# What Is Constant Contact? The Price Is Published, the Thing It Multiplies Is Not

> A measured Constant Contact review: the pricing page serves only the annual-prepay rate, the list price is recoverable by dividing by 0.85, and the billable contact tier is the highest band you have ever touched.

_Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/constant-contact-review — The Professional's Toolkit · updated 2026-10-08_

---

 Constant Contact is the oldest product in this category still winning new customers, and it
behaves differently from the rest of the field in a way that is easy to miss. Most of its rivals
hide the price and publish the mechanics. This one publishes the price, three of them, on the
pricing page, in dollars, and puts the mechanics somewhere a buyer will not look until the bill
has already moved.

That is the whole review in one sentence, and the rest of it is the measurement. `constant
contact pricing` draws 3,600 searches a month in the United States, the same as `constant
contact cost` and `constant contact price`; *what is constant contact* draws 1,600. The question
people actually arrive with is what it costs, and the honest answer has three layers.

## What you are actually buying

One subscription, three tiers, and more surface area than the price suggests. Lite, Standard and
Premium all carry a drag-and-drop email editor, an AI copy generator, templates, web sign-up
forms, automatic social posting to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, segmentation, automation,
and, on every tier, including the cheapest, "Host events, sell products, and take payments"
[2]. That last line is the thing most comparisons miss. For an organisation whose mailing list
exists to fill a room or sell a ticket, a studio or a festival or a charity, the events capability
removes a second vendor at the entry price, and nothing else in this category does that.

Above the core sit the things that separate the tiers, and they are almost all about scheduling
and scale rather than capability. Lite cannot schedule an email or a social post, carries one
automation template and one custom segment, and allows one user. Standard adds scheduled sends,
subject-line A/B testing, subject-line recommendations and personalisation, an AI campaign
builder, three automation templates, ten segments, three users, a social ads manager, and
automatic resend to non-openers. Premium removes the ceilings: unlimited users, unlimited
automations and segments, dynamic content, ecommerce automation and segmentation, Google Ads
Manager with a *$500 Google Ads credit*, SEO recommendations, and the first 500 SMS messages a
month included rather than bought [2].

What is not here matters too, and it is the depth the top of this category has moved to. There is
no customer data platform, no helpdesk, no AI agent resolving conversations, and no channel beyond
email and SMS. Klaviyo runs six channels off one profile. This runs two, and sells the breadth
sideways instead, ads, events, social, SEO, rather than downward into the customer record.



> 💡 **undefined:** Price the contact band your annual peak will reach, not the band your list sits in now. The published rule moves you up and says nothing about coming down.

## What the pricing page actually publishes

Read on 8 October 2026, the pricing page carries three prices: $10.20, $29.75 and $68 a month
for Lite, Standard and Premium [2]. Every one of them is suffixed "billed annually", and
that is not an accident of which link you followed. The page has a Monthly and Annual toggle, the
Annual side is labelled *Save 15%*, and the state the server sends is the annual one. The
month-to-month price of any tier is not in the page at all.

It is, however, recoverable, because the vendor publishes the rule next to the discount rather
than hiding it. The billing FAQ states that for six- and twelve-month prepayment "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]. Apply the twelve-month figure in reverse and the three published rates
imply $12, $35 and $80. All three come out round, which is what makes the arithmetic worth
trusting rather than merely plausible, one round number is a coincidence, three is a rate card.
And the arithmetic is not the only evidence: the vendor's own Shopify App Store listing reads
"Pricing From $12/month" and carries $12/month, $35/month and $80/month directly [21]. The
list price is published. It is published in another company's store.

So the headline price on this page is the one that requires a year paid up front, and the FAQ
adds the condition that matters: "Prepayments are non-refundable" [3]. A buyer comparing
Constant Contact against a rival on the strength of a $10.20 figure is comparing a prepaid year
against someone else's month.

What the page does not carry in any state is the ladder. Price rises with the size of your
contact list, the FAQ names the bands in passing as "0-500, 2501-5000, etc." [3], and the
pricing page offers a link reading `See pricing tiers` whose table is assembled in the browser.
The three figures above are the first band's. What the second band costs, on any of the three
plans, is not published anywhere we could read.



