ActiveCampaign pricing: what it really costs per year (2026)

TL;DR

• ActiveCampaign starts at $15.00/month on its Starter plan — $180 a year, $540 over three years for a single seat.
• That puts it in the 63th percentile of the 32 tool prices we track: 12 tracked tools cost more per month, the rest cost less.
• Against the median email-marketing tool we track ($15.00/month), ActiveCampaign is priced identically.
• The median lifetime deal we currently track costs $29.99 — the equivalent of 2 months of ActiveCampaign.
• ActiveCampaign has no free tier, so the subscription meter starts on day one.

The cumulative bill for ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign bills $15.00 per seat per month on its Starter plan. That lands in the awkward middle of software budgets: expensive enough to notice on an invoice, cheap enough that most teams renew without recalculating. Three years on a single seat is $540; the same span across five seats is $2,700. ActiveCampaign scales its price with contact count, so the entry figure applies at the lowest contact tier only.

Time on ActiveCampaign	Cumulative cost (1 seat)	Cumulative cost (5 seats)	Break-even one-time price
1 year	$180	$900	Under $180
2 years	$360	$1,800	Under $360
3 years	$540	$2,700	Under $540
5 years	$900	$4,500	Under $900
10 years	$1,800	$9,000	Under $1,800

The break-even column is a ceiling, not a recommendation. It assumes uninterrupted use across the whole horizon and a perpetual licence that keeps working. Neither assumption is free: churn on your side and vendor shutdown on theirs both destroy the payback.

What happens when the team grows

Per-seat pricing is where most estimates go wrong: the advertised figure covers one person, and the invoice covers the team. Assuming linear per-seat pricing on the Starter plan, ActiveCampaign scales like this:

Seats	Monthly	Annual	Three-year total
1	$15.00	$180	$540
3	$45.00	$540	$1,620
5	$75.00	$900	$2,700
10	$150.00	$1,800	$5,400
25	$375.00	$4,500	$13,500

Where this table will be wrong is at scale: enterprise agreements, education pricing and annual commitments all bend the curve downward. It will not be wrong in the direction of costing you more.

Benchmarking ActiveCampaign on price

We hold published entry prices for 32 software tools, which lets us place ActiveCampaign on a distribution instead of calling it affordable or premium with nothing behind the word. ActiveCampaign sits at the 63th percentile. The median tracked tool costs $14.00 per month. ActiveCampaign therefore prices above the midpoint of what we track, without being an outlier at either end.

The tracked tools priced closest to ActiveCampaign are Canva at $15.00/month, Kit (ConvertKit) at $15.00/month, Figma at $16.00/month. If any of those already sit in your stack, the overlap question comes before the pricing question: two tools at this price point cost $360 a year together, and consolidation is usually the larger saving than any discount on either one.

ActiveCampaign is an email-marketing and automation platform for businesses that have outgrown basic newsletter tools.

How email-marketing tools compare

Comparing across all software is a blunt instrument, so we also hold the 2 other email-marketing tools we price. Their median entry price is $15.00 per month, which puts ActiveCampaign exactly level with its category. A price that close to the category median tells you the choice between these tools is a fit question, not a cost question.

email-marketing tool	Entry price / month	Vs ActiveCampaign
Mailchimp	$13.00	13% less
Kit (ConvertKit)	$15.00	level

There is no free plan to fall back on

With no free tier, ActiveCampaign gives you a trial window and then bills. The consequence for total cost is that light months cost exactly as much as heavy ones — there is nowhere to downshift to. Divide $180 by the number of times you realistically open it in a year. That number, not $15.00, is what the tool costs you.

What perpetual licences cost right now

ActiveCampaign has never appeared as a lifetime deal on the marketplaces we track; email-marketing lifetime deals usually come from smaller challengers. These are the cheapest one-time-payment tools our crawler currently observes across the marketplaces we track, each converted into the number of ActiveCampaign months it equals.

Tracked one-time deal	Category	Marketplace	Lowest observed price	Months of ActiveCampaign it equals
Email List Validation	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
ProductDyno	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
The Personal Goals Freebie Bundle	Online Courses	StackSocial	$0.00	0
Shopper.com	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
Helium 10	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0
Vumu	Software	AppSumo	$0.00	0

The conversion column is the point of this table. A perpetual licence is not "cheap" in the abstract — it is a fixed number of subscription months, and it repays only if the tool outlives them.

Does ActiveCampaign itself have a lifetime deal?

Rather than guess, check the tracked answer — it records which marketplaces were searched and when. See Does ActiveCampaign have a lifetime deal? The page updates automatically if that changes.

How this page is maintained

Pricing comes from ActiveCampaign's own published pricing page and is re-checked each review cycle; the comparison distribution is recomputed from our first-party tracker on every run. Last computed 2026-09-20.