Report · 7 September 2026
ActiveCampaign 2026 pricing, explained - what it really costs as your list grows
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform, and it is a good one. Branching automations, goals, lead scoring, a CRM with deal pipelines, SMS and WhatsApp, landing pages, more than a thousand integrations. If your business runs on those, this page is not really for you and you should stop reading with our blessing.
It is for everybody else. The people who signed up for the automation, use it to send a newsletter and the occasional announcement, and watch the bill climb every time the list does.
Here is the whole bill, set out the way Bernard sets out a quote. Every line, and no surprises at the van.
First, the good news about the price
ActiveCampaign publishes a price in pounds. That sounds like faint praise until you have read the rest of this category, where What an online course platform really costs in 2026 - Podia, Kajabi, Teachable and the rest found that not one of the six course platforms we checked quoted anything but US dollars. ActiveCampaign's pricing page has a currency selector with pounds in it. A UK buyer can read the actual number before signing up.
So the figures below are real pounds, read off their own page on 6 September 2026, on the annual billing they show by default.
The price is the size of your list
This is the thing to understand before anything else. ActiveCampaign is not priced by what you do. It is priced by how many contacts you hold.
The pricing page carries a contact selector with bands at 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 7,500, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 25,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 and above. Every plan's price moves when you change it. Here is the same four plans at four different list sizes, in pounds a month, billed annually:
| Contacts | Starter | Plus | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | £13 | £42 | £67 | £123 |
| 2,500 | £33 | £81 | £127 | £217 |
| 5,000 | £67 | £123 | £174 | £319 |
| 10,000 | £127 | £161 | £319 | £501 |
Read across a row and you are choosing features. Read down a column and you are watching your own success bill you.
Their FAQ is admirably straight about it. If your list grows beyond your plan's limit, they say, ActiveCampaign makes it easy to upgrade to the next contact band, and your investment simply scales as your business and opportunities expand. That is a fair description. It is also the entire arithmetic.
What that means over a year
Take Starter, the cheapest plan, and follow one business as its list grows.
| Your list | Starter, per year |
|---|---|
| 1,000 contacts | £156 |
| 2,500 contacts | £396 |
| 5,000 contacts | £804 |
| 10,000 contacts | £1,524 |
Nothing about the business changed. The owner sends the same monthly newsletter she always sent. She got better at collecting email addresses, and the bill went up nearly tenfold.
And the contacts doing that to her are not the good ones. A list is mostly people who signed up once, meant to read it, and never quite did. Under a per-contact price you pay the same for them as for your best customer, every month, until you work up the nerve to delete them. That is why "clean your list" is advice this whole industry gives you, and it is worth knowing whose interest it serves that you find it hard.
Two more things the band decides
Your sending room. The number of emails you may send a month is a multiple of your contact limit rather than a flat allowance: their comparison table gives 10 times your contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12 times on Pro and 15 times on Enterprise. So the same number sets both your price and your ceiling.
What the cheap plan actually is. Starter is the entry price and it is also the cut-down product. Their own comparison table gives it limited segmentation, one user, and five actions per automation, against unlimited automation actions further up. If the automation is the reason you are paying for a marketing automation platform, the £13 a month is not the plan you will end up on.
The VAT question is left open
Their pricing page says nothing about VAT, one way or the other. We are not going to tell you either, because we could not source it. Ask them, or read your first invoice properly, before you compare any of these figures with anything.
Bernard's own answer is short. He is not big enough to be VAT-registered, so nothing is added at the checkout.
So where does Bernard sit?
Honestly, and this needs saying before the table: at the small end Bernard is not the cheap option.
With 1,000 contacts, ActiveCampaign Starter is £156 for the year. Bernard's entry plan is £200 a year. If the only thing you want is a way to email a thousand people and you already have a website you are happy with, ActiveCampaign is cheaper and you should take it.
The comparison changes shape when you notice that those two prices are not buying the same thing.
| The yearly bill | ActiveCampaign Starter | Bernard, entry plan |
|---|---|---|
| At 1,000 contacts | £156 | £200 |
| At 5,000 contacts | £804 | £200 |
| At 10,000 contacts | £1,524 | £200 |
| Charged per contact | yes, by band | no |
| Your website | not included | included, moved and rebuilt |
| Email to your list | that is the product | included in the plan |
| Taken from your sales | nothing | nothing |
Bernard's price is for a whole website, moved across free and rebuilt so it loads fast and reads clearly to people and to the search and AI tools that now read the web. Emailing the people on it is part of the plan rather than a second subscription. There is no charge per contact and no separate bill for email, so the number in that column stays where it is while your list does whatever it likes.