> ⚠ **undefined:** A single emoji cuts an SMS segment from about 160 characters to 70, so a one-segment message can become three and the bill with it.

## The contact tier is the highest one you have ever touched

Here is the sentence that decides what this product costs, and it is one sentence, in a community
FAQ, maintained by a vendor administrator: "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].

Read it twice. It describes an upward move and it describes persistence. It does not describe a
downward one, and no other page we could read describes one either. The billable quantity is not
your list; it is the high-water mark of your list. A charity that runs one December appeal, a
retailer with one Black Friday, a conference organiser with one event a year. Each of them buys
the peak and keeps paying for it.

A customer describes exactly that, and the useful thing about the review is its tone. It is three
stars, not one: "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]. The expectation was met on the way up and
disappointed on the way down, by someone who otherwise liked the product.

Compare how the same asymmetry is built elsewhere. Klaviyo ships auto-upgrade switched on and
offers auto-downgrade as a preference a customer can find and enable. That is worse in its default
and better in its remedy. There is a setting. Here the asymmetry sits inside the definition of the
quantity being billed, where there is nothing to toggle. Another reviewer found the consequence:
"I looked at our account, hoping to downgrade to a cheaper plan, but found I couldn't do so on my own, so I called to ask for help and if there was a reason for the increase" [10].



> 💡 **undefined:** Treat the $10.20 figure as a prepaid year, not a month. The month-to-month price is $12, and prepayments are non-refundable.

## The send allowance is generous, and the second tier sells what spends it

Now the part where this vendor is better than its reputation, and it deserves saying plainly.
Email plans carry a send allowance, and the vendor's own documentation defines it well:
"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 actual list. On a
1,500-contact list sitting in the 2,500 band, that is 25,000 sends on Lite, and the vendor's own
worked example says so.

The pricing page undersells this. Its feature table says *10x your number of contacts* [2],
which on the same list would be 15,000. The marketing page is the stingier of the two
descriptions, and the support documentation is the generous one, a contradiction in the buyer's
favour, which is rare enough to note.

More generosity: "Automated emails, such as Welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and automated email series, are excluded from the email send allowance and overage fee calculation"
[4]. The sends that fire without you watching do not count at all.

And then the catch, which is structural rather than sneaky. The same sentence continues: "Only campaigns that can be scheduled in advance, including automatic resends to non-openers, are included in the email send allowance" [4]. Resend to non-openers is precisely the feature
Standard unlocks over Lite. So the headline capability of the second rung is the one that consumes
the meter, and the vendor says, in its own words, that its volume cannot be known in advance:
"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]. Above the allowance the rate is "$0.002 for every send over the maximum send allowance" [4], two dollars per thousand, and bounces
count: "Even if an email bounces, it still counts as a send" [4].

## SMS bills segments, and an emoji is expensive

SMS is a separate add-on, *Starting at $10 USD/mo.* on Lite and Standard and with the first 500
messages included on Premium [2]. The arithmetic behind it is published, which is more than
most of this category manages, and it is worth reading before you buy: "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].

The unit is the segment, not the message, and a segment is "around 160 characters each, or 70 characters when using emoji" [5]. So the same sentence to the same list bills differently
depending on its length and on whether it carries a single smiley. The vendor's two examples make
the point better than any criticism could: 1,000 contacts and two messages of 160 characters is
2,000 billed messages, while 1,000 contacts and two messages of 300 characters is 6,000 [5].
Three times the bill, same list, same two sends.

Rounding goes the same direction it does on email. Undershoot and you pay anyway. "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 the tier moves. "If you exceed the tier you chose, you'll be moved into the higher corresponding tier" [5]. The one genuine relief is that this
meter, unlike the contact band, is explicitly reversible: "You can adjust your tier at any time"
[5], a sentence that appears three times in the article and nowhere in the FAQ's description
of email pricing.

One hard limit to check before the feature appears in your comparison at all: "Our SMS marketing tools are only available to US customers (excluding Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) with a valid 9-digit Tax ID Number (TIN), or an Employer ID Number (EIN) for businesses assigned by the IRS" [5], plus Australian customers with an 11-digit ABN. Everywhere else, the SMS column
of the feature table is decoration.



> 💡 **undefined:** Pick the tier on two questions only: how many people need to log in, and whether you schedule sends. Those are what the tiers actually gate.

