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

> A setup order for Keap built from the vendor's published rules: size the plan before importing, export in week one, configure list management against your buying cycle, and calculate the email ratio.

_Source: https://professionalstoolkit.com/articles/keap-tutorial — The Professional's Toolkit · updated 2026-10-07_

---

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.



**10 times recipients** — Keap's real email ceiling is a ratio, not a volume. A list of five thousand reaches its limit at fifty thousand emails, not two hundred and fifty thousand.



- **5 contacts or 5%** — The published warning thresholds before you cross your contact limit: within five when adding manually, within five per cent when importing.
- **4 then 6 months** — Inactivity thresholds for the warning status and the non-marketable status under automated list management, which is on by default.
- **1,500 calls a minute** — The published API rate limit per key and secret pair, with a 429 and documented retry guidance on breach.

## 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.



> 💡 **undefined:** Deduplicate before the import. Nothing in Keap's billing rewards cleaning up afterwards, because deleting contacts does not reduce the subscription by itself.

## 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].



> 💡 **undefined:** Run a full export in week one and open the file. You are checking that tags and notes are missing, which the vendor documents, so you can plan to rebuild segmentation.

## 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.



> 💡 **undefined:** Choose your plan by how many prebuilt automations you want, not by the contact slider. That count is the only capability figure that changes with price.

## 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.



> ⚠ **undefined:** Raising or lowering your own capacity is not self-service. Both vendor FAQ answers about adding contacts and users say to contact a Customer Success Manager or support.

## 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.



> ⚠ **undefined:** The text tier that the pricing footnote calls included is described in the same page's payload as a three-month trial, after which nine dollars a month is billed. Settle it in writing.

## 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.



> ⚠ **undefined:** Record the cancellation procedure on day one. It must be done verbally, and the vendor states that emailed cancellation requests are not acceptable.

## 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.



## FAQ

**How do I set up Keap?**

Through the required implementation package, which assigns you a Customer Success Manager, an Implementation Strategy Manager and migration specialists. Before that starts, size the plan, deduplicate your list and decide which prebuilt automations you want, because that last choice determines which plan you need.

**How many contacts does Keap include?**

1,500 on the entry plan, 2,500 on the middle one and 5,000 at the top. Additional contacts start at thirty-six dollars a month per thousand, which is roughly a sixth of what the included contacts cost per contact.

**What happens if I go over my Keap contact limit?**

Nothing is blocked. The vendor waits until your next billing date, raises your subscription's additional contacts and bills the increase. Deleting contacts afterwards does not reverse it, because Keap does not remove additional contacts from a subscription automatically.

**How do I export data from Keap?**

A free self-service contact export is documented. Up to a thousand contacts it downloads immediately as a CSV; larger exports arrive as an emailed link valid for twenty-four hours. Notes and tags are not included, and an account unable to send email may be prevented from receiving the link.

**Why can't I email some of my Keap contacts?**

Automated list management moves a contact with no open, click or form submission for six months into an unengaged, non-marketable status, where it is not eligible for broadcast or automation emails. It is on by default and you cannot manually reactivate such a contact on any edition.

## 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.



## Sources

[1] Keap vendor pricing page and product catalogue — https://keap.com/pricing (2026-10)
[2] Keap vendor implementation services page — https://keap.com/resources/implementation-services (2026-10)
[3] Keap vendor billing policies FAQ — https://keap.com/legal/billing-policies/faq (2026-10)
[4] Keap terms-of-service redirect chain — https://keap.com/legal/terms-of-service (2026-10)
[5] Thryv Terms and Conditions, July 2026 — https://assets.thryv.com/prod/pdfs/tc/Thryv-Terms-and-Conditions-July-2026.pdf (2026-10)
[6] Keap vendor documentation on unengaged contacts — https://learn.thryv.com/hc/en-us/articles/41630277888013-Unengaged-Contacts-and-Automated-List-Management-in-Keap-How-It-Works-and-How-to-Configure-It (2026-10)
[7] Keap vendor documentation on limits and overages — https://learn.thryv.com/hc/en-us/articles/41295749032333-Limits-Thresholds-and-Overages-with-Keap (2026-10)
[8] Keap vendor documentation on exporting contacts — https://learn.thryv.com/hc/en-us/articles/37598018586893-Export-contacts-from-Keap (2026-10)
[9] Keap vendor documentation on email usage — https://learn.thryv.com/hc/en-us/articles/37299423089933-Email-usage-and-overages (2026-10)
[10] Keap developer documentation on API quotas — https://developer.keap.com/api-token-quota-and-usage-measurements/ (2026-10)
[11] Keap vendor contact page — https://keap.com/contact (2026-10)
[12] Keap vendor acquisition FAQ — https://keap.com/thryv-faq (2026-10)
[13] Keap partner marketplace counted with its own filters — https://marketplace.keap.com (2026-10)
[14] Trustpilot profile and review corpus for keap.com — https://www.trustpilot.com/review/keap.com (2026-10)
[15] Gartner Digital Markets review pool for Keap — https://www.capterra.com/p/76390/Infusionsoft/reviews/ (2026-10)