Most email platforms bill you for every contact record you store, whether or not you are allowed to send that person anything. It is a pricing model that charges rent on a database, and it quietly turns list growth into a cost centre.
There are only two real costs in running a lifecycle programme. The first is sending: every email has a delivery cost, and every SMS has a carrier cost. The second is the software itself: the segmentation engine, the flow builder, the reporting, the deliverability plumbing, the people who keep it running.
Storing a row in a database is not, in any meaningful sense, the third one. A contact record with a name, an email address, a consent state and some order history is a few hundred bytes. Ten thousand of them is a rounding error on a modern database. Yet the dominant pricing model in this category is built on exactly that: a per-contact ladder where your bill steps up every time your list crosses another band.
The result is a bill that has almost nothing to do with what you actually did that month. You can send one campaign or thirty, and if your stored contact count is the same, so is your invoice.
Take a retailer growing steadily. The numbers below are illustrative and rounded, meant to show the shape of the curve rather than any particular vendor's rate card. Check your own platform's published pricing for its exact bands.
| Contacts stored | Per-profile model | Flat fee model |
|---|---|---|
| 25,000 | around $600 a month | $750 a month |
| 100,000 | around $2,100 a month | still $750 a month |
| 250,000 | $3,500 a month and up | $2,500 a month |
Notice what happens between the first row and the second. The list grew four times. The workload barely changed: the same number of campaigns, the same flows, the same team. The invoice tripled anyway.
Notice also that at the smallest size, the flat fee is the more expensive option. That is honest, and it matters. Per-profile pricing is genuinely cheap when your list is small. The problem is that it is cheapest at exactly the moment you have the least to gain from it, and most expensive at the moment your programme is finally working.
The invoice is only half the cost. The other half is what a per-contact bill does to the decisions your team makes.
Sunsetting genuinely disengaged contacts is good practice for deliverability. Deleting contacts because a billing band is approaching is something else entirely. When those two motives blur, people start removing records that had real value: past customers who buy once a year, seasonal shoppers, contacts who never open email but click through from SMS.
Every new account, every checkout, every enquiry form creates a contact record. When each of those records has a price on it, the sensible-looking move is to filter what syncs across, or not sync at all. You end up with a marketing platform that holds a partial, stale copy of your customer base, and a segmentation layer that cannot see the purchase history it needs.
This is the strangest one. Growing your subscriber base is the entire point of the exercise, and a per-profile bill makes each new subscriber a marginal cost before they have bought anything. Sign-up units get quieter. Second-channel consent, particularly SMS, gets deferred because it means another contact record.
A cost that scales with a number nobody controls precisely, in a foreign currency, with band thresholds that trip mid-month, is a genuinely annoying line item to budget for. Most retailers discover their next band the same way: an invoice arrives that is several hundred dollars higher than the last one.
A fair caveat: volume does cost money somewhere. Sending a million emails costs more to deliver than sending ten thousand, and SMS has a real per-message carrier cost that no pricing model can wish away. The argument here is not that everything should be free. It is that the fee should track the work, not the size of a table.
Reachable charges a flat monthly fee per brand, in Australian dollars, with contact bands that are deliberately wide and no per-profile component at all. That single change removes a whole category of decision from the marketing calendar:
If the answers make you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the product working as designed. A pricing model that gets more expensive as you succeed is not aligned with you, however good the software is. Ours is a simple bet in the other direction: charge for the service, never for the storage, and let list growth be unambiguously good news.
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