There is a tool that beats us on the price of a single email at every tier we have measured. Not by a rounding error. Structurally, because that is their whole business and they are good at it. I am writing this down so that nobody on our side has to be vague about it in a sales call again.
Key takeaways
- We lose the cost-per-email comparison, and we are not going to try to win it.
- The axis is won by infrastructure scale, which is a different business from ours.
- The comparison we ask for is the annual total at your real list size and send frequency.
Why write this at all
Because the alternative is worse. When a company refuses to name the axis it loses, three things happen. The sales conversation gets slower, because every prospect discovers it themselves and wonders what else is hidden. The marketing gets vaguer, because you have to write around a hole. And the people who eventually find out trust nothing else you said.
There is also a narrower reason, which is that I want a page I can send. When someone asks "aren't you more expensive than X per email", the honest answer is yes, and it takes four paragraphs to explain why that is the wrong unit. Those four paragraphs should exist once, at a URL, written calmly, rather than improvised badly at four in the afternoon.
The axis we lose
Cost per email sent. At small volumes, at large volumes, on every tier we have looked at. If your requirement is "deliver a million emails a month as cheaply as possible", we are not the answer and you should not buy us.
The reason is not that they are clever and we are not. It is that sending infrastructure is a scale business. Companies that specialise in it own or lease the sending capacity, amortise it across everyone, and sell the marginal message. Independent guides to email marketing cost lay out the same picture: as volume rises, the per-message price of a transactional sender collapses towards its own marginal cost. You do not beat that by wanting to.
We could price below cost to match it for a quarter, and then we would either raise it or run out of money. Both of those are worse for you than this paragraph.
What we ask to be compared on instead
Not a better version of the same table. A different unit.
| Pricing model | What it charges for | Best for | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per email sent | Each delivered message | High volume, transactional | Nothing keeps your audience between sends |
| Per stored contact | Everyone in the database | Small lists, mailed often | A dormant archive costs the same as an active one |
| Per active profile | People who engaged recently | Shops with repeat purchase | A seasonal audience keeps re-entering the meter |
| Per seat | Users of the software | Teams doing manual work | The audience size is irrelevant to the price |
| Per send, contacts unlimited | The messages you choose to put out | Large, seasonal, mostly quiet audiences | Frequent full-list sends are the expensive case |
Take the bottom row. It is ours, and its weakness is stated in the same line as its strength, which is the only way a table like this is worth anything.
The comparison we would like is the twelve month total, at your list size and your real send frequency, with the cost of keeping the contacts you did not message included. For an events business that number usually reorders the ranking. For a shop that mails weekly it usually does not, and then you should buy the cheaper sender.
The rule this comes from
We have an internal rule, older than this page: say where a competitor beats you, then move the axis. Most companies do the second half and skip the first, which is why comparison pages read like brochures and nobody believes them.
The half that costs something is the first half. It is also the half that makes the second half land, because a reader who has just seen you concede a real point gives you thirty seconds of genuine attention for the next one.
So, the second half, once, briefly. HIIPE charges for sends and keeps contacts unlimited on every plan, including the free one, because the audience is the thing we think you should never be billed for holding. The plans are three lines long for that reason.
What I would do if I were reading this
I would not take my word for any of it. I would take my own last twelve months, count how many distinct people I messaged and how many I stored, and run both models on those two numbers. It takes ten minutes and it will tell you more than this page can.
If storage and activity are the same number in your business, the cheap sender wins and you should go and buy it. If they are not, the interesting question is no longer the price of an email, it is what a 10,000 contact list really costs and what a fan CRM is supposed to store.
Read next : What a 10,000 contact list really costs · What a fan CRM is, and what it is not