Elastic Email offers two main product lines: Email Marketing for campaigns and audience growth, and Email API for transactional and custom integrations.
While our pricing is now primarily based on email volume, the number of contacts you store is still subject to a limit. For our paid Email Marketing plans, you can store up to 1,000,000 contacts by default. This generous limit ensures you can focus on sending emails without worrying about contact quotas.
If you require a limit higher than 1,000,000 contacts, please contact our Customer Service team, and we will be happy to assist you.
The price of a paid Email Marketing plan is determined by your email sending volume, but the contact limit is a key factor in managing your audience. See the list below to learn which contacts are counted towards your limit and which ones are not.
Which contacts count toward your plan?
Please note that if you are on Email Marketing 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 "Active" status are counted in your pricing plan. This status is assigned by default when a new contact is added to your list.
Engaged Status – All contacts with "Engaged" status are counted in your pricing plan. These are the most valuable contacts, as they actively engage by opening emails, clicking links, or interacting with activation/consent links.
Transactional Status – All contacts with "Transactional" status are counted in your pricing plan. This special status is reserved for transactional emails and appears only in Marketing plans.
Inactive Status – Contacts that received emails during the current subscription period and later became "inactive" will still be counted toward 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 will still be counted until the next subscription period (typically the following month).
Subaccounts (paid plans) - If a MaxContacts limit is set on a subaccount, all contacts - regardless of status - will count toward the limit. This is an exception to the standard contact counting rules.
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 stored contacts only once every 24 hours. Therefore, if you modify your uploaded contacts with statuses that are not counted as active, the changes may not take effect 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.