Most email marketing tools charge you for contacts you never email. Import 10,000 people, email 2,000 of them, pay for all 10,000. Mailchimp does this. Klaviyo does this. It has been the default model for so long that most people assume it is the only model.
It is not. And when we were building Sendflo, we decided not to do it.
The math on a typical list
On an average email list, somewhere between 40% and 60% of contacts have not opened an email in over six months. They signed up, they went cold, and they are still sitting there being counted. Early Sendflo users imported their existing lists and were surprised to find that often more than half their contacts had not engaged in months — some in over a year.
Under per-contact pricing, your bill goes up every time someone subscribes, regardless of whether they ever engage. A list of 25,000 contacts on Mailchimp's standard plan runs around $270 per month. If 12,000 of those contacts are dormant, you are paying roughly $130 per month for people who will never click anything.
Most tools count unsubscribed contacts against your limit too — you have to manually archive them to stop being charged. Check your current tool's settings if you are not sure.
Why this pricing model exists
Per-contact pricing is not arbitrary. It made sense when email infrastructure was expensive and the hard part was storing and managing subscriber data. Platforms charged for what it cost them to run.
That is no longer the constraint. Storage is cheap. The bottleneck now is deliverability — getting emails into inboxes rather than spam folders. Deliverability depends on how many emails you send and how engaged your recipients are, not how large your list is.
So the legacy model charges you for a cost that no longer exists, while ignoring the thing that actually matters.
What per-email pricing changes
When you pay per email sent, the incentive changes. You are not penalized for having a large list. You are not pushed to delete unengaged contacts just to lower your monthly bill. You import your full list, and you pay when you actually send something.
A business with 50,000 contacts that sends one campaign per month to 10,000 engaged subscribers pays for 10,000 emails — not 50,000. The other 40,000 contacts sit there at no cost until you decide to run a re-engagement campaign, segment them out, or clean them on your own schedule rather than because your pricing is forcing your hand.
For most businesses sending weekly or monthly campaigns to a portion of their list, this works out cheaper. The savings get larger the more dormant your list is.
The tradeoff worth naming
Per-email pricing is not cheaper for everyone. If you send very high frequency — daily campaigns to your entire list — per-contact pricing might work out lower. We are not the right tool for that, and we are fine with that.
For everyone else: businesses sending newsletters, product updates, promotional campaigns, or drip sequences to a portion of their list, the per-contact model is charging you for something you are not using. We built Sendflo so you pay for what you send.