For the coach, consultant or founder who bought email automation and got a bill that grows with their list
A plain audit of what you're paying for one excellent channel, what's stacked on top of it, and the work it still leaves on your plate.
The ActiveCampaign Cost Audit: What You're Actually Paying — see the exact line items in your bill you didn't know existed, and the ones that still aren't there.
Or apply to run KBD in your business nowAn early application, unpaid, honest feedback only, not for everyone
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation platform with a CRM beside it, priced by how many contacts you hold. People land here when the bill has climbed with their list and they've realised email is one channel, not a whole business. Both things can be true at once: it's excellent at its job, and its job is narrower than the problem.
| ActiveCampaign plan | Published allowances | Monthly | Annual /mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| StarterTheir words: get started with personalised email campaigns. | Users: 1 · Email sends: 10× your contact limit · Segmentation: Limited · Automations: 5 actions per automation · Business goals: 15 active | — | $15 |
| PlusThe first tier with unlimited automation actions. | Users: 1 · Email sends: 10× your contact limit · Segmentation: Standard · Automations: Unlimited actions · Landing pages: Included · Business goals: 25 active | — | $49 |
| ProTheir most popular tier. | Users: 3 · Email sends: 12× your contact limit · Segmentation: Advanced · Automations: Unlimited actions · Attribution: Attribution and conversion tracking · Business goals: 200 active | — | $79 |
| EnterpriseAdds single sign-on, custom objects and a dedicated account team. | Users: 5 · Email sends: 15× your contact limit · Segmentation: Premium · Single sign-on: Included · Custom objects: Included · Business goals: 200 active | — | $145 |
Prices read from activecampaign.com/pricing on 6 August 2026. A “—” means ActiveCampaignpublishes no figure — we don’t estimate. Billed on top: The price rises with your contact count — the page's own bands run from 1,000 to over 200,000; Enhanced CRM (pipelines and sales engagement) is a paid add-on on every plan; WhatsApp is priced as its own set of plans, and as bundles with email. Transaction fees: Not applicable — it does not process your sales.
If email is your centre of gravity and you want the strongest deliverability in a stack you already run, pick ActiveCampaign — it's superb at exactly that. If you're tired of buying one channel at a time and want the whole engine written for you in your voice, that's what KBD is for.
ActiveCampaign does one job as well as anything on the market — email deliverability and automation logic that genuinely goes deep. But between a stranger and a paying customer there are seven stages, and email is one of them. The bill grew because you kept bolting on the other six.
The enhanced CRM is an add-on. WhatsApp is priced on its own. The email send allowance and the price both move with your contact count. None of it is hidden exactly — it just arrives one invoice at a time, so you never see the whole shape of what you're paying until you lay it out.
Even the best email tool still hands you the blank field. You write the sequence, build the page, wire the checkout, chase the person who went quiet — in your own hours, at your own kitchen table. The audit shows you where those hours actually go, so you can decide whether one more channel is the answer or the problem.
Lay your ActiveCampaign bill next to everything a whole business actually runs on, and the shape of the spend becomes obvious.
| What you’re paying for today | Like | Typical /mo |
|---|---|---|
| Email & automation | ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, ConvertKit | $49 |
| CRM / pipeline | HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive | $49 |
| Funnel & landing pages | ClickFunnels, Leadpages, Instapage | $97 |
| Course / membership platform | Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific | $99 |
| Checkout & billing | ThriveCart, SamCart | $49 |
| Scheduling | Calendly, Acuity | $15 |
| Forms & surveys | Typeform, Jotform | $29 |
| Automation / connectors | Zapier, Make | $29 |
| Design & content | Canva Pro | $15 |
| AI writing tools | Jasper, Copy.ai | $39 |
| The tools alone | $470/mo |
Every tool in that column is a blank box you fill yourself. Owners routinely lose 15 to 20 hours a week to the work around the work — writing, building, fixing, chasing — across logins that never quite talk to each other. Those hours are finite, and at a common valuation of your own time they cost far more than any subscription line.
