ActiveCampaign Pricing in 2026: Ten Numbers on the Page, Eighteen Products in the Catalogue

ActiveCampaign's pricing page displays ten numbers. The vendor's own billing catalogue, which that page fetches every time it loads, contains eighteen products, fourteen metered entitlements and contact ladders of up to forty-nine bands^[3].

Nothing is hidden. The catalogue is sent to your browser, and the vendor publishes a second copy as a static file with no authentication on it at all. This article is what those two sources say.

The four tiers, both ways

Every plan card on the page reads "Starts at" a figure, then "/mo", then in smaller type "Billed annually"^[2]. The catalogue carries both terms.

Plan	Month to month, $/mo	Billed annually, $/mo	Charged once a year, $
Starter	19	15	180
Plus	59	49	588
Professional	99	79	948
Enterprise	179	145	1,740

The four displayed figures are the yearly totals divided by twelve. Checking that was the first thing we did, because mixing an annual rate with a monthly one is the easiest way to get a pricing article wrong: one hundred and eighty divided by twelve is fifteen, and the same reconciliation holds on all four tiers^[3].

Across thirty-two tier-and-band combinations, the annual discount runs between 16.9% and 21.6%, median 20.1%^[3]. There is no monthly-annual toggle on the page.

A third term exists and the pricing page never mentions it: commit annually, pay monthly, worth "up to 10% off". It is published inside the help-centre article about cancelling^[7].

## What the contact band does

The price is a function of the product, the tier and the contact band. Everything above is the first band, one thousand contacts.

Contacts	Starter, $/mo	Plus, $/mo	Professional, $/mo	Enterprise, $/mo
1,000	15	49	79	145
2,500	39	95	149	255
5,000	79	145	205	375
7,500	109	169	289	479
10,000	149	189	375	589
15,000	231	265	465	689
20,000	311	329	549	785
25,000	391	389	629	879
30,000	not sold	449	709	949
50,000	not sold	609	969	1,169
250,000	not sold	2,399	2,399	2,759

All annual rates. Three things in that table are worth stopping on.

Starter stops at twenty-five thousand contacts, and at that last band it costs more than Plus charges for the same number. Plus and Professional cost exactly the same at two hundred and fifty thousand contacts, so the capability difference between them becomes free at volume. And the selector on the page offers these twelve bands while the catalogue carries forty-eight, so the band you actually land on may not be one you can see.

Seats

Included seats are one, one, three and five from Starter up^[3]. The caps are where it gets interesting: Starter allows a maximum of two, every other tier allows nine hundred and ninety-nine.

An extra seat costs ten dollars a month or ninety-six dollars a year. So two people on Starter at one thousand contacts is two hundred and seventy-six dollars for the year, against five hundred and eighty-eight for Plus with one seat. The second Starter seat costs about 47% of a whole Plus subscription, and then you are out of seats.

## Sending

The allowance is a multiple of your contact limit: ten times on Starter and Plus, twelve on Professional, fifteen on Enterprise^[2]. At the entry band that is ten thousand, ten thousand, twelve thousand and fifteen thousand emails a month.

Beyond it, the vendor publishes two incompatible rules. The terms of service say sending stops until the next calendar month^[5]. The help centre says you are charged half a cent per email and sending is only switched off once the overage reaches three times your limit, with the reset tied to your billing cycle rather than the calendar^[8]. The help article is nine months newer and neither document mentions the other.

The help centre does publish the warning path, which is more than most: in-app notifications at 75%, 90% and 100% of capacity, plus an email to the primary admin at 75% and 100%.

Hitting the contact limit

Not an overage. A stop.

"We do not automatically increase your contact limit unless you have enabled auto-upgrade in your account"^[10]. Without it, "you will not be able to send any email campaigns until you upgrade your account"^[9]. Automations keep running and their send steps are skipped. Contacts keep arriving through the API, through integrations and through your forms.

Turn auto-upgrade on and the terms say fees "will increase immediately according to usage", pro-rated for the rest of the period, with every renewal thereafter at the new amount^[5].

Unsubscribed and bounced contacts count. The vendor says so in a dedicated article: "All contacts, regardless of their list status, count towards your contact limit", for accounts created on or after 3 November 2025^[11]. Lowering the limit again is not self-service.

## The add-ons

Six are named on the pricing page and none is priced there^[2]: Pipelines enhanced CRM, Sales Engagement enhanced CRM, Custom Reporting, SMS, AI Activities and WhatsApp Messaging. Every mention is "Available add-on" or "Included in add-on".

The catalogue fills in three. SMS is twenty-one dollars a month for a thousand credits, which do not roll over. Postmark, for transactional sending, is fifteen dollars a month for ten thousand emails. The WhatsApp add-on has a full ladder. The two CRM add-ons carry empty price ladders on every tier^[3], so the billing system does not state their price either.

This matters because of what is behind them. Pipeline management, deal records, account records and lead scoring are each marked "Included in add-on"^[2]. If you are evaluating ActiveCampaign as a CRM, the price of the CRM is unpublished.

The AI meter is the same story with a number attached. The catalogue's Activities entitlement has zero included units on all four tiers and a ladder starting at a dollar a month for two hundred^[3], while the page marks AI translations and AI actions "Available add-on" even on Enterprise.

