Constant Contact is one of the few products in this category where the published price is close to the real one, and the surprises live somewhere else entirely. In which band you land in, which quantities get counted, and what happens when your list shrinks. This checklist is ordered the way the decisions actually arrive, and every item is answerable from a published page or from a question support can answer in one call.
Establish your band, not your list size
The first number to write down is not how many contacts you have. It is how many you will have at your busiest week of the next twelve months, because that is the number the price is a function of: "Your pricing is based on the highest tiered number of active contacts you've had (0-500, 2501-5000, etc.), so if you go into a higher tier in your current month, your monthly subscription will reflect that going forward" [3].
The bands are named in that sentence and nowhere else we could read, and the price of any band above the first is not published on any readable page. So this item has two actions. Write down your annual peak, and then ask support what that band costs on the tier you are considering. Before signing, in writing if you can get it. That one answer governs everything else.
The reason to do this first is that it reorders everything after it. A 400-contact list that peaks at 600 in December is not a 0-500 account; it is a 501-1,000 account that spends eleven months below its band. A 2,000-contact list that imports a 1,200-name event list once is a 2,501-5,000 account from that day forward. The ratchet is the single most expensive property of this product and it is fully knowable in advance, which makes it the cheapest thing on this list to get right.
If your list genuinely swings, ask about suspension in the same call: "For a significantly reduced price (based on contact tiers), suspension allows certain automated functions of your account (such as sign-up forms and welcome emails) to continue while you're not actively making new ads, social media posts, emails, etc." [3]. Its price is published as a rule rather than a number, so get the number. Ask for it once.
Ask the downgrade question in writing before you sign: if my active contact count falls below my band for a full cycle, does the price fall, and is it automatic?
Every price on the pricing page is the prepaid one. The three figures are $10.20, $29.75 and $68, and all three carry the suffix "billed annually" [2], the page's Monthly and Annual toggle is served in its Annual state, and the Annual side is labelled Save 15%.
The month-to-month prices are $12, $35 and $80. You will not find them on the pricing page: the vendor publishes the rule, "The discounts are 10% and 15% off per month" [3], and dividing each published figure by 0.85 returns all three as round numbers, while its own Shopify App Store listing states them outright as "Pricing From $12/month" with $12, $35 and $80 a month .
So the decision is a real one with a real cost. Twelve months prepaid saves 15%, and "Prepayments are non-refundable" [3]. Six months saves 10%. A nonprofit gets 20% and 30% respectively, which on Standard is the difference between $35 and $24.50 a month.
Two mitigations are published and worth knowing before you choose. The commitment is reversible as a setting even if the cash is not, "Account owners can freely switch into and out of prepayment from within the account" [3], and every tier carries a "30-day-money-back guarantee" with its own legal terms [2]. If you are in India the choice does not exist: "For India-based payments, 6- and 12-month prepayment is the only payment setup available due to RBI restrictions on automated card payments" [3].
Cancellation stops renewal rather than refunding the cycle, so the deadline matters. One reviewer reports being charged for two months after cancelling.
The tiers do not divide on capability as much as the comparison table suggests. The entry plan already carries the editor, the AI copy generator, templates, sign-up forms, automatic social posting, segmentation, live phone and chat support, live 1:1 onboarding, and "Host events, sell products, and take payments" [2].
What Lite does not have is scheduling. No scheduled email sends, no scheduled social posts, no subject-line A/B testing, one automation template, one custom segment, one user. If you write and send in the same sitting and you are the only person who touches the account, Lite is not a downgrade; it is the right tier.
Standard buys three things worth naming: scheduling, testing, and two more users. It adds scheduled sends, subject-line A/B testing, recommendations and personalisation, scheduled social posts, an AI campaign builder, three automation templates, ten segments, a social ads manager, and resend to non-openers [2].
Premium removes ceilings rather than adding kinds: unlimited users, automations and segments, dynamic content, ecommerce automation and segmentation, Google Ads Manager with a $500 Google Ads credit, SEO recommendations, a dedicated priority support team, and the first 500 SMS messages a month included [2].