## Where the mechanics are documented, and who can read them

Everything above comes from two places, and neither of them is the marketing site. The
contact-tier ratchet, the prepayment discounts, the non-refundability, the suspension option and
the cancellation route are in a community billing FAQ. The send allowance, the overage rate and
the segment arithmetic are in two knowledge-base articles. The documentation itself is good.
Specific, worked, honest about its own limits.

The delivery is the problem, and it is measurable. The knowledge base serves 222,005 characters of
markup to a reader without a JavaScript engine, and the text in them is the unfilled template:
`label content here`, `articletitle`, `title html here`, `Loading. One moment`. Each article is
1,967 characters of placeholder. Rendered in a real browser with a wait for the body to arrive,
the same URLs return between 3,991 and 10,474 characters of actual article. The support
documentation that makes this product legible exists only for browsers, which means it is
invisible to search infrastructure, to assistants answering questions about pricing, and to anyone
reading without one.

The commercial site is harder still. Nine commercial pages returned nothing at all on our first
pass, across four fetch paths: rendered and plain HTTP, from Virginia and from Europe, with and
without a browser user-agent. Four of them came through later, in a single window and only once
the render step was changed to wait for the page to finish assembling itself. Three different URLs
returned the same cookie-consent dialogue, byte for byte. Two never returned anything. And a later
pass was blocked on all nine. The blocking is rate limiting rather than a permanent refusal, which
means a figure read from this site is a figure read in a window. The pricing page itself came
through on one path, once. We are describing a product whose own marketing we could read exactly
as much of as the vendor allowed, and we say so rather than presenting a gap as a finding.

This is the third product in this category to show the same shape, and the shape is worth naming:
the information exists, it is adequate, and it has been built for one kind of reader only.



> ⚠ **undefined:** SMS exists only for US customers with a TIN or EIN and Australian customers with an ABN. Everywhere else the SMS column is decoration.

## What the reviews say, coded

Constant Contact is the best-regarded product in our email set, and by a distance. Trustpilot
displays 4.0 from 2,093 reviews [10], against Mailchimp's 2.5 and Klaviyo's 1.6. A
hundred-review sample retrieved through the connector has a mean of 3.95 and a distribution of 57
five-star, 15 four-star, 9 three-star, 4 two-star and 15 one-star, so here the badge tracks its
own corpus, unlike Keap, where the same platform displayed 1.1 against 3.9 in its own structured
table. The vendor's own mobile application scores 4.67 from 2,401 ratings on Google Play [11],
and the application identifier is the one the pricing page publishes in its own meta tag, so that
attribution is the vendor's rather than ours.

That 0.67-point gap between the app people use and the company people review is itself the
finding. The same gap is 2.4 points at Mailchimp, which shows 4.9 on mobile against 2.5 on
Trustpilot, and 3.1 at Klaviyo. Here the two measurements nearly agree.

Coded by theme, the corpus splits in a way that maps onto everything above. The largest theme is
contacts and lists, 44 of 100 reviews, and 36 of those are four- or five-star: the core job does
not fight the user. Support appears in 27, and splits 18 positive to 8 negative, which is unique
in this category. Live phone and chat sit on the cheapest tier, which is why a five-star reviewer
can write "Shannon was a huge help in answering my question about contact teir" [10].

Billing does not split. It appears in 11 reviews and 9 of them are one- or two-star. And the
figure that matters most: only 6 reviews say the product costs too much, and 3 of those are four-
or five-star. People are not complaining about the level of the price. They are complaining about
the direction it moves, which is the same signature we measured at Klaviyo and the reason both
products score better on value than their review pages suggest.

The vendor's own weakest published number is its WordPress forms plugin, 2.6 from 107 ratings
[12]. That is a narrow surface, forms on WordPress, and the score belongs to the surface.



> 💡 **undefined:** If your list is seasonal, ask what suspension costs for your band before you sign. It is published as a reduced price with no number.

## Two real ways down, and one hard way out

Credit where it is due, and this is the section most comparisons omit. Constant Contact publishes
two mechanisms for spending less that its rivals do not publish at all.