The alternative to doing it yourself is paying someone to run it. An operator or small agency to actually work the whole engine runs $500 to $2,000 a month, and even then they never quite learn your voice no matter how many onboarding calls you sit through.
KBD stands in for all three columns — the stacked tools, the hours, and the operator — writing the actual work in your voice and handing you the decision. The price lives on the pricing page, not in this sentence.
The cost breakdown lands in your inbox now. One email later, the day you can actually buy KBD — nothing to purchase today.
We never sell your information.
Or apply to run KBD in your business nowAn early application, unpaid, honest feedback only, not for everyone
Read off activecampaign.com/pricing on 6 August 2026: Starter is $15/month billed annually. Plus is $49/month billed annually. Pro is $79/month billed annually. Enterprise is $145/month billed annually. There is no free plan. The free trial is 14 days.
Yes — on 6 August 2026 their own pages listed: The price rises with your contact count — the page's own bands run from 1,000 to over 200,000; Enhanced CRM (pipelines and sales engagement) is a paid add-on on every plan; WhatsApp is priced as its own set of plans, and as bundles with email. On transaction fees specifically: Not applicable — it does not process your sales.
The deepest, most reliable email deliverability and automation logic in this set. That is what it has always been for. Segmentation and conditional content go further than anything else here. Over a thousand integrations, so it sits inside a stack instead of asking to replace it. A 30-day money-back guarantee stated on the pricing page, which is unusual in this category. It does one job extremely well rather than nine jobs adequately. That is from their own pricing and product pages, read on 6 August 2026.
It is not an all-in-one: no funnels in the ClickFunnels sense, no courses, no checkout. The pricing page publishes annual-billed prices only; there is no monthly figure on it. The bill moves with your list, so growing the list is what raises the price. Starter caps automations at five actions each, which is the feature most people came for. That is our reading of their published plans and limits as of 6 August 2026 — check activecampaign.com/pricing before you decide anything on it.
Their pricing page publishes a 30-day money-back window, checked on 6 August 2026. Read the terms on activecampaign.com/pricing before relying on it.
ActiveCampaign publishes no monthly price at all on activecampaign.com/pricing — Starter is $15/month billed annually, read on 6 August 2026 — so there is no monthly figure to line it up against, and this page will not invent one by dividing an annual rate by twelve. The platforms priced on this site that DO publish a monthly entry tier run from Systeme.io at $0/month up to Keap at $299/month. Systeme.io publishes a permanently free plan. Read that carefully before switching on price alone: the entry tier is not the bill. ActiveCampaign's own pages list these on top of the plan: The price rises with your contact count — the page's own bands run from 1,000 to over 200,000; Enhanced CRM (pipelines and sales engagement) is a paid add-on on every plan; WhatsApp is priced as its own set of plans, and as bundles with email. On transaction fees: Not applicable — it does not process your sales. Several of the cheaper options above charge a percentage of your sales or per-message usage instead, and every one of those is listed per vendor, in their own words, at /data/platform-pricing — all of it read on 6 August 2026. The alternative this page is about is KBD Systems, which is priced at /pricing; the difference it is arguing is not the monthly figure but what you still have to do yourself after you have paid it.
That depends on who is going to run it, and their own pages make it answerable. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation platform with a CRM beside it, priced by how many contacts you hold, sold to businesses whose centre of gravity is the email list and the automations around it. What it genuinely does better: The deepest, most reliable email deliverability and automation logic in this set. That is what it has always been for. Segmentation and conditional content go further than anything else here. Where it is hardest on a small business owner running it alone: It is not an all-in-one: no funnels in the ClickFunnels sense, no courses, no checkout. The pricing page publishes annual-billed prices only; there is no monthly figure on it. Starter is $15/month billed annually. There is a 14-day free trial, so this is testable before it is decided. That is our reading of their published plans, limits and product pages as of 6 August 2026, not a rating — we publish no scores, and you should check activecampaign.com/pricing yourself before deciding anything on the strength of ours.