WhatsApp, and the arithmetic of the bundle

The page offers three tabs: email, WhatsApp, and both. WhatsApp alone is displayed at ninety-nine, ninety-nine and two hundred and eighteen dollars a month under the names Core, Advanced and Premium — names the catalogue does not use, where the same three objects are coded plus, professional and enterprise^[3].

The bundle numbers are exactly the email plan plus the WhatsApp add-on.

Bundle tier	Email, $/mo	WhatsApp add-on, $/mo	Total, $/mo	Page shows, $/mo
Plus	49	63.00	112.00	112
Professional	79	63.00	142.00	142
Enterprise	145	138.92	283.92	284

There is no bundle discount on top of that. The struck-through price the page shows beside each bundle is the difference between the add-on price and the standalone price — which is the real finding here. The same WhatsApp costs 57% more bought on its own than bought attached to an email plan^[3].

## The vendor's two price sources do not agree

The pricing module fetches the live catalogue and falls back to a published static file if the catalogue does not answer within 1,500 milliseconds^[4].

We compared the two across every priced entitlement and every band: 4,664 pairs. Three thousand one hundred and sixty-two agree. One thousand and thirty-four bands exist only in the live catalogue. And four hundred and sixty-eight carry a different price for the same quantity.

Every one of those four hundred and sixty-eight is a WhatsApp meter, where the published fallback is around 45% higher than the live price and in places more than three times it. The email plans agree on all 1,954 of their own pairs^[4].

So an email buyer is unaffected, and a WhatsApp buyer's displayed price can depend on how quickly an interface answered. Worth knowing before you screenshot a quote.

Our first version of that comparison looked at three meters across twelve bands and found zero differences. Narrowing a check to the parts you care about is how a clean result hides a third of the disagreement.

What the entry tier actually includes

Price is only half of a pricing question. The other half is what the money buys, and on Starter the answer is narrower than the ladder suggests.

The catalogue lists eleven entitlements on Starter and fifty-six on Plus^[3]. The eleven are contacts, email sends, activities, user seats, campaigns, lists, business goals, custom object records, the ecommerce core, the Pipedrive integration and the automation action fence. That last one is not a feature. It is the mechanism that caps automations at five actions each.

What Plus adds is most of the product: landing pages, site messages, modal forms and preference centres, contact scoring, segment logic that combines conditions, custom branding, custom user permissions, database sync, AI content and image generation, the AI brand kit, ecommerce coupons and product catalogue, and the named integrations for Slack, Calendly, Eventbrite, Google Ads, LinkedIn, TikTok and Facebook.

Professional adds sixteen more, most of them about prediction and attribution: predictive sending, predictive content, conditional content, revenue attribution, conversions, the automations map, split automations, and the premium ecommerce connectors for BigCommerce, Magento and Shopify Plus. Enterprise adds eight, and they are the ones a large buyer will recognise: single sign-on, account activity logs, custom object schemas, and the integrations for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Zendesk.

Two fixed ceilings sit on Starter and nowhere else. Five lists and five actions per automation, both recorded in the catalogue with maximum units equal to included units^[3], which is to say no amount of money raises them. The page states both plainly, as "Lists — Up to 5" and "5 actions per automation".

One oddity we report without resolving. The catalogue carries a Zapier entitlement on the Plus tier and on no other, including the two above it, while the pricing page lists Zapier among its integrations with no tier marked at all^[2]. Both statements are the vendor's.

## WhatsApp as its own product

The second tab on the pricing page sells WhatsApp on its own, with three tiers of its own and a separate contact ladder. The displayed figures are ninety-nine, ninety-nine and two hundred and eighteen dollars a month, at five thousand WhatsApp contacts.

Two of the three show the same price because their underlying contact ladders are identical. What differs between them is seats and lines: three seats and five lines against five seats and five lines^[3]. The top tier has eight seats.

The catalogue prices three separate WhatsApp meters rather than one: contacts, messages and lines. Lines are four hundred and eighty dollars a year each with five included on the upper tiers. Messages run a hundred and eighty dollars a year per thousand. Contacts carry a forty-six-step ladder.

This is the part of ActiveCampaign's price surface where the vendor's own two sources disagree most, and where a buyer should check the figure twice.

What a first year actually costs

One seat, the entry contact band, annual billing:

Plan	Committed up front, $	Effective, $/mo
Starter	180	15
Plus	588	49
Professional	948	79
Enterprise	1,740	145

At ten thousand contacts those same four become one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, two thousand two hundred and sixty-eight, four thousand five hundred, and seven thousand and sixty-eight dollars for the year.

Add the things the page does not price: a CRM add-on if you need a pipeline, an AI Activities meter if you want the AI to do anything, SMS at twenty-one dollars a month, and transactional sending at fifteen. And remember that there are no refunds of any kind, so an annual commitment is a year^[6].

## Three questions to settle in writing

Which send-limit rule applies to your account, given that the terms and the help centre describe different consequences for the same event. What the CRM add-on you need actually costs. And which contact band you will be on, since the catalogue carries forty-eight and the page shows twelve.

The vendor's own minimum advertised price policy binds its resellers to "the prices listed for each individual plan, tier, and contact amount at ActiveCampaign's pricing page"^[2]. It treats that page as the price of record. On the add-ons, the page has no price to be the record of.