ActiveCampaign Price Increase: Forced Migrations and 30-40% Higher Bills
ActiveCampaign has quietly become one of the most expensive mainstream email platforms—through a plan overhaul in mid-2024 that force-migrated every existing customer, followed by a 2025 change to how contacts are counted.
If your ActiveCampaign bill jumped and you're not sure why, here's the complete timeline.
We run Audienceful, an AI-powered email marketing platform, and ActiveCampaign's changes are part of an industry-wide wave of price increases we've been documenting.
What changed in ActiveCampaign's pricing?
June 2024: new plans for new customers. On June 3, 2024, ActiveCampaign replaced its longstanding Lite, Plus, and Professional plans with a new structure—Starter, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise. Features were reshuffled, bundles were discontinued, and several capabilities moved into paid add-ons like Sales Engagement and Pipelines.
August 2024: everyone else gets migrated. Existing accounts were moved to the new plans automatically on their first billing date after August 5, 2024, with about two weeks' notice. ActiveCampaign said increases would be capped at 30%—but many customers reported bills 30–40% higher once add-ons were factored in, and analysts estimate prices have risen roughly 40% since June 2024 overall.
November 2025: paying for dead contacts. ActiveCampaign began charging new accounts based on total contacts—including unsubscribes, bounces, and unconfirmed contacts. People who explicitly opted out of your emails now count toward your bill until you delete them.
How much does ActiveCampaign cost now?
The Plus plan (the realistic starting point for marketing automation) starts at $49/month for just 500 contacts, climbing to $759/month at 50,000 contacts—with a custom quote required beyond that. Features like predictive sending, split automations, and attribution sit behind the pricier Pro and Enterprise tiers, so the effective cost of comparable functionality is often higher than the sticker price suggests.
What can ActiveCampaign customers do?
- Audit your add-ons. Much of the post-migration bill shock came from features that used to be bundled. Check whether you actually use Pipelines, Sales Engagement, or other paid extras.
- Purge dead contacts. With unsubscribes and bounces now billable (on newer accounts), regular list cleaning directly cuts your bill.
- Price out the market at renewal. The 2024 migration reset everyone's "grandfathered" advantage—if you're paying new-customer prices anyway, you have nothing to lose by comparing.
ActiveCampaign isn't alone
The past three years have seen price increases from virtually every ESP: Brevo is migrating legacy plans to new pricing this September, Klaviyo switched everyone to active-profiles billing, AWeber eliminated grandfathered pricing entirely, Kit raised its Creator plan 34%, and Campaign Monitor repriced across the board. Charging for inactive contacts—ActiveCampaign's November 2025 move—is the same direction Mailchimp has taken for years.
The best ActiveCampaign alternative
ActiveCampaign's automation depth used to be the justification for its price. That advantage is gone: Audienceful matches the automation power and adds AI-native, agentic capabilities ActiveCampaign doesn't have—at a significantly lower price with no feature gating:
An AI agent that builds your automations for you: Describe a welcome sequence in plain language and Audienceful's built-in agent drafts the full trigger, steps, and email bodies for your approval. It also writes in your voice, builds segments, cleans your list, and answers questions about your data—no certification (or consultant) required.
All features on every paid plan: Multi-step automations with branching and conditional logic, segmentation, A/B testing, analytics, and deep Stripe and Shopify integrations—no Pro-tier paywalls, no add-on bills.
A modern editor, not a 2012 one: Real-time collaborative, Notion-style email builder with AI writing and image generation built in.
No charges for dead contacts: Unsubscribes and bounces don't count against your bill.
See the full comparison: ActiveCampaign vs Audienceful.
Email? Easy.
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