The test to apply: count the people who need to log in, and count whether you schedule. Those two answers pick the tier more reliably than any feature list, because they are the two things the tiers actually gate.
Use the SMS editor before buying the add-on. The vendor offers the full feature without a subscription, so you can count real segments.
The send allowance is generous and it is not counted the way most people assume. "Depending on your selected email plan, Constant Contact customers can send up to 10, 12, or 24 times the highest number of contacts in your contact pricing tier during a given billing cycle" [4]. The multiplier applies to the ceiling of your band, not to your list, so a 1,500-contact account in the 2,500 band gets 25,000 sends on Lite.
Be aware the vendor's own two pages disagree here, and that the marketing page is the pessimistic one. The pricing page's table says 10x your number of contacts [2]; the knowledge base says ten times the band's highest potential contacts [4]. Plan against the knowledge-base figure and verify it on your own billing tab, which is where the vendor says the real number lives.
Three counting rules to apply to your own plan. A send is one email to one contact, so "an email sent to 10 contacts = 10 sends" [4]. Bounces count: "Even if an email bounces, it still counts as a send" [4], which makes list hygiene a billing activity rather than a deliverability one. And automated email does not count at all. Welcome emails, abandoned-cart reminders and automated series "are excluded from the email send allowance and overage fee calculation" [4].
The one line you cannot forecast is resend to non-openers, and the vendor says so: "Since you don't know how many contacts won't open your original email, you won't know for sure how many resends to non-openers there will be" [4]. If you plan to use it, leave headroom. The overage itself is small — "$0.002 for every send over the maximum send allowance" [4], two dollars per thousand — so the risk is a creeping bill rather than a cliff.
If you want SMS, do the segment arithmetic first
SMS is a separate monthly add-on, Starting at $10 USD/mo., and included to the tune of 500 messages a month on Premium [2]. Check eligibility before anything else: it requires a US nine-digit TIN or EIN, excluding Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, or an Australian eleven-digit ABN, and is unavailable anywhere else [5].
Then do the multiplication, because the unit is not what it appears to be: "Number of text messages billed = (The number of text message segments X The number of contacts the text message is sent to) + The number of automated outgoing messages sent" [5]. A segment is "around 160 characters each, or 70 characters when using emoji" [5].
Two consequences to build into your plan. Message length multiplies your bill: the vendor's own examples put 1,000 contacts and two 160-character messages at 2,000 billed messages, and the same list with two 300-character messages at 6,000. And a single emoji drops the segment size from about 160 characters to 70, so a message that fitted one segment can suddenly take three.
Pick the tier with headroom, because rounding runs both ways and neither favours you: "You're charged for your selected tier even if you send fewer messages", "Unused messages don't carry over to the next billing cycle", and "If you exceed the tier you chose, you'll be moved into the higher corresponding tier" [5]. The relief, and it is a real one, is that this meter is reversible by design — "You can adjust your tier at any time" [5].
Before you buy it, use it. The vendor offers the full editor without the subscription, so you can draft and measure your real segment counts first [6].
Export your contacts on setup day using the vendor's documented route, not on the day you decide to leave.
Everything above is about not overpaying on the way in. This item is about the way out, and it is the one the review corpus is unanimous about.
There are three published mechanisms, and you should confirm each applies to the plan you are being sold. The money-back guarantee, 30 days, on every tier with its own legal terms [2]. Suspension, at an unpublished reduced price [3]. And prepayment you can switch out of as a setting [3]. Three published routes down.
What is not published is a route back down the contact band. Read the rule once more and note what it does not say: it describes the upward move and the persistence, "going forward" [3], and no page describes a downward one. One reviewer found the reason it may not be available on an older plan at all: "I was told that the reason I couldn't downgrade on my own was that we were on a grandfathered-in old plan that no longer existed" [10].
So the question to put to support in writing, before signing: if my active contact count falls below my band for a full billing cycle, does my subscription price fall, and is that automatic or do I have to ask? Keep the answer. That single question covers the most expensive property of this product, and no published page answers it.
