Constant Contact Pricing 2026: Cost by Plan

The short answer: Constant Contact costs $12 a month for Lite, $35 for Standard and $80 for Premium on monthly billing at the smallest contact tier. Prepay twelve months and 15 percent comes off, taking those to $10.20, $29.75 and $68. There is no free plan, only a free trial and a 30 day money back guarantee. The two things that actually decide your bill are not on the plan cards: your price tier moves up automatically as your contact list grows, and each plan caps monthly sends at a multiple of your contacts, 10x on Lite, 12x on Standard and 24x on Premium, with anything beyond that billed at $0.002 per send.

Every figure below was read from Constant Contact's own US pricing page on 16 August 2026. Prices move, so check before you sign.

Constant Contact pricing in 2026

Those are starting prices, which is the caveat that matters most. Every one of them applies at the smallest contact tier. Constant Contact prices by plan and by list size together, so the $12 and the $35 on that table are the floor of a ladder rather than a flat rate. As your list grows the tier changes underneath you and the invoice follows.

What each plan actually includes

All three plans share a base that is more generous than most of the category: the drag and drop editor, an AI copy generator, templates, social posting, signup forms, live phone and chat support, and over 300 integrations. Phone support on an entry plan is genuinely unusual and it is a real part of what people pay for here.

The differences sit in automation, scheduling and reporting depth.

• Lite is one user, one automation template and basic reporting. It sends email and posts to social, and that is close to the whole story.
• Standard is the one most small businesses land on. Three users, email scheduling, subject line A/B testing, automatic resend to non openers, three automation templates, AI campaign building, 10 custom segments and reporting that shows open and click rates. The automatic resend to non openers is the feature that usually pays for the upgrade on its own.
• Premium is unlimited users, unlimited custom automations and segments, dynamic content, a Google Ads manager, SEO recommendations, revenue reporting, a dedicated priority support team and 500 SMS messages a month.

Constant Contact itself recommends Standard for most small businesses, and on the feature split that is fair rather than a sales line. The jump from Lite to Standard buys tools you will use weekly. The jump from Standard to Premium mostly buys scale and headcount, so it makes sense when a second and third person need their own login or when SMS becomes part of the plan.

The send limit nobody reads until the invoice arrives

This is the part of Constant Contact pricing that gets left out of almost every comparison post, and it is the one that produces surprise charges.

Your monthly send allowance is not a flat number. It is a multiple of your contact count: ten times your contacts on Lite, twelve times on Standard, twenty four times on Premium. A list of 1,000 contacts on Standard therefore buys 12,000 sends a month.

That sounds like plenty until you count properly. One weekly newsletter to 1,000 people is 4,000 sends a month. Add a three email automated welcome series, a monthly promotion, and an automatic resend to non openers, and a modest programme gets close to the ceiling faster than people expect. Going over does not block anything, which is the humane choice, but Constant Contact bills the excess at $0.002 per send. That is $2 per thousand extra emails.

The important consequence is structural. On a per contact platform, a big quiet list is expensive. On Constant Contact you also get punished for sending frequently to a small list, because the allowance scales with contacts rather than with intent. If you run a high frequency programme to a tight audience, model that multiplier before you commit.

The contact count is the real meter

Constant Contact counts contacts, not subscribers who engage. Somebody who signed up in 2022, never opened an email and never unsubscribed still occupies a slot and still pushes you toward the next tier.

So the cheapest lever available to you is list hygiene, and it is worth doing deliberately rather than once a year in a panic:

• Delete or archive contacts who have not opened anything in twelve months. They are not going to start, and they are dragging your deliverability down as well as your bill.
• Check for duplicates across imported lists. Event exports and point of sale imports produce them constantly.
• Watch the tier boundary. If you are sitting at 2,510 contacts and the tier breaks at 2,500, pruning ten dead records can be worth a real amount over a year.

There is a version of this that goes too far. Do not delete engaged contacts to save $20 a month, and do not confuse a small list with a good one. The point is that on this pricing model an unmaintained list is a recurring cost, not just untidy.

The nonprofit discount, with the actual terms

Constant Contact has one of the clearer nonprofit programmes in the category, and the terms are specific enough to be worth stating exactly:

• 20 percent off when you prepay six months.
• 30 percent off when you prepay twelve months.
• No discount at all on monthly billing.

That last line is the one that costs organizations money. A nonprofit paying month to month is paying full retail. Thirty percent off Standard at the starting tier takes $35 down to about $24.50, and the gap widens at every tier above it.

The paperwork requirement is strict. Constant Contact asks US organizations for the federal Letter of Determination, 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6). Tax ID paperwork on its own does not qualify. Get the discount confirmed before you purchase a prepay plan rather than after, because sorting it out retroactively is slower. When the quarter's results have to go in front of a board or a funder, most teams end up rebuilding those email numbers into a deck by hand, which is the sort of thing you can now turn a report into a presentation automatically instead.

