Setting Up Keap: Ten Steps, Six of Them About Limits

A word on what this is, before you rely on it. This walkthrough is built from what Keap publishes: its pricing page and product catalogue, its documentation on contacts, email and exports, its developer reference and its billing policy. We have taken the product apart on paper rather than run a live account for a year, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

What that makes this useful for is the order of operations and the traps. Both are published, and both are the sort of thing people discover in month four.

OUR TAKE: The single most useful thing to know before you start is that Keap's limits move in one direction by themselves. Going over your contact allowance raises your bill automatically; coming back under it does not lower your bill automatically. Set up in an order that respects that, and you avoid the mistake that most of the unhappy reviews describe.

## Step zero: understand that you are not setting this up alone

Keap requires an implementation package, and the vendor says so on its pricing page. The pricing FAQ asks why one is required and answers at length, including the sentence that no one likes a bigger price tag on their software but this is one of those situations where you will thank them later^[2].

What the package contains is published: a business mapping session with an automation expert, two automations built for you, a basic data import, up to fifteen hours of migration services, weekly calls with an Implementation Strategy Manager in month one, monthly calls in months two to six, quarterly calls in months seven to twelve, and up to two third-party tools integrated^[3].

So the honest first step is to know who is doing what. You will be assigned a Customer Success Manager and an Implementation Strategy Manager, and import and migration specialists handle the data^[3]. Plan your own time around their calendar, not the other way round.

## Step one: size the account before you import anything

This is the step where money is won or lost, and it comes before any configuration.

Your plan determines two numbers: contacts included and user licences included. The entry plan carries 1,500 contacts and two licences, the middle one 2,500 and three, the top one 5,000 and five^[2].

A contact, in the vendor's definition, is a single person recorded in your account. No exclusion is published for duplicates, unsubscribes or hard bounces^[2].

Now the arithmetic that matters. Included contacts on the entry plan work out at just under twenty cents each per month. The first add-on band, a further thousand contacts, is thirty-six dollars a month, which is three and a half cents each^[2]. So the cheapest way to hold a given number of contacts is the smallest plan plus add-ons, not the plan whose slider matches your list.

Deduplicate before the import, not after. Nothing about Keap's billing rewards you for cleaning up later, and one published rule makes that explicit: Keap will not remove additional contacts from your subscription automatically^[8].

Step two: know what happens when you cross a line

Three thresholds are published and worth writing on a note.

You get a warning when you are within five contacts of your limit if you are adding them manually, or within five per cent if you are importing or looking at your account page^[8].

Crossing the limit does not block anything. The vendor waits until your next billing date, raises your subscription's additional contacts and bills the increase^[8]. There is no permission step and no confirmation.

Coming back under the limit does nothing by itself. Reducing the bill is a separate, manual request, and so is raising capacity deliberately: both of the vendor's FAQ answers about adding contacts and adding users say to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or support^[2].

## Step three: import, then export immediately

Do the import with the specialists. Then, in the same week, run an export and open the file.

A free self-service contact export is documented. At a thousand contacts or fewer it downloads immediately as a CSV; larger exports arrive as an emailed link valid for twenty-four hours^[9]. Two things to look for in the file. Notes and tags are not included in a contact export, which matters enormously because tags are where Keap accounts keep their segmentation. And the vendor publishes a trap worth knowing early: an account unable to send marketing or transactional email may also be prevented from receiving its export download link.

Run that test while the account is healthy. It takes ten minutes and it tells you what your exit looks like.

Step four: set up automated list management deliberately

This is the published rule that most surprises people, and it is on by default.

A contact with no open, click or form submission for four months is given a warning status. At six months the contact is moved to an unengaged, non-marketable status, and in the vendor's words contacts with that status are not eligible to receive your broadcast emails or automation emails^[7].

Two details decide how much this matters to you. A customer cannot manually reactivate a contact out of that status, on any edition. And the thresholds are adjustable on one edition of the product and not on another, so establish which one you are on before you design anything around annual buying cycles.

If your business sells once a year, talk to your Implementation Strategy Manager about this in the mapping session. It is a configuration question, not a complaint.

## Step five: work out your real email ceiling

Keap's email limit is a ratio, not a volume, and the ratio is the part people miss.

Overage fees begin only when you pass both published thresholds: more than two hundred and fifty thousand emails sent, and an average above ten emails per recipient^[10]. The vendor states the practical version directly: the total you may send before overage is ten times the number of recipients you send to.

So a list of five thousand contacts has a ceiling of fifty thousand emails, not two hundred and fifty thousand. Everything counts: broadcasts, automation emails, reminders, invoices and quotes. Beyond the ceiling the rate is five hundredths of a cent per email.

Design your sequences against the ratio. A six-email nurture to your whole list, repeated monthly, reaches that ceiling faster than most people expect.