Count the vendors this replaces, because that is where the value is
This is the item most buyers skip, and on this product it is the one that changes the answer. The comparison worth running is not Constant Contact against another email tool. It is Constant Contact against your current stack, because one subscription here covers things that are usually separate line items.
Events are the clearest case. "Host events, sell products, and take payments" appears identically on Lite, Standard and Premium [2]. If you currently pay a ticketing platform for a handful of events a year, price that against $12 a month and check whether the fee structure you are paying on tickets disappears. Nothing else in this category carries event registration with payments at any tier, let alone the cheapest.
Social is the second. Automatic posting to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn is on every tier, scheduling arrives at Standard, and a social media ads manager comes with it [2]. Premium adds Facebook lookalike targeting, Google Ads Manager, SEO recommendations and a one-off $500 Google Ads credit [2]. If you are paying a separate scheduler, that is a line to compare directly.
The third is the one not to count on. The integrations claim is "Import your data using 300 integrations, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Canva, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Zapier, Shopify, Eventbrite and more!" [2], repeated identically on all three tiers. Nine are named; the directory was not a page we could read, so nine is what a buyer can actually verify, with Zapier covering a long tail by proxy. If a specific integration decides your purchase, confirm it by name with support rather than inferring it from the count.
Add up what those three lines replace in your current spend before you judge the price. On this product the entry tier is unusually full, and the honest comparison is against your invoice total, not against a rival's headline.
If a salesperson offers a Marketing Manager or Marketing Advisor engagement, ask about the contract term and the exit before it starts.
The published policy is that a subscription "will continue to renew unless we have received a call or online request to cancel the account" [3]. An online route exists in writing, which is more than some of this category manages.
The reported experience is harder, and we record both because they are different kinds of evidence. "After looking everywhere online for the cancel button, and after two chat bots, I had to CALL" [10]. "In order to cancel, this company was FORCING me to answer personal questions regarding my cancellation and my business" [10]. One reviewer reports "I cancelled my service but they kept charging me for 2 months" [10], and another, outside the United States, "I have been trying to cancel my subscription for 4 months by phoning customer service in the UK, I have also sent 3 emails now to customer service and haven't heard a thing" [10].
Add-ons do not all cancel the same way, and the split is published: "Some add-ons, such as Inbox Preview or SMS marketing, can be cancelled directly through our Billing team. Other services, such as the Marketing Manager and Marketing Advisor services, either have contracts or have particular ways their teams manage billing elements, and require contacting your service agent to cancel the service" [3]. If a salesperson offers you a Marketing Manager or Marketing Advisor engagement, ask whether it carries a contract term and how it ends, before it starts.
Two practical steps. Export your contacts while the account is live, using the vendor's own documented route [9]. And note the deadline: cancellation stops renewal, so do it before the cycle turns, not after.
Add-ons do not all cancel the same way: Inbox Preview and SMS go through billing, while advisory services may carry contracts.
Put these in one call, and keep what you are told. Each one covers something no readable page states.
What does my annual-peak band cost on this tier? The bands exist and their prices are not published; this is the number your budget depends on.
If my contact count falls below my band for a full cycle, does the price fall, automatically or on request? The published rule only describes the upward move. Nothing published describes the downward one.
What does suspension cost for my band? It is published as "a significantly reduced price" [3] with no figure.
What are the SMS tier prices above the entry one? Starting at $10 USD/mo. [2] is a floor, and the article that explains how to choose a tier does not price the tiers.
How long is the trial, and does the 30-day money-back guarantee run from signup or from first
charge? The signup button says Start trial and no readable page states its length.
Is my send allowance ten times my list or ten times my band ceiling? The vendor's own two pages give different answers, and the generous one is in the knowledge base [4].
The trial length is not stated on any readable page, and neither is whether the thirty-day guarantee runs from signup or from first charge. Ask both.
