Constant Contact Pricing: $12, $35 and $80 — and Why the Page Shows You $10.20

The short answer is three numbers. All three are the discounted ones. Constant Contact's pricing page publishes $10.20, $29.75 and $68 a month for Lite, Standard and Premium. Each with the suffix "billed annually" ^[2]. The month-to-month price is $12, $35 and $80. Those three are not on that page at all, the vendor publishes them on its own Shopify App Store listing, as "Pricing From $12/month" , and its published prepayment discount confirms them to the cent.

This article does the arithmetic the page leaves out: what the prices are prices of, what makes them move, and what a real bill looks like at three list sizes.

The three published prices, and what they are prices of

The pricing page carries a Monthly and Annual toggle. The Annual side is labelled Save 15%, and the state the server sends to any reader outside a browser is the annual one, so the only prices in the page are the prepaid ones ^[2]. The tiers are described by the vendor as "Ideal for beginners", "Great for most businesses" and "Ideal for pros", and the Recommended badge sits on Standard, the vendor's own choice of default, not ours ^[2].

Each of those prices buys a plan at the first contact band. That is the single most important sentence in this article. The price is a function of two things: which tier you pick, and how many contacts you have. The pricing page states the first and not the second.

A fourth tier exists and has no number: Multi-Account is published as "Custom Pricing", scoped to "Ideal for teams that need 5+ accounts" ^[2]. It is the only tier whose cost a buyer cannot establish without a conversation.

What separates the three priced tiers is mostly scheduling and scale rather than capability. One user on Lite, three on Standard, unlimited on Premium. One automation template, three, then unlimited. One custom segment, ten, then unlimited. Scheduled email sends, subject-line A/B testing and resend to non-openers start at Standard; dynamic content, ecommerce automation and segmentation, Google Ads Manager with a $500 Google Ads credit and SEO recommendations start at Premium ^[2]. The things every tier shares are more notable than the things that separate them: the editor, the AI copy generator, sign-up forms, automatic social posting, live phone and chat support, live 1:1 onboarding, and "Host events, sell products, and take payments" ^[2].

## The month-to-month price, published in another company's store

Because the page serves only the annual state, the list price has to be recovered rather than read, and the vendor makes that possible by publishing the rule. The billing FAQ states: "We offer 6- and 12-month prepayment options, with reduced monthly charges as part of those prepayments. The discounts are 10% and 15% off per month, or 20% and 30% off if your account is set up for non-profit status, respectively" ^[3].

Run the twelve-month discount backwards. Divide each published figure by 0.85 and you get $12.00, $35.00 and $80.00. Three divisions, three round numbers, a single round result would be a coincidence, and three is the rate card the toggle is hiding.

Then there is the confirmation, which turns an inference into a reading. Constant Contact's own listing in the Shopify App Store publishes its pricing block as "Pricing From $12/month. Free trial available." and states $12/month, $35/month and $80/month . The same company, the same product, the month-to-month ladder in full. On a third party's store rather than on its own pricing page. This is the third product in this category we have measured that publishes its real price somewhere other than where a buyer looks: Mailchimp put it in promotional-offer terms and Klaviyo in the legal terms of a discount.

Two conditions attach to the published side of that trade. The first is that prepayment is money you cannot get back. "Prepayments are non-refundable" ^[3]. The second is a surprise in the other direction: the commitment is reversible as a setting even though the cash is not, because "Account owners can freely switch into and out of prepayment from within the account" ^[3], and prepaid balance is drawn down first: "Our system will always try to charge your account's balance (from prepayments, credits, etc.) before trying to charge your billing info" ^[3].

One market has no choice at all: "For India-based payments, 6- and 12-month prepayment is the only payment setup available due to RBI restrictions on automated card payments" ^[3].

## The band is the ratchet

Price rises with the number of contacts, in bands. The FAQ names them only in passing, as examples, "0-500, 2501-5000, etc.", and no readable page states what any band above the first costs on any plan. The pricing page offers a link reading See pricing tiers, and the table behind it is assembled in the browser.

What the FAQ does state, in one sentence, is how the band is chosen: "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 billable quantity is the high-water mark, not the current count. One campaign that imports a list, one event that fills a room, one appeal that works, and the band moves up and stays there by the published rule. A three-star reviewer reports the consequence in the plainest possible terms: "Recently i increased the number of subscribers temporarily and the charges went up which was expected. Then the number of subscribers went down to the previous number and they still charged me for the tier above" ^[10].

Another describes finding no self-service route back: "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]. And a third describes discovering the move after the fact: "Recently, the price of our package took a HUGE leap in expense, but we weren't aware of the increase until it had already been charged to our credit card" ^[10], followed by "I asked if we could switch to the new plan and get a prorated refund for the huge amount we had just been charged, but was denied" ^[10].

The practical consequence for pricing this product: budget the band your annual peak will reach, not the band your list sits in today.