The first is suspension: "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
seasonal businesses this is the right shape of answer, and neither Klaviyo nor Mailchimp offers
it in writing. The price is not published, which is the usual flaw: a rule without a number.

The second is the guarantee. Every tier on the pricing page carries a "30-day-money-back guarantee" with a link to its own legal terms [2]. Prepayment is also reversible as a
setting, if not as money: "Account owners can freely switch into and out of prepayment from within the account" [3], while what has already been prepaid is not refundable.

Cancellation is where the published policy and the reported experience diverge, and we record
both rather than reconciling them. The FAQ says a subscription "will continue to renew unless we have received a call or online request to cancel the account" [3] — an online route exists,
which is more than Keap publishes. The corpus says it is not findable: "After looking everywhere online for the cancel button, and after two chat bots, I had to CALL" [10], and "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]. Add-ons split by type: "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].



> ⚠ **undefined:** Bounces count as sends against the allowance, which makes list hygiene a billing activity rather than a deliverability one.

## Where it fits, and where it does not

Buy this if your list is stable in size and your marketing is broad rather than deep. The
combination that nothing else in this category matches at $12 a month is email plus social
posting plus social ads plus events with payments plus live human support plus 1:1 onboarding.
A community organisation, a local retailer, a studio, a festival, a practice — the kind of
operation with one marketer who is also three other things — gets more done per dollar here than
anywhere else we have measured, and gets a person on the phone when it breaks.

Do not buy this if your list size swings. The ratchet is the single most expensive property of
the product and it punishes exactly the seasonal pattern that otherwise suits the events
capability so well. Before signing, establish which band your annual peak lands in and price
that band, not your current list. Do not buy it for deep lifecycle work either: one automation
template on Lite and three on Standard is a different product from flow-based rivals, and the
customer record is thin by comparison.

And if you are outside the United States or Australia, strike SMS from the comparison entirely.



> ⚠ **undefined:** Resend to non-openers is the feature Standard unlocks, and it is the one campaign type that counts against your send allowance and that the vendor says cannot be forecast.



## FAQ

**How much does Constant Contact actually cost?**

The published prices are $10.20, $29.75 and $68 a month for Lite, Standard and Premium, and all three are the rate for a year paid in advance. The month-to-month prices are $12, $35 and $80; those are derived from the vendor's own published fifteen-percent prepayment discount rather than read off the page, and all three divisions return round numbers. Both sets are the price at the first contact band only. Price rises with the size of your list, in bands the vendor names as 0-500 and 2501-5000, and the cost of any band above the first is not published on any page we could read.

**Does my bill go back down if my list shrinks?**

No published page says it does. The vendor's rule is that pricing is based on the highest tiered number of active contacts you have had, and that going into a higher tier is reflected going forward. A three-star reviewer describes raising their subscriber count temporarily, seeing the charge rise as expected, reducing it again, and still being charged for the tier above. Ask support in writing whether a full cycle below your band lowers the price, and whether that is automatic.

**Is there a free plan?**

No. The three paid tiers are the entry points and the signup button says Start trial. What the pricing page does publish on every tier, with a link to its own legal terms, is a thirty-day money-back guarantee, which is a stronger consumer promise than most of this category offers and makes the absence of a free plan matter less than it looks. The trial's length is not stated on any page we could read.

**How many emails can I send?**

Ten, twelve or twenty-four times the highest number of contacts in your contact band, depending on tier — so the multiplier applies to the ceiling of your band rather than to your actual list, which is the generous reading and the vendor's own. A 1,500-contact account in the 2,500 band gets 25,000 sends on Lite. Automated emails are excluded entirely. Above the allowance the rate is $0.002 per send, and bounces count as sends.

**Is Constant Contact good for nonprofits?**

It has the largest published charity discount in this category — twenty percent off at six months prepaid and thirty percent at twelve, against ten and fifteen for everyone else — and events with registration, payments and product sales are on every tier including the cheapest, which removes a second vendor for ticketed fundraising. The caution is the ratchet: a December appeal that pushes your list into a higher band moves the price there by the published rule, so budget the peak.

**How do I cancel?**

The published policy is that the subscription renews unless the vendor has received a call or online request to cancel. The review corpus describes the online route as hard to find, with one reviewer reporting two chatbots before having to telephone and another reporting personal questions as a condition. Add-ons differ: Inbox Preview and SMS can be cancelled through the billing team, while Marketing Manager and Marketing Advisor engagements may carry contracts and require the assigned agent.