Frequently asked questions
What should I settle before I talk to sales?+
Three things, and all three are yours to work out rather than theirs. The contact count at your busiest week of the next twelve months, because that sets the band the price is a function of. How many people need to log in, which is the hardest ceiling on the cheaper tiers at one user and three. And whether you schedule sends, which is the main thing the Standard tier actually unlocks. With those three answers the conversation becomes a request for two unpublished numbers rather than a demonstration.
Which tier should a one-person operation buy?+
Lite, in most cases, and it is not a hollowed-out tier: the editor, the AI copy generator, sign-up forms, automatic social posting, segmentation, live phone and chat support, 1:1 onboarding, and events with payments are all on it. The reason to move up is scheduling rather than capability. If you write and send in one sitting and nobody else logs in, Lite is the right answer and the saving against Standard is $23 a month.
What is the single most expensive mistake to make here?+
Pricing your current list instead of your peak. The band is set by the highest tiered contact count you have had, the move applies going forward, and no published page describes a route back down. A 400-contact list that reaches 600 in December is a 501-1,000 account spending eleven months below its band, and a list import for one event can move the band permanently. It is also the cheapest mistake to avoid, because the arithmetic is entirely knowable before you sign.
Price the band your peak reaches, not the list you have. Expect $12, $35 or $80 month-to-month, or 15% less for a non-refundable prepaid year, and 30% less if you are a registered nonprofit prepaying twelve months. Pick the tier on two questions — how many people log in, and do you schedule — rather than on the feature table. Assume your send allowance is ten, twelve or twenty-four times your band ceiling, leave headroom if you use resend to non-openers, and treat list hygiene as a billing task because bounces count. If you want SMS, confirm you are in the United States or Australia, draft a real message, and count its segments before picking a tier. Get three numbers in writing before you sign: your peak band's price, whether the price falls when the list does, and what suspension costs. And export your contacts the day you set up, not the day you leave. Day one, not day last.
- [1] Constant Contact vendor pricing page (2026-10) https://www.constantcontact.com/pricing
- [2] Constant Contact vendor billing FAQ (2026-10) https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/FAQs/Billing-FAQ/ta-p/386088
- [3] Constant Contact vendor documentation on the email send allowance and overage fee (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/46046-Constant-Contact-s-email-send-limit-and-overage-fee?lang=en_US
- [4] Constant Contact vendor documentation on the SMS marketing add-on (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/46517-Add-SMS-to-your-Constant-Contact-email-plan?lang=en_US
- [5] Constant Contact vendor documentation on trying SMS features (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/54070-Try-Before-You-Buy-SMS-Features?lang=en_US
- [6] Constant Contact vendor documentation on payment options (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5775-payment-options-for-your-account?lang=en_US
- [7] Constant Contact vendor documentation on lists, tags and segments (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5963-difference-between-tags-and-lists?lang=en_US
- [8] Constant Contact vendor documentation on exporting contacts (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5295-exporting-a-contact-list-from-constant-contact
- [9] Trustpilot aggregate score and review corpus for Constant Contact (2026-10) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/constantcontact.com
- [10] Google Play listing for the Constant Contact Marketing App (2026-10) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.constantcontact.toolkit
- [11] WordPress.org plugin directory listing for Constant Contact Forms (2026-10) https://wordpress.org/plugins/constant-contact-forms/
- [12] Mailchimp vendor pricing page (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/pricing/
- [13] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pricing plans (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans/
- [14] Mailchimp vendor plan comparison page (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/compare-plans/
- [15] Trustpilot aggregate score for Mailchimp (2026-09) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailchimp.com
- [16] Mailchimp vendor documentation on changing or pausing a plan (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/change-or-pause-your-pricing-plan/
- [17] Mailchimp vendor documentation on contacts (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-your-contacts/
- [18] Constant Contact public status page and its incident history (2026-10) https://status.constantcontact.com/
- [19] Constant Contact vendor documentation for Lead Gen & CRM, a separate product (2026-10) https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/lead-gen-crm/articles/KnowledgeBase/51158-Account-Import-History-Overview?lang=en_US
- [20] Constant Contact's own Shopify App Store listing, which publishes the month-to-month prices its pricing page does not (2026-10) https://apps.shopify.com/constant-contact-2