Constant Contact Pricing 2026 With Cost, Fees and Plans by Contact Tier

How does Constant Contact pricing work?

Constant Contact prices on one number: how many contacts you store. You pick a plan, the system reads your contact count, and the monthly price follows from that pair. Your send allowance comes from the same number, at 10 times your contact count on Lite, 12 times on Standard and 24 times on Premium. A Standard plan sized for 5,000 contacts therefore includes 60,000 emails a month.

That is the model in one sentence. The surprises come from two rules that sit underneath it, and unlike most pricing complaints, both are documented by Constant Contact rather than inferred from angry reviews.

The first rule is the one that costs money. Constant Contact billing documentation states that your contact tier is based on the highest number of active contacts you have had in your account, so it may differ from the number of contacts you currently have. It goes on to say plainly that deleting contacts does not lower the contact tier. The worked example in the vendor documentation is a customer who starts at 400 contacts, rises to 525, then falls back to 410, and is billed on the 501 to 1,000 tier regardless. Cross a threshold once and the price stays there.

The second rule works in your favor, and it is the single biggest difference between Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Constant Contact bills only for active contacts. Unsubscribed contacts are classified as inactive and are not billed. Neither are contacts in awaiting confirmation status, contacts on temporary hold, or SMS-only contacts with no email address. Mailchimp does the opposite: unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts keep counting toward your bill until somebody manually archives them.

Read those two rules together and the expensive mistake on Constant Contact is not a dirty list. It is a single bulk import. A list that slowly accumulates unsubscribes will cost you nothing extra here. A one-time upload of an event export or a purchased list can raise your tier and keep it raised.

How much does Constant Contact cost per month?

The table above lists the published monthly figures. In plain terms: Lite opens at $12 a month, Standard at $35 and Premium at $80, all sized for 500 contacts. At 5,000 contacts those become $80, $110 and $200. At 25,000 they are $280, $310 and $425, and above 50,000 contacts Constant Contact moves to custom quoting.

Pay attention to the shape of that ladder rather than the entry price, because the entry price is not where most businesses live. The steepest proportional jump on Lite is early: $12 at 500 contacts becomes $30 at 1,000 and $50 in the 1,001 to 2,500 band. Doubling a small list more than doubles the bill. A business that starts on Standard at $35 and grows to 5,000 contacts over eighteen months, which is an ordinary trajectory for an active list, is paying $110 a month for exactly the same activity.

The charges that are not in the list price

Plan price is the floor. These are the line items that sit on top of it.

None of this is concealed. It is documented. It is simply not in the number on the pricing page, which is why teams budget the sticker and pay more.

Does Constant Contact have a free plan?

No. Constant Contact removed its free plan in June 2025, and at the same time moved features that had been available lower down, including A/B testing and advanced segmentation, into more expensive tiers. For small businesses that picked Constant Contact because it was the approachable option, both changes land the same way.

What remains is a 30 day free trial. The vendor documentation is specific about its limits: you can upload as many contacts as you like, but you get 100 total email sends, where an email to 10 contacts counts as 10 sends. You can build automations, landing pages, surveys and events during the trial, but you cannot publish them until you pay. The trial cannot be paused or cancelled and simply ends after 30 days.

Two stale numbers circulate widely and are worth correcting. The old 60 day trial is gone, and several 2026 roundups still say the trial is 14 days. The vendor help documentation says 30.

Did Constant Contact raise prices?

Yes. The June 2025 restructuring eliminated the free plan and pushed features up-tier, which raises the effective price for anyone who needed those features without changing the headline number. Beyond that specific event, most of what customers experience as a price increase is not a repricing at all. It is the contact ladder doing what it is designed to do, combined with the rule that tiers go up automatically and come down only when you ask.

Does Constant Contact have nonprofit pricing?

Yes, and it is more generous than most of the category. Nonprofits get 20 percent off by prepaying for 6 months, or 30 percent off by prepaying for 12 months. That compares well against Mailchimp, which offers 15 percent off the base plan and only if you request it before you buy.

There is a better deal, with one important condition. Constant Contact is available through TechSoup, the nonprofit technology marketplace, at a discount commonly reported around 50 percent. The condition is the part that costs organizations money: nonprofits that already hold a Constant Contact subscription are not eligible for the TechSoup offer. If you are a nonprofit evaluating Constant Contact, check TechSoup before you open an account, not after. Signing up first and asking later is the sequencing mistake, and it is not reversible.

Constant Contact pricing vs Mailchimp

These two are the default comparison for US small businesses, and on headline price they are closer than either would like to admit. Mailchimp Essentials is $13 at 500 contacts against Constant Contact Lite at $12. At 5,000 contacts Mailchimp Standard is about $100 against Constant Contact Standard at $110.

The real difference is in what counts as a contact. Constant Contact does not bill unsubscribed contacts. Mailchimp does, until you archive them, and nothing in the product prompts you to. On an older list carrying years of opt-outs, that gap is worth more than the difference in list price. Running the other way, Mailchimp recalculates from your current peak each billing period, while Constant Contact holds you at the highest tier you have ever reached. We put the full comparison, with both billing models side by side, in Constant Contact vs Mailchimp, and the Mailchimp ladder in detail on Mailchimp pricing.

How to lower a Constant Contact bill without switching

If you are staying, three moves are worth an hour of somebody time.

Ask to be moved down a tier. This is the one that matters most, because it does not happen automatically. Delete or archive the contacts you do not need, then contact billing and request the lower tier. Cleaning the list without asking changes nothing on your invoice.

Remove bounced contacts. Hard bounces that are still sitting in the account count as active contacts until they are removed. This is the one category of dead record that does cost you money here.

Prepay if your list is stable. A 12 month commitment is 15 percent off and a 6 month commitment is 10 percent. That only makes sense if you are confident about your tier, since prepaying locks in the plan, not your contact count.

When a flat plan costs less than a contact ladder

Here is the honest comparison, including where Constant Contact wins.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Constant Contact Standard is cheaper than $149 a month until somewhere around 10,000 contacts, and more expensive after that. But it is not a like for like comparison at any list size, because the $149 Growth plan is email plus SEO, social and Google Ads, and a Constant Contact plan is email plus events. If you run events and want a US phone number to call when something breaks, Constant Contact earns its price and you should stay. If your list is modest but four channels are behind and nobody is writing anything, the contact ladder is charging you for the wrong thing.

If you are weighing a move rather than a budget, our Constant Contact alternative comparison covers the switch itself, and email marketing software covers how the whole category prices. For the other big vendor cost questions, see HubSpot pricing and what email marketing software costs.