## How we scored it

Constant Contact scores 3.63 on our rubric for the `email` category, where value for money and
capability carry 0.229 each, ease of use and integrations 0.146, AI and support 0.083, and
sentiment and documentation 0.042. That places it between Klaviyo at 3.88 and Mailchimp at 3.46,
and the shape of the score is more useful than the number.

It takes the category's highest marks for ease of use, 4.2, and user sentiment, 4.1, on the
measurements above. Support is 3.6 against Klaviyo's 2.7, because phone and chat on a $12 plan is
a real thing and the review corpus splits rather than condemns. Value is 3.6: the entry tier is
genuinely full, the send allowance is the most generous published here, and three ways down exist
— held back by a ratchet with no setting attached and a ladder nobody publishes.

Where it loses ground is depth and specificity. Capability is 3.7 against Klaviyo's 4.5, for the
absent customer data platform and the two channels instead of six. Integrations is 3.3: "300
integrations" is claimed on every tier with nine named, and the directory was not a page we could
read, so nine is what a reader can verify. AI is 2.9 — the features are on every tier and nothing
about them is specified, no model, no provider, no ceiling, no rate. Documentation is 3.5, which
is the score of good writing in an unreadable container.


**Our scorecard — 3.6/5**
- Value for money: 3.6/5
- Capability & depth: 3.7/5
- Ease of use: 4.2/5
- Integrations: 3.3/5
- AI: 2.9/5
- Support & reliability: 3.6/5
- User sentiment: 4.1/5
- Docs & learning resources: 3.5/5




## Sources

[1] Constant Contact vendor pricing page — https://www.constantcontact.com/pricing (2026-10)
[2] Constant Contact vendor billing FAQ — https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/FAQs/Billing-FAQ/ta-p/386088 (2026-10)
[3] Constant Contact vendor documentation on the email send allowance and overage fee — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/46046-Constant-Contact-s-email-send-limit-and-overage-fee?lang=en_US (2026-10)
[4] Constant Contact vendor documentation on the SMS marketing add-on — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/46517-Add-SMS-to-your-Constant-Contact-email-plan?lang=en_US (2026-10)
[5] Constant Contact vendor documentation on trying SMS features — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/54070-Try-Before-You-Buy-SMS-Features?lang=en_US (2026-10)
[6] Constant Contact vendor documentation on payment options — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5775-payment-options-for-your-account?lang=en_US (2026-10)
[7] Constant Contact vendor documentation on lists, tags and segments — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5963-difference-between-tags-and-lists?lang=en_US (2026-10)
[8] Constant Contact vendor documentation on exporting contacts — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5295-exporting-a-contact-list-from-constant-contact (2026-10)
[9] Trustpilot aggregate score and review corpus for Constant Contact — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/constantcontact.com (2026-10)
[10] Google Play listing for the Constant Contact Marketing App — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.constantcontact.toolkit (2026-10)
[11] WordPress.org plugin directory listing for Constant Contact Forms — https://wordpress.org/plugins/constant-contact-forms/ (2026-10)
[12] Mailchimp vendor pricing page — https://mailchimp.com/pricing/ (2026-09)
[13] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pricing plans — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans/ (2026-09)
[14] Mailchimp vendor plan comparison page — https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/compare-plans/ (2026-09)
[15] Trustpilot aggregate score for Mailchimp — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailchimp.com (2026-09)
[16] Mailchimp vendor documentation on changing or pausing a plan — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/change-or-pause-your-pricing-plan/ (2026-09)
[17] Mailchimp vendor documentation on contacts — https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-your-contacts/ (2026-09)
[18] Constant Contact public status page and its incident history — https://status.constantcontact.com/ (2026-10)
[19] Constant Contact vendor documentation for Lead Gen & CRM, a separate product — https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/lead-gen-crm/articles/KnowledgeBase/51158-Account-Import-History-Overview?lang=en_US (2026-10)
[20] Constant Contact's own Shopify App Store listing, which publishes the month-to-month prices its pricing page does not — https://apps.shopify.com/constant-contact-2 (2026-10)