ActiveCampaign Setup Guide: The Four Decisions That Cost Money Later

Most ActiveCampaign tutorials show you where the buttons are. This one covers the things that cost money or lose data if you get them wrong in the first fortnight, all of them taken from what the vendor publishes about how the account actually behaves.

OUR TAKE: The hard parts of starting with this product are not in the builder. They are the contact band you land on, the setting that decides what happens when you exceed it, the send allowance, and the export you should run before you need it.

Day one: start the trial knowing its ceiling

Fourteen days, no credit card, one user, features matching the Professional tier, and one hundred email sends^[14]. The signup page says "No credit card needed" and the trial expires without charge: "If you are on a trial account, you can let it expire. We will not charge you unless you manually upgrade to a paid account"^[7].

Two things follow from the hundred-send ceiling. You can test the builder, the segments and the automations thoroughly. You cannot test deliverability at all, and you cannot evaluate predictive sending, which needs volume.

One trap worth knowing before it wastes a day: during the trial, test emails go only to the trial user's address, and your sending domain must be verified before even those will go out.

## Day two: work out your contact band before you import

This is the single most consequential number in the account and the easiest to get wrong, because the pricing page shows twelve bands and the vendor's catalogue carries forty-eight on the middle tiers^[3].

Count the contacts you will import, not the ones you will mail. The vendor publishes the rule 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]. Unsubscribed records count. Bounced records count.

So if you are migrating a list with years of dead addresses in it, clean the file before the import rather than after. Cleaning afterwards does not reduce the band you are already paying for until you ask for a change, and that direction is not self-service: "If you need to decrease your contact limit, please contact our Customer Experience team"^[10].

Day three: decide about auto-upgrade deliberately

This one setting determines what happens when your list outgrows your band, and the two outcomes are completely different.

With it off, which is the default the vendor states, you hit a wall: "Once you reach your contact limit, you will not be able to send any email campaigns until you upgrade your account"^[9]. Automations keep triggering and contacts keep moving through them, but every send step is skipped. Contacts also keep arriving, through the API, through integrations and through your own forms.

With it on, the terms say your fees "will increase immediately according to usage", pro-rated for the rest of the period, and every renewal after that is charged at the new amount^[5].

Neither is wrong. A newsletter that must not stop wants it on. A budget that must not move wants it off. Choose, rather than inheriting the default.

## Week one: set up sending, and know what you are allowed

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

What counts: "Email send limits apply to direct and automated campaigns. This does not include 1:1 or transactional emails"^[8]. So your automation sends come out of the same pot as your newsletters, which is the thing people underestimate when they build a long nurture sequence.

What happens if you pass it has two published answers and they conflict. The terms of service say sending stops until the next calendar month^[5]. The help centre says you are charged half a cent an email and sending is only switched off once the overage reaches three times your limit, with the allowance resetting on your billing cycle rather than the calendar^[8]. Ask which applies to you, in writing, before you plan a heavy month.

The warning path is published and useful: 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, so check that the person who watches the budget is the primary admin.

Week one: the two ceilings on the entry tier

If you are on Starter, two of its limits are not bands. They are fixed ceilings, recorded in the vendor's catalogue with maximum units equal to included units, which means no amount of money raises them^[3].

Five lists. Five actions per automation.

The second one shapes how you build. An automation with five actions is a trigger, a condition and three steps, so complex nurture logic has to be split across several automations or the tier has to change. The page states it as "5 actions per automation" against "Unlimited actions" on every tier above.

The seat cap is the third wall: one seat included, two maximum, where every other tier allows nine hundred and ninety-nine. A second seat is ten dollars a month.

## Week two: build one real automation, not five simple ones

The reason is practical rather than aesthetic. Automations have no file export in this product. The only published way to move one out is a share link, and the vendor states it carries none of the campaigns, lists, scores, deals, pipelines, events or whitelisted domains the automation references^[14].

So the automation you build here is the automation you rebuild by hand if you ever leave. Build the hardest one you actually need during the trial, and find out whether the tier you intend to buy can hold it.

The vendor's own tip is worth taking: share links can be used as backups, and they do not expire. Store them outside the account.

Week two: run an export and open the file

Do this before you need it, not when you are leaving.

The export is free and self-service: all contacts to CSV, with columns for custom fields, lead scores and deal scores, and tags collapsed into a single column. The download link is valid for seven days^[13].

What is not in it: "Contact notes cannot be exported." If your team keeps context in notes, that context is not in the file.

And the reason to do it early is in the terms: "Upon cancellation or termination, you will not have access to or be able to restore any Contact Data"^[5]. The same document states that the service "does not serve as a repository for Contact Data" and that keeping your own backups, on a system "entirely independent" of ActiveCampaign, is your responsibility.

## Before you pay: check the billing term

Every figure on the pricing page is the annual rate, labelled "Billed annually" underneath.

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 annual term saves between 16.9% and 21.6% across the bands we measured^[3]. It also costs you two rights: an annual account cannot be paused^[12], and a commit-annually plan "must contact our Customer Experience team to cancel"^[7] rather than cancelling from the dashboard.

There are no refunds either way^[6].

Before you pay: price the add-on you need

Six add-ons are named on the pricing page and none is priced there^[2]. If your plan involves a sales pipeline, deal records or lead scoring, those live in the two CRM add-ons, whose prices are absent from the page and from the vendor's own billing catalogue^[3].

If your plan involves AI doing things rather than suggesting them, that is the AI Activities add-on, and the matching meter in the catalogue includes zero units on every tier.

Ask for both figures before the trial ends. They are the two numbers most likely to change your tier decision.

## Month one: the list-quality rules that can switch you off

Worth reading properly, because enforcement here is automatic.

"Your account will be placed under review if we receive higher-than-normal spam complaints... our system automatically places your account under review"^[15]. Bounces found during campaign approval can do it. So can link patterns such as redirects or shorteners, or a chargeback. And while a review is open, "your campaigns will not send until the issue is resolved".

The policy behind it bans paid, rented and borrowed lists outright and states that "simply getting someone's business card is not an acceptable opt-in"^[17]. If your list has an unusual provenance, raise it during the trial rather than after your first import.

Month one: what to measure before the first renewal

Four numbers, all of which you can get from inside the account, and all of which decide whether your tier is right.

Your real send ratio. Divide the campaigns and automated sends you made in the month by your contact count. Compare it against your multiple of ten, twelve or fifteen. If you are near the ceiling in month one, you will be over it in month four.

Your contact growth rate. The band is the biggest lever on the invoice, every contact counts regardless of list status^[11], and moving up is self-service while moving down is not.

Your seat count, if you are on Starter. Two is the maximum and there is no warning before you want a third.

And your automation count against the five-action ceiling, if you are on Starter. Hitting it changes how you build, not just what you pay.

## A note on what this guide is not

We have not reproduced the builder walkthrough, because the vendor's own documentation does that well and keeps it current. The help centre publishes dated articles on nearly every mechanic in this product, and in our measurement it was the most complete documentation of any product we have assessed.

What it does not publish is prices: no monthly rate on the pricing page, no add-on price anywhere, and two different answers about what happens when you exceed the send limit^[5][8].

So the division of labour is simple. Use the vendor's documentation for how the product works. Use a list like this one for what it costs and where it stops.

## The ten-minute version

Count your contacts including the dead ones. Pick the band. Decide auto-upgrade on purpose. Learn your send multiple and ask which overage rule applies to you. If you are on Starter, remember five lists, five actions and two seats. Build your hardest automation during the trial. Export in week two and open the file. And price the add-on carrying the feature you came for before the fourteen days run out.