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

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.

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 . 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.

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].

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.

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.

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.

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].

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.

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.

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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Capability &amp; depth</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.7<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Ease of use</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">4.2<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Integrations</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.3<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">AI</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">2.9<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Support &amp; reliability</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.6<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">User sentiment</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">4.1<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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    <span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Docs &amp; learning resources</span>
    <span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.5<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<p class="mt-3 text-xs text-ink-300">Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). <a href="/how-we-test" style="color:var(--color-accent)">How we score →</a></p>