## The send allowance and the overage

Email plans do not bill per send, but they do cap sends, and the cap is unusually generous. "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 rather than to your list, so a 1,500-contact account in the 2,500 band gets 25,000 sends on Lite, the vendor's own example.

Note the disagreement between the vendor's own two pages. The pricing page's feature table says 10x your number of contacts, 12x your number of contacts and 24x your number of contacts ^[2]; the knowledge base says ten, twelve or twenty-four times the band's highest potential contacts ^[4]. On that same 1,500-contact list those are 15,000 sends and 25,000 sends. The support documentation is the more generous of the two, so the marketing page understates the product, a contradiction worth knowing because it runs in the buyer's favour.

Above the allowance the rate is published and small: "Overage fees are assessed at $0.002 for every send over the maximum send allowance. So for every 1,000 sends over the monthly allowance, there will be a $2 fee" ^[4]. The vendor's worked example: an account with a 25,000 allowance that sends 40,000 emails pays $30.

Three details decide whether you will ever see that fee. A send is one email to one contact, so "an email sent to 10 contacts = 10 sends" ^[4]. Bounces are not free: "Even if an email bounces, it still counts as a send" ^[4]. And automated email is exempt entirely, welcome emails, abandoned-cart reminders and automated series "are excluded from the email send allowance and overage fee calculation" ^[4], while the one campaign type that is included and cannot be forecast is resend to non-openers, the headline feature of the Standard tier. The vendor says so itself: "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].

## The add-ons, and what Premium already includes

Two things are sold on top of the plan, and one of them is cheap enough to be easy to miss. Inbox Preview is a $10/month add-on on all three tiers ^[2].

SMS is the larger one. It is Starting at $10 USD/mo. on Lite and Standard, and on Premium the First 500 messages/mo. included ^[2]. Pricing is independent of the email plan: "SMS marketing is a monthly add-on to your email plan, and the pricing is independent of your email plan" ^[5].

What is billed is not messages but segments, and the formula is published: "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], with a hard ceiling of 1,950 characters per message. So message length and a single emoji both change the bill: the vendor's two 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.

The SMS tier behaves like the contact band in one direction and better in the other. Undershoot and you pay regardless. "You're charged for your selected tier even if you send fewer messages" and "Unused messages don't carry over to the next billing cycle" ^[5]. Overshoot and "you'll be moved into the higher corresponding tier" ^[5]. But unlike the email band, this one is explicitly reversible: "You can adjust your tier at any time" ^[5]. The rates for tiers above the entry one are not published.

Before any of this is relevant, check eligibility. SMS requires a US tax identifier or an Australian ABN, and is unavailable everywhere else ^[5].

## Discounts, prepayment and the nonprofit rate

There are four published discounts and one published suspension, and together they make this the most flexible pricing in the category on paper.

Prepay six months and the monthly charge falls 10%; prepay twelve and it falls 15% ^[3]. If the account is registered as a nonprofit those become 20% and 30%, which is the largest published charity discount in this category ^[3]. On Standard that takes the effective monthly rate from $35 to $24.50 — and the arithmetic is worth doing against the $29.75 the page shows everyone, because a nonprofit that prepays twelve months is paying meaningfully less than the headline.

Suspension is the lever nobody else publishes: "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]. For a seasonal operation this is the correct shape of answer. Its price is not published, so it is a rule without a number — ask for the figure before you need it.

And every tier carries a "30-day-money-back guarantee" with a link to its own legal terms ^[2], which is a stronger consumer promise than most of this category offers and the reason the absence of a free plan matters less than it looks.

## What a bill actually looks like, at three sizes

Three worked examples, built only from published figures and the one derived rate card. All assume month-to-month billing, so subtract 15% for a prepaid year.

A charity with 400 contacts on Standard pays $35 a month, or $24.50 prepaid twelve months at the nonprofit rate. Its send allowance is twelve times the 500-contact band ceiling, 6,000 sends a month, which is a weekly newsletter to the whole list with room to spare. Events with payments are included, so a ticketed fundraiser needs no second vendor. Realistic annual cost: $294.

A retailer with 1,500 contacts on Standard sits in the 2,501-5,000 band after one list import, and that band's price is not published — the first real unknown in this exercise. Its allowance is twelve times the band ceiling, 60,000 sends. Adding SMS for a 1,000-contact opted-in list at two 160-character messages a month means 2,000 billed messages, which the vendor's example maps to the 1,001-2,500 tier; the price of that tier is also unpublished. Two of the four lines on this bill cannot be quoted from any page.

A membership organisation with 9,000 contacts on Premium gets 24 times the 10,000 ceiling, 240,000 sends — the vendor's own worked figure — and 500 SMS messages included. If it runs a December appeal that pushes the list to 10,400 for three weeks, the band moves and stays moved, by the published rule. That is the line to model before signing, and it is the only line in this article whose size depends on a decision the buyer has not made yet.