What ActiveCampaign costs
ActiveCampaign is priced on the size of your contact list, not on a flat monthly fee. There is no free plan, so the entry point is the paid Starter plan at $23/mo (Starter). From there the price climbs a contact-tier ladder: each time your list crosses a band, the monthly bill steps up. Plans and pricing checked July 2026, and every figure on this page is pulled live from our database rather than typed in by hand.
The billing detail that catches Australian businesses out is what counts as a contact. ActiveCampaign bills on All contacts (active + inactive), so a subscriber who has not opened an email in two years still costs you money every month. On a tool that bills only active subscribers, that same dead weight is free. List hygiene is not housekeeping on ActiveCampaign, it is a line item.
ActiveCampaign plans explained
There is no free plan (No (14-day trial)). ActiveCampaign gives you 14 days on the paid product and then asks for a card. That is a real difference from MailerLite, Brevo and Kit, which all run genuine free tiers, and it is worth knowing before you migrate a list across.
Starter is the entry paid plan at $23/mo (Starter). The important correction to make here, because a lot of comparison sites still get it wrong: Starter does include marketing automation. It is throttled, not absent. Each automation is capped at five actions, which comfortably covers a welcome sequence, a simple abandoned-cart nudge or a lead-magnet delivery, and runs out fast on a branching journey with conditional logic and waits. Starter also carries advanced segmentation and A/B testing (Yes (all plans)), and it is only sold up to 25,000 contacts. Past that, Starter is not an option.
Plus is where ActiveCampaign becomes the tool people rave about: uncapped automation actions, landing pages (Yes (Plus+)) and revenue attribution in the reporting. It rides the same contact-tier ladder as Starter, so it does not have one flat price. Use the calculator above to see what Plus costs at your own list size rather than guessing from a headline figure. Pro and Enterprise sit above it for teams that need attribution modelling and custom reporting.
The contact ladder is the thing that gets you
ActiveCampaign's pricing model is Per contact, and that is the whole story of the bill. A list that grows from 1,000 to 10,000 contacts does not cost ten times more, but it does cross several bands, and each band is a step up rather than a gentle slope. Layer the Starter-to-Plus jump on top (because most businesses that chose ActiveCampaign for its automation eventually hit the five-action cap) and you get the pattern we see repeatedly: a merchant who signed up for a competitive entry price is, two years later, on a bill they never modelled.
That is not a criticism of ActiveCampaign's value, it is an argument for costing it at the list size you expect to have in eighteen months, not the one you have today. The calculator above does exactly that.
Who ActiveCampaign suits
ActiveCampaign is for the business whose email actually is a machine: multi-step nurture journeys, behavioural triggers, lead scoring and CRM-style pipelines living beside the campaigns. Its automation builder is the best in this comparison, its segmentation is Advanced (behavioural, purchase, engagement), its deliverability is Very high (94% in independent tests), and it connects to 870+ other tools. It supports SMS for Australian senders (Yes (AU supported)) and meets Spam Act obligations (Yes). Support is 24/7 chat, which is genuinely better than most of the field.
If you send a monthly newsletter, none of that is worth paying for.
Where ActiveCampaign falls short
Honest cons, because the price only makes sense against them. It has no free plan at all, so there is no way to sit on it while a list is tiny. It bills every contact you store, active or not, so a stale list is a standing charge. The Starter automation cap of five actions is a real ceiling and it is easy to hit without noticing, which turns the advertised entry price into a stepping stone rather than a destination. And the tool is genuinely complex: the automation builder that justifies the money is also the thing a small team will not have time to learn. Plenty of businesses pay for ActiveCampaign and use it as a newsletter tool, which is the most expensive way to send a newsletter in Australia.
Cheaper ActiveCampaign alternatives
Three rivals in this category undercut it, and all three have the free plan ActiveCampaign lacks. MailerLite starts at $17/mo (Comfort) and bills on Active subscribers, so an unengaged list costs you nothing: it is the obvious pick if you want a clean editor and a low bill. Brevo starts at $12/mo (Starter) and bills on Unlimited contacts (billed by sends), which is the cheapest shape for a large Australian list that sends infrequently. Kit starts at $0 (free to 10K) and is built around creators and newsletters rather than sales pipelines.
None of the three matches ActiveCampaign's automation depth, and that is the honest trade. The live table above costs all of them against your real contact count so you can see what the depth is actually costing you.