SMS pricing

SMS is bundled on Premium, which includes 500 messages a month. On Lite and Standard it is an add on starting at $10 a month for up to 500 messages, with larger bundles as your list grows. Text to join and SMS reporting are included in every option.

Worth doing the arithmetic before you assume Premium is the cheaper route to SMS. Standard at $35 plus a $10 SMS add on is $45, against Premium at $80. If SMS is the only reason you are looking at Premium, the add on wins comfortably. Premium earns its price on unlimited users, unlimited automations and revenue reporting, not on the texts.

How Constant Contact compares on price

Entry prices in this category cluster so tightly that they are almost useless for choosing. Every one of these lands between $9 and $20. What separates them is the third column, because the meter decides how the bill behaves two years from now when your list has tripled.

Constant Contact is the only one of the six that meters both directions at once, by contacts and by send volume. Brevo is the opposite, unlimited contacts and priced purely on sends, which is why it suits a large but rarely mailed list. Klaviyo charges for stored profiles whether or not you mail them. Our fuller breakdown of that pattern sits in the email marketing software guide, and the Mailchimp cost breakdown covers the closest direct comparison.

Is Constant Contact worth the price?

For its actual audience, which is US small businesses, nonprofits and event organizations that want email to work without becoming somebody's specialty, the pricing is fair. Live phone support on a $12 plan is a genuine differentiator, and the reason a lot of these accounts never leave.

Where it stops being good value is depth. If you need branching automation, tight ecommerce revenue attribution or serious segmentation logic, you will find the higher plans expensive relative to what ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo give you at the same money. That gap is well covered in our Constant Contact alternative comparison, and the honest question first is whether the tool is the constraint at all, which is what is Constant Contact worth it works through.

The pattern we see most often is not a platform problem. An account gets paid for every month and sends four campaigns a year, because writing the emails keeps slipping. No pricing tier fixes that. If the calendar is the bottleneck rather than the software, the useful move is to sort out the production side first, which is what an AI email marketing agent does before any sender is involved, and what the wider AI marketing platform pricing comparison sizes up.

Questions people ask about Constant Contact pricing

How much does Constant Contact cost?

Constant Contact starts at $12 a month for Lite, $35 for Standard and $80 for Premium when you pay monthly, at the smallest contact tier. Prepaying 12 months takes 15 percent off and brings those to $10.20, $29.75 and $68. Those are starting prices only. Your actual bill is set by how many contacts are on your list, and it rises automatically as the list grows.

Does Constant Contact have a free plan?

No. Constant Contact does not offer a permanently free tier. It offers a free trial with no credit card required, and every new paid plan carries a 30 day money back guarantee, so you can cancel within the first month for a full refund. After the trial the cheapest option is Lite at $12 a month.

What is the Constant Contact email send limit?

Every plan includes a monthly send allowance calculated as a multiple of your contact count: 10 times your contacts on Lite, 12 times on Standard and 24 times on Premium. Going over does not stop your sends. Constant Contact bills additional sends at $0.002 each, which works out to $2 for every 1,000 emails past the allowance.

Does Constant Contact offer a nonprofit discount?

Yes, and the terms are specific. Nonprofits get 20 percent off by prepaying six months, or 30 percent off by prepaying twelve months. There is no nonprofit discount on monthly billing. You have to submit your federal Letter of Determination, 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6), before purchasing, because tax ID paperwork alone is not accepted.

How much does Constant Contact SMS cost?

SMS is included on Premium, which comes with 500 messages a month at no extra charge. On Lite and Standard it is a paid add on starting at $10 a month for up to 500 messages, with larger bundles available as your list grows. Every SMS option includes text to join for list building and SMS reporting.

Is Constant Contact cheaper than Mailchimp?

At the smallest tiers they are close, with Constant Contact Lite at $12 against Mailchimp Essentials around $13. The two diverge as lists grow, and which one wins depends on your send pattern rather than your list size. Constant Contact caps sends at a multiple of contacts and charges $0.002 for overage, so heavy senders on small lists can hit that ceiling while light senders on large lists will not.

Can you cancel Constant Contact and get a refund?

Every new paid plan comes with a 30 day money back guarantee, so cancelling inside the first month returns your money in full. After that window you can cancel at any time on monthly billing, but a prepaid annual term is what you bought, so weigh the 15 percent prepay saving against the commitment if you are not yet sure the platform fits.

Last updated August 2026. Plan prices, send multipliers, overage rate, SMS add on pricing and nonprofit terms were read from constantcontact.com on 16 August 2026. Comparison prices carry their own check dates in the table above.