The other half of it is that the list is not in a different building from the website. Somebody who buys from you, enrols on your course or fills in a form on your site is already a contact, with the permission they gave recorded next to them. There is nothing to sync and no integration to keep alive.
What Bernard does not do
This matters more than the price, so it goes in plain sight rather than in a footnote. If any of these is the thing you need, ActiveCampaign is the better home and you should stay there.
There is no workflow builder. Bernard has a fixed set of automatic emails that cover the ordinary jobs: greet a new subscriber, thank somebody after they buy, look after a new student, deliver a course by email, follow up an enquiry, chase an unconfirmed sign-up and open the doors to a waiting list. That is a list of good answers to common questions. It is not a canvas with branches, goals and scoring, and nothing here is going to become one.
There is no open and click tracking, deliberately. You will be told how many were delivered, how many bounced, who unsubscribed and who complained, and not who opened what. If your reporting depends on open rates, that is a real difference and you should weigh it.
There are no custom fields and no segments built on them. You group people with tags, and you can narrow an audience by tag and save that combination by name. There is no SMS, no WhatsApp, no landing pages beyond your own website's pages, and nothing like a thousand integrations.
There is a monthly sending allowance, which exists to protect your sending reputation rather than to sell you the next band. A campaign that would go over it is declined whole rather than trimmed to a random slice of your list.
Bernard can also write the email for you from a one-line description of what is happening, and that particular ability sits on the middle plan rather than the entry one.
That is a real list, and Bernard would rather hand it to you now than let you find it out in month two.
What you would actually get
Your website, your contacts and your mailing list in one place, on one bill. Campaigns that only ever go to people whose permission is on record, with the count in front of you before you agree to anything. One quote, one yes, and a window in which stopping still works. Results afterwards in plain words rather than codes. An unsubscribe link that lands on your own site and that you can never undo on somebody's behalf. And if you are coming from ActiveCampaign, an import that writes your unsubscribes and bounces to your do-not-email list before it creates a single contact, with a report you read and approve first and can undo at any time afterwards.
What you would not get is the automation platform. If you are using it, keep it.
Paste your current address and Bernard will measure up, free, and show you the new place before you decide anything.
Questions people ask
- How much does ActiveCampaign cost in 2026?
- It depends on how many contacts you hold, because that is what the price is based on. Read on ActiveCampaign's own pricing page on 6 September 2026, with the currency set to pounds and billed annually: with 1,000 contacts, Starter is £13 a month, Plus £42, Pro £67 and Enterprise £123. With 5,000 contacts the same four plans are £67, £123, £174 and £319. With 10,000 they are £127, £161, £319 and £501. The plan you are on does not change; the bill does.
- Does ActiveCampaign charge by the number of contacts?
- Yes, and it says so. The pricing page has a contact selector with bands running from 1,000 to over 50,000, and every plan's price moves when you change it. Their own FAQ puts it this way: if your list grows beyond your plan's limit, they make it easy to upgrade to the next contact band, and your investment scales as your business expands. That is the whole shape of the bill. The people who cost you the most are the ones who never open anything.
- Does ActiveCampaign publish a price in pounds?
- Yes, and that is worth saying because most of this category does not. The pricing page has a currency selector with pounds in it, alongside dollars, euros, Canadian and Australian dollars and Brazilian reais. So a UK buyer can read the real number before signing up rather than guessing at an exchange rate. The page says nothing about VAT either way, so check your first invoice.
- How many emails can I send on ActiveCampaign?
- It is a multiple of your contact limit, not a flat number. Their comparison table gives 10 times your contact limit on Starter and Plus, 12 times on Pro and 15 times on Enterprise, per month. So the same thing that sets your price also sets your sending room.
- Is Bernard a cheaper alternative to ActiveCampaign?
- Not at the small end, and this page will not pretend otherwise. With 1,000 contacts ActiveCampaign Starter is £156 for the year and Bernard's entry plan is £200. The difference is what the two prices buy and what happens next. Bernard's £200 is your whole website, and emailing your list is included in it, with no charge per contact, so the number does not move when your list grows. ActiveCampaign's £156 is the email tool on its own, you are still paying somebody else for the website, and at 5,000 contacts that £156 has become £804.