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Email Marketing Cost Calculator

You are billed on how many contacts you have stored, not how many read your email. See the cost of your list, and the saving hiding in the inactive half.

Enter your numbers

Platform

Contacts on your list

Every stored address, including people who never open. This is the number you are billed on.

Inactive share of the list (percent)

No open in 12 months. 20-40 percent is normal. Check your platform's engagement segment to get the real figure.

Emails sent per month

Campaigns, not individual messages. Send volume is usually included in the tier.

Monthly add-ons

Dedicated IP, extra seats, SMS credits, advanced reporting.

Annual cost at current list size

Twelve months on your current tier, including add-ons.

Monthly cost now

What you are billed today.

Monthly cost after cleaning the list

The same list with inactive contacts removed - often one tier lower.

Annual saving from list hygiene

You are paying to store people who never read your email. This is what that costs.

Annual cost per active subscriber

The number to compare against revenue per subscriber. If it is high, the list is carrying dead weight.

Cost per campaign sent

Monthly cost divided by send volume - useful when deciding whether to send more often.

Active contacts after cleaning

The list you would actually be mailing.

Estimates only. Vendor pricing and contract terms vary - always confirm figures on a written quote. Results update as you type and nothing is sent to a server.

Email platforms price on the size of your list. That means every address you collected, imported, or never quite got around to deleting is billed monthly, whether or not it has opened an email in two years.

Most lists carry 20-40% inactive contacts. This calculator prices your list on publicly published tiers, then prices the same list after removing the inactive share, so you can see what list hygiene is worth in hard currency. It is usually one full pricing tier.

How to use this calculator

Pull your contact count from the billing page, not the audience page. Some platforms bill on total stored contacts including suppressed ones.
Find your engagement segment - usually contacts with no open in the last 12 months - and read the percentage off it rather than guessing.
Compare the current monthly cost with the cleaned-list cost. If they land in different tiers, that gap is a recurring saving for the cost of one afternoon isolating and archiving the disengaged.
Check what your platform does with unsubscribes and bounced addresses. Some stop billing them, some do not. That difference is worth knowing before you pay for a bigger tier.
Compare cost per active subscriber rather than total cost before switching platforms - a cheaper headline tier on a dirtier list is not cheaper.

Paying for contacts who never open?

Kit bills on subscriber count with automation included on every tier, and its free plan covers your first 10,000 subscribers for a single newsletter. Straightforward pricing, no send-volume metering.

See Kit pricing

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Want automation priced in, not bolted on?

ActiveCampaign includes automation on all tiers, which matters if you are paying a premium tier somewhere else purely to unlock flows.

See ActiveCampaign pricing

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Frequently asked questions

Is list cleaning actually worth doing?

It is one of the few actions in email marketing with an immediate and certain return, because the billing is tied directly to list size. If clearing 30% of your list drops you one pricing tier, that saving recurs every month for zero further effort. The deliverability benefit is a bonus on top.

Should I delete inactive contacts or just stop emailing them?

Most platforms bill on stored contacts, so archiving without deleting does not reduce the bill. Check the specific rule for your platform - some exclude unsubscribed and hard-bounced addresses from the count, which makes suppression enough.

Why is Klaviyo more expensive than Mailchimp?

Klaviyo is priced for revenue attribution and ecommerce flows rather than newsletter sending, and its tiers start at lower contact counts. On a small list it costs more; on an ecommerce list where triggered flows drive a meaningful share of revenue, the attribution and segmentation are what you are paying for.

Does send volume change the price?

Rarely on the mainstream platforms - the price is driven by contacts stored. Volume becomes a cost issue on providers that bill per email sent, and on any platform once you exceed the included monthly send allowance.

Next steps

If the saving from list hygiene is large, do the cleaning before you switch platforms - otherwise you will carry the same dead weight onto the new pricing tier and pay for it all over again.