Constant Contact Price Increase: Free Plan Killed, Features Pushed Up-Tier

Constant Contact restructured its pricing in June 2025—eliminating its free plan entirely and moving features that used to live in lower tiers, like A/B testing and advanced segmentation, into more expensive plans.

For small businesses that chose Constant Contact because it was the approachable, affordable option, both changes amount to the same thing: paying more for what you already had.

We run Audienceful, an AI-powered email marketing platform, and Constant Contact's changes mirror what nearly every ESP has done over the past three years.

What changed in Constant Contact's pricing?

Two things, in the same mid-2025 restructure:

The free plan is gone. Constant Contact eliminated its permanent free tier in June 2025, replacing it with a time-limited trial. If you were using the free plan, your options became: pay monthly, or leave.
Features moved up-tier. Capabilities that lower-tier customers previously relied on—A/B testing, advanced segmentation, dynamic content, multichannel automation—are now exclusive to the Standard tier and above, with the most valuable features locked to Premium.

The current lineup: Lite from $12/month, Standard from $35/month, and Premium from $80/month—all at just 500 contacts.

The real price is in the contact tiers

Constant Contact's sticker prices look reasonable until your list grows. The Lite plan jumps from $12 to $30/month when you cross from 500 to 1,000 contacts—a 150% increase for doubling a small list—and hits $50/month at 2,500 contacts. Standard follows the same steep curve from its higher base.

Past 50,000 contacts, published pricing disappears entirely and you're negotiating a custom quote. For a growing business, the pricing page tells you very little about what you'll actually pay next year.

What should Constant Contact customers do?

Check which tier your features live in now. After the restructure, the plan you're on may no longer include things you use—verify before your next renewal rather than after a campaign breaks.
Prune your contact list. With tiers this steep, staying under a threshold is worth real money.
Compare modern alternatives. Constant Contact's editor and automation have aged; at $35–80/month plus contact-tier climbs, you're paying modern prices for a legacy product.

Part of an industry-wide squeeze

Free plans are dying everywhere: Mailchimp has cut its free plan to 250 contacts, MailerLite halved its free tier, and Drip eliminated its free tier entirely. Meanwhile AWeber raised prices 50–150% on grandfathered customers, Campaign Monitor repriced across the board, and Brevo is migrating legacy plans to new pricing this September. Cheap entry points into email marketing are disappearing industry-wide.

The best Constant Contact alternative

If the restructure has you shopping, Audienceful has leapfrogged the legacy platforms Constant Contact competes with—while giving you dramatically more per dollar:

A built-in AI agent that does the work: It writes emails in your voice, generates images, builds segments and entire automations from a plain-language brief, cleans your list, and answers questions about your campaign data—included on every plan.
Every feature on every paid plan: A/B testing, segmentation, multi-step automations with branching logic, analytics, and deep Stripe and Shopify integrations—nothing is held hostage in a higher tier.
A modern, collaborative editor: Write emails like documents in a real-time, Notion-style builder with design systems (themes) that render beautifully everywhere.
Transparent pricing at every size: Published pricing all the way up to 200K contacts, with no custom-quote cliff and no steep tier ambushes.

See the full side-by-side breakdown: Constant Contact vs Audienceful.