client campaign

Agencies get called when sending stops, so it is worth knowing the two ways it happens here.

The contact band: "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, which is the version that looks fine in the interface and is not.

Account review: "our system automatically places your account under review" on higher-than-normal spam complaints, and while a review is open "your campaigns will not send until the issue is resolved"^[15]. Bounces found during campaign approval, link shorteners and redirects, and a chargeback are the other published triggers.

The second one is the agency risk. The anti-spam policy bans paid, rented and borrowed lists outright and states that "simply getting someone's business card is not an acceptable opt-in"^[17]. If a client hands you a list of unknown provenance, that is your account under review, not theirs.

Put list provenance in the contract. Every time.

## Warnings go to one person

A small operational detail with real consequences for an agency. Check it on every account.

The capacity warnings are published: in-app notifications at 75%, 90% and 100% of the monthly send allowance, plus an email to the primary admin at 75% and 100%. The vendor states that "Users with billing permissions are not sent this email notification"^[8].

So if the client is the primary admin and you are the one who manages sending, the warnings arrive in the wrong inbox. Decide who holds that role deliberately on every account you run.

Billing terms, and the rights they cost

The annual term saves between 16.9% and 21.6% across the bands we measured^[3]. It also removes two things an agency occasionally needs.

An annual account cannot be paused. The pause feature is three months maximum, once every twelve months, and "The Pause option applies to monthly plans only", with commit-annually accounts explicitly excluded^[12].

And a commit-annually plan "must contact our Customer Experience team to cancel"^[7] rather than cancelling from the dashboard. So does any downgrade, including lowering a contact limit or removing an add-on.

For a seasonal client, or a client you are not sure about, the monthly term buys flexibility that is worth more than the discount.

## What you cannot hand back

Two published facts shape what a client offboarding looks like.

Automations have no file export. The only route is a share link, which the vendor states carries none of the campaigns, lists, scores, deals, pipelines, events or whitelisted domains the automation references^[14]. The vendor does suggest using share links as backups and notes that they do not expire, which is the closest thing to a portable asset here.

And access to contact data ends at cancellation, not after it^[5]. The contact export is free and self-service, covers custom fields, lead scores, deal scores and tags, excludes contact notes, and the download link lasts seven days^[13].

Build both into your offboarding checklist: share links for every automation, a contact export, and a copy of the campaign report sections, remembering that the Campaign Overview report cannot be exported at all^[13].

What to put in the client agreement

Five lines, all of them derived from what the vendor publishes rather than from what usually goes wrong.

Who holds the account, and therefore who cancels it. Who is the primary admin, and therefore who receives capacity warnings. Where the list came from, in writing, with consent evidence. What happens to the contact band as the list grows, and who pays for it. And what the offboarding package contains, since automations will have to be handed over as share links rather than as files.

## Pricing your own agency account

The account you run your own marketing from has different requirements from the ones you run for clients, and it is usually the one that gets least thought.

If you are using it to nurture prospects, the capability you want is contact scoring and segment logic, which begin at Plus^[3]. If you are using it to run a pipeline, that is an add-on with no published price^[2], and most agencies are better served by a dedicated CRM for that.

The contact band is the part to watch. An agency list accumulates every prospect, every past client contact and every event attendee, and all of them count regardless of list status^[11]. Agencies tend to have lists that are large relative to their revenue, which is the worst shape for a contact meter.

Run the same hygiene you would recommend to a client: clean before the import, not after, because lowering the band later requires contacting support^[10]. Practise what you sell.

The integrations question clients will ask

The vendor's own marketplace counts 1,056 apps and integrations, rendered as a filter result rather than claimed in copy^[16]. That is the largest figure we have counted in any category we measure, and it is a legitimate thing to put in a proposal.

Two caveats before you do. The marketplace publishes a filter by plan, but the server returns the same total for every plan, so you cannot tell a client how many of the 1,056 their tier can actually use. Check the specific connectors they need against the tier instead.

And some of the ones that matter are gated high: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Zendesk are Enterprise entitlements, and the premium ecommerce connectors for BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify Plus start at Professional^[3]. A client on Shopify Plus cannot be served from a Plus plan.

One more we report without resolving: the catalogue carries a Zapier entitlement on the Plus tier and on no other, while the pricing page lists Zapier with no tier marked at all^[2]. If a client workflow depends on Zapier, confirm it against their tier rather than against the page.

The trial, used properly

Fourteen days, no card, one user, Professional-tier features and one hundred email sends^[14].

For an agency that is a useful scoping tool rather than a client demo. Build the client's hardest automation in it, because the trial runs Professional features and will show you whether the tier you intend to sell them can actually hold the logic. If the automation needs more than five actions, the entry tier is out before you quote it.

What the trial cannot do is tell you anything about deliverability, which is the question clients ask most. A hundred sends is not a test. Ask the deliverability questions in writing instead, and set expectations about the account review process before the first import rather than after.

## The one number to quote with care

There are no refunds: "As a policy, our company does not provide partial or full refunds"^[6], with no window and no exception.

If you are recommending an annual term to a client, you are recommending a year. Say so in the proposal rather than letting the discount do the talking, because the client who discovers it in month three will not remember that the saving was their decision.