Ask what a mailing tool costs and you get a figure tied to how many people you keep, not how often you write to them. That is the whole trap of email marketing cost: per-contact pricing bills the archive, so the number grows in months when you send nothing at all.
Key takeaways
- Per-contact pricing bills the archive. Per-send pricing bills the activity.
- The gap widens with every person you keep and do not message.
- Pruning a list to lower a bill is deleting an asset to reduce a cost.
The unit almost everyone charges on
Contacts stored. The plan steps up at thresholds, and crossing one raises the bill whether or not your sending changed.
It is a rational model for a business that emails several times a week. It is a poor one for a promoter with a large audience and four campaigns a year, who ends up paying every month for people they will address in March.
Industry pricing guides describe the same structure across the category: the bill is indexed on contacts held, not on messages sent, with tiers that step up at fixed thresholds.
What that does at 10,000
At ten thousand contacts, most platforms have moved you into a mid tier. The subscription is now a fixed monthly cost that exists whether you send once or thirty times.
Two operators with identical lists and very different sending patterns pay the same. The one who sends rarely is subsidising the one who sends constantly, and neither gets told that is what is happening.
The behaviour it produces
This is the part worth watching, because it changes what people do rather than just what they pay.
Faced with a bill indexed on list size, operators start pruning. Contacts that have not opened in a while get deleted, not because they are worthless but because they are expensive. An audience gets smaller to make a number smaller.
Sometimes that pruning is right. Doing it because of a pricing model rather than because of the audience is not.
| What you are comparing | The question that matters |
|---|---|
| Cost of holding | At your real list size, not the plan you were sold |
| Cost of sending | One month of your actual pattern, not a hypothetical one |
| Cost of growth | What happens the month the list doubles |
| Cost of leaving | Can you export everything, with the consent trail |
What to compare instead
Three things, in this order.
The cost of holding your list at the size it actually is, not the size of the plan you were sold. The cost of one month of your real sending pattern, not a hypothetical one. And what happens the month the list doubles, which is the number that decides whether growth is something you look forward to or something you budget for.
Then compare the exit. A list you cannot export, with its consent trail, is not an asset you own. It is one you are renting, and the rent is the subscription.
Chart data
| USD | |
|---|---|
| 10 000 | 135 |
| 25 000 | 310 |
| 50 000 | 450 |
| 100 000 | 800 |
HIIPE bills the other unit. Contacts are unlimited on every plan, including the free one, and what is metered is the sending: ten thousand email sends a month on the entry plan, a hundred thousand at the top. Keeping a name costs nothing, so nobody has to prune an archive to lower a bill. The plans are on one page.
The other way round
The alternative is straightforward: hold the list for nothing, pay for what you send. Growth stops being a cost and the bill follows activity rather than storage.
That is how our pricing is built, and the FAQ covers what happens when you want to leave with everything.
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