Step six: build automations from the library first

Keap ships prebuilt sequences in four groups: marketing, sales, service and operations. They cover lead magnet delivery, newsletter signup, phone intake, consultation requests, flash sales, webinars of three kinds, satisfaction surveys, review requests, referral requests, birthday campaigns, hiring, onboarding, billing and more^[2].

Your plan includes five, ten or fifteen of them depending which one you bought. That count is the only capability figure in the entire product that changes with price, so it is worth knowing which ones you want before you choose a plan.

Start from a template rather than a blank canvas. The AI Automation Assistant will assemble one for you, and then you check it against step four and step five before you publish it.

## Step seven: set up the text and voice layer, if you can use it

Tier one of Keap Business Line, five hundred messages and a hundred voice minutes, is attached to every plan^[2].

Resolve one contradiction before you build anything on it. The pricing page's footnote and its text marketing FAQ both describe tier one as included with your subscription, with no time limit. A disclaimer inside the same page's data payload describes it as a three-month trial, after which nine dollars a month is billed^[2]. Ask which applies to your account.

Then check the geography, because there are three different footprints. The dedicated business line and one-to-one texts cover the United States and Canada. Text marketing, meaning automated texts and broadcasts, is United States only. The mobile app covers five countries.

Paid tiers above the first are twenty-four, thirty-nine, seventy-nine, a hundred and thirty-nine and two hundred and seventy-nine dollars a month. Overage is one and a half cents a message and a cent a minute.

Step eight: connect the rest of your stack

Keap's marketplace carries 88 applications against 255 experts, counted with the vendor's own filters^[14]. Check your specific tools rather than assuming coverage; eighty-eight is a small number in this category.

The API is the better route and it is well documented. Published limits are fifteen hundred calls a minute and a hundred and fifty thousand a day per key and secret pair, with ten a second and thirty thousand a day for a personal access token, a per-application ceiling of ten thousand a minute introduced in June 2026, and a spike allowance of twenty-five calls a second^[11]. Over the limit you get a 429, and the vendor's guidance is to back off exponentially and respect the retry header.

One gap to be aware of: no per-plan monthly API entitlement is published anywhere, while the catalogue sells five hundred thousand calls a month for two hundred dollars^[2]. If you are building an integration that matters, ask what your base quantity is.

## Step nine: write down how support works, and how cancellation works

Support hours are published: phone Monday to Friday, six in the morning to six in the evening Mountain time, and chat around the clock inside the application^[12]. Your Customer Success Manager handles strategy and capacity changes. Note that the role carries no response time or service level in the governing agreement^[6].

Cancellation is the one to record on day one, while nothing is urgent. It must be initiated verbally through a Keap representative; the vendor's billing policy states that emailed cancellation requests are not acceptable, and that a request not received at least ten days before your billing date takes effect only at the end of the next cycle^[4]. The governing agreement asks for thirty days before the end of the current period and makes termination effective at the expiry of the following one^[6]. An annual contract carries a $299 early termination fee.

You are not planning to leave. Write it down anyway. Across the hundred reviews we read, cancellation is the single theme that separates the unhappy from the happy, appearing in 57% of the one and two-star reviews and in none of the four and five-star ones^[15].

Step ten: price the three ladders above your subscription

Most people meet the first of these and are surprised by the other two. All three are in the vendor's catalogue^[2].

The one-off implementation ladder runs at a thousand, two thousand and three thousand dollars matched to the three plans, with onboarding packages at nine hundred and ninety-nine and two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, and an accelerator at five thousand. This is the required one.

The ongoing service ladder is monthly and optional: fifty-four, a hundred and nine and five hundred and forty-nine dollars, then platinum packages at one thousand and ninety-seven, two thousand one hundred and ninety-seven and three thousand two hundred and ninety-seven a month. Establish in writing that these are optional.

The data services ladder covers imports at a hundred and ninety-nine, nine hundred and ninety-nine or one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars by complexity, hourly data work at a hundred and fifty, and restores at a hundred and fifty or two hundred expedited. If your migration is not from a clean spreadsheet, this is where it lands.

## What the free trial will and will not show you

Worth knowing before you judge the product by it. The vendor publishes the trial's limits: a maximum of twenty-five emails, no payment processing and no ability to send or receive texts^[2]. On the business line, trial editions are capped at twenty-five outbound messages a day.

So the trial shows you the interface and the automation builder. It cannot show you the three things that most distinguish this product from a plain CRM, which are the email engine at volume, the checkout with its payment processor, and the text layer. Plan the evaluation around that gap rather than being surprised by it.

## A setup order, in one list

Size the plan small and add contacts as add-ons. Deduplicate before importing. Import with the specialists. Export in week one and open the file. Configure list management against your buying cycle. Calculate your email ratio. Build from templates. Resolve the text tier question in writing. Connect through the API where the marketplace is thin. Record the cancellation procedure.

Ten steps, and six of them are about limits rather than features. That is a fair description of this product.