Elastic Email offers four pricing plans. Marketing and Marketing PRO for email marketing. Email API and Email API PRO designed mostly for transactional emails and users who prefer to connect through SMTP or HTTP API.
The price of Marketing and Marketing PRO depends on the number of contacts you have on your list. See the list below to learn which contacts are counted towards your plan limit and which ones are not.
Which contacts are counted into your plan
Please note that if you are on Marketing PRO plan and use subaccounts, the contacts of your subaccounts are treated as unique. A contact that is stored both on the main account and the subaccount will be counted twice. Main account and subaccount are treated separately when it comes to counting the contact limits.
Active status - All contacts with the status of Active are counted in your pricing plan. This status is set by default when adding a new contact to your list.
Engaged status - All contacts with the status of Engaged are counted in your pricing plan. These are the most valuable kind of contact you can have. The contact receives Engaged status when they click links, open emails or click activation/consent links in an email.
Transactional status - All contacts with the status of Transactional are counted in your pricing plan. This is a special status reserved for transactional emails only.
Inactive - Contacts that received emails during your current subscription period and were changed into "inactive" after that will still be counted towards your limit.
If you delete a contact that had any of the above statuses, and an email was sent to it during the current subscription period, it is still counted until the next subscription period (usually the following month).
Subaccounts (PRO plans) - if your subaccount has a MaxContacts limit set up, all contacts will be counted towards the limit, regardless of their status. This is an exception.
Which contacts are NOT counted in your plan
Elastic Email will NOT count contacts with the following statuses: Invalid, Unsubscribed, Complaint, Stale and Not Confirmed. You don’t have to delete these contacts. However, please note that if a contact with one of these statuses received an email prior to being changed to this status will still count towards your limits.
Please note that our system recalculates your currently stored contacts only once every 24 hours. That's why if you change your uploaded contacts with statuses that are not counted into active status, they might still not be counted until the next day.
Based on all the information presented in this article, it is also important to remember that if you upload contacts topping up your limit by mistake and send emails to them, you will have to either wait for your next subscription period to upload more or increase your limit. This process can be automated with the "auto-increase contact limit" option available on your Billing screen.