Marketing automation pricing: the real cost over two years

In brief: What you pay for marketing automation software depends first on how it bills you: per contact, per email sent or per licence. Below 10,000 contacts, per-contact billing usually works out cheaper. Beyond that, the gap flips, and quickly.

“How much does it cost?” It sounds like a simple question, and every pricing page answers it with a “from”. €15 a month with one vendor, €90 per licence with another, €1,250 with a third. Those figures are accurate. Yet they tell you almost nothing about what you will be paying eighteen months from now, once your database has doubled after two trade shows and an imported prospect list.

The entry price matters less than the way the bill grows. That is what this article puts numbers on, using the public price lists published on each vendor’s official pages and checked on 13 November 2026. The amounts are the ones displayed, on annual billing where that applies, and vendors do not always say whether they exclude VAT.

Three ways to bill for automation

Before comparing prices, you need to compare units. Vendors are not selling the same thing.

The first model is the most common. It has a certain logic: the more contacts you have, the harder the tool works. Except that in B2B, a good share of the database does no work at all. Old prospects, contacts from a trade show two years ago, addresses that no longer open anything: every one of them counts towards your tier.

The second bills you for what actually goes out. A database of 20,000 contacts you email twice a month costs the same as a database of 5,000 you email eight times. The third barely cares about your contacts: it counts seats, and it locks you in for a year.

Price lists as of November 2026

Here is what the pricing pages actually show. Where a price is not displayed, the table says so. The figures circulating on third-party comparison sites contradict each other too often to be copied across.

One point on HubSpot. Its price list is now presented per licence, and it no longer lets you see what a growing base of marketing contacts will cost. If you are leaning towards this tool, get that point quoted in writing before you sign.

ActiveCampaign’s prices assume an annual commitment. That is standard across the market: the headline price nearly always means paying twelve months upfront or signing up for a year.

What a growing database costs

This is where the billing model makes all the difference. The table below gives ActiveCampaign’s annual cost at three database sizes, taken from its own euro price list, against a volume-based plan.

To be fair about it: with 2,500 contacts, a volume-based plan makes no financial sense. ActiveCampaign’s Starter tier costs a fifth as much. And at 10,000 contacts, the Plus plan is still slightly cheaper.

After that, the curve steepens. Between 10,000 and 20,000 contacts, the Starter plan more than doubles, from €1,788 to €3,732 a year, without a single extra message going out. The Pro plan passes €6,500. The volume-based plan stays put as long as you remain under 100,000 emails a month, which is five monthly sends to 20,000 contacts.

The two-year simulation

Take a B2B SME that starts out with 10,000 contacts, prospects and customers combined. It imports a prospect list and picks up the contacts from two trade shows: by year two, its database reaches 20,000 addresses. It sends three to four campaigns a month and runs a handful of follow-up workflows.

The gap does not come from a lower headline price. It comes from the fact that growing the database, which is the whole point of prospecting, does not weigh on the bill.

The same sum works the other way round. A company that keeps 3,000 highly engaged contacts and writes to them every week is far better off on per-contact billing. There is no right model in the abstract, only a model that fits the shape of your database.

The costs the price list does not show

Additional users

ActiveCampaign includes one user on Starter and Plus, three on Pro. HubSpot charges for every licence. Three people building workflows means three licences, or €270 a month on Pro before contacts even come into it. Decide how many people will use the tool before you sign, not after.

Commitments and fixed tiers

Most displayed prices assume annual billing. In practice, if your database crosses a tier mid-year, you move up a bracket. If it shrinks after a clean-up, the contract does not necessarily follow. Ask how the vendor handles a drop in tier: the answer is often less flexible than the one for an increase.

Email volume beyond the plan

Volume-based plans have their limits too. At Ediware, extra credit on the Premium plan costs €0.25 excl. VAT per thousand emails and carries over from one month to the next. A trade-show month with 150,000 sends therefore adds €12.50 excl. VAT to the bill. Check this overage rate with every vendor: it tells you whether the plan is flexible or not.

Your team’s time

This is the heaviest cost, and the only one nobody displays. Building a workflow, writing its messages, monitoring it, fixing it when it chases the wrong audience. Gartner’s 2022 Marketing Technology Survey found that marketers were using only 42% of their tools’ capabilities, down from 58% in 2020 (as reported by Chief Marketer). Paying for a suite and using less than half of it is the most common overspend in the market, and it never appears on an invoice.

Choosing the features comes before the price, in any case. Our marketing automation comparison sets out the three families of tools and what each one really automates.

Reading a marketing automation quote in five questions

Before comparing two offers, put the same questions to both vendors. Written answers are worth more than any headline price.

The second row deserves a word of explanation: the gap between monthly and annual pricing varies from vendor to vendor, and some simply do not offer monthly billing. Ask for both prices.

Once you have those answers, rebuild the 24-month table with your own figures: your database today, the one you are aiming for, the number of sends per month. Ten minutes in a spreadsheet is enough, and the ranking of the offers often turns upside down.

Which billing model suits which company

For the second row, the most common among companies that prospect, this is the choice we made. Ediware pricing bills the volume sent, with no contact tiers and no commitment, dedicated IPs included and credits that never expire. If your database is small and heavily emailed, a per-contact tool will cost you less, and there is no reason to deny yourself one.

What matters, in the end, is paying for what you actually use. The right emailing software with automation is the one whose bill follows your activity, not the size of your list.