Campaign Monitor Price Increase: The 2025 Repricing Explained

Campaign Monitor—once the designer-friendly darling of email marketing—quietly executed a major repricing in 2025. Under the ownership of Marigold (the marketing conglomerate that also owns Emma, Sailthru, and Cheetah Digital), it renamed its plans and raised prices substantially across every tier.

If you've been a Campaign Monitor customer since its independent days, the product you're paying premium prices for today is largely the same one you used five years ago. Here's what changed.

We run Audienceful, an AI-powered email marketing platform, and Campaign Monitor's repricing is one entry in an industry-wide wave we've been documenting.

What changed in Campaign Monitor's pricing?

In 2025, Campaign Monitor rolled out new plan names—Lite, Essentials, and Premier—alongside a broad price increase. The renaming makes before/after comparisons deliberately hard, but the current structure looks like this:

Lite from $13/month at 500 contacts, with a monthly send cap
Essentials (unlimited sends) from around $30/month at 500 contacts
Premier from $171/month at 500 contacts

Those entry prices aren't the story, though. The story is the scaling curve.

How expensive is Campaign Monitor really?

Campaign Monitor's costs accelerate hard as your list grows: the Essentials plan runs about $162/month at 10,000 contacts and $577/month at 50,000 contacts—several times what comparable modern platforms charge for the same list. Above 50K contacts, published pricing disappears entirely and you're routed to enterprise sales.

Meanwhile, features that peers include by default—like advanced automation and send-time optimization—sit in the Premier tier, pushing the real cost of a competitive feature set higher still. And there's no free tier at all.

What should Campaign Monitor customers do?

Re-check which plan you're on. The 2025 renaming reshuffled features between tiers; make sure you're not paying Premier prices for Essentials usage (or missing features you assumed you had).
Watch your contact count. With this curve, list hygiene has a direct, large effect on your bill.
Benchmark at renewal. Campaign Monitor's design-quality edge from the 2010s has evaporated—modern editors have caught up and passed it. If you're paying 2–4x market rates, ownership inertia is the main thing keeping you.

The bigger picture: everyone raised prices

The past three years have brought increases from nearly every ESP: Brevo is migrating legacy plans to new pricing this September, ActiveCampaign force-migrated customers at 30%+ increases, Klaviyo moved everyone to active-profiles billing, GetResponse restructured all its plans, and Constant Contact killed its free plan. Consolidation is a common thread—platforms owned by conglomerates and private equity (like Marigold) reprice most aggressively.

The best Campaign Monitor alternative

If Campaign Monitor's 2025 pricing no longer matches its value, Audienceful delivers the design-quality email Campaign Monitor was known for—plus AI-native capabilities it doesn't have, at a fraction of the price:

A built-in AI agent: It writes emails in your voice, generates images and full restyles of your theme, builds segments and entire automations from a plain-language brief, and answers questions about your campaign data—included on every plan.
Design-system emails without an agency: Themes and a real-time collaborative, Notion-style editor keep every send beautiful and on-brand across Gmail and Outlook.
Advanced features included, not gated: Multi-step automations with branching logic, segmentation, A/B testing, analytics, and send-time features Campaign Monitor reserves for Premier come standard.
Significantly cheaper at every tier: At 50K contacts, roughly $370/month versus Campaign Monitor's $577—36% less, with transparent published pricing beyond 50K where Campaign Monitor goes quote-only.

See the full comparison: Campaign Monitor vs Audienceful.