Contact-based vs send-based pricing
Contact-based pricing bills your list size, send-based bills what you send. The crossover sits at about 1.5 sends a month, almost regardless of list size, with the math to redo it yourself.
Contact-based pricing bills the row sitting in your database, whether or not you ever mail it, the specific cost paying for contacts you never email works through in isolation. Send-based pricing bills the message that leaves your server, however small your list. They’re two different bets about what your account will do, and one of them is cheaper for you specifically.
Work the bet with real numbers and it has an answer. Compare MailBluster, a send-based tool, plus the Amazon SES account it needs to actually deliver, against EmailFig’s BYOS plan, which is contact-based, and the crossover lands at roughly 1.5 sends a month. Mail more often than that and a flat monthly fee wins. Mail less and paying per email wins. That holds from 1,000 contacts to 100,000, because both bills happen to scale with list size in close to the same way.
Key Takeaways
- Contact-based pricing bills what you store; send-based bills what you send. Which is cheaper depends on how often you mail, not on list size alone.
- MailBluster plus your own Amazon SES account costs $5 a month plus $0.70 per 1,000 emails sent: $0.60 to MailBluster, $0.10 to Amazon. EmailFig’s contact-based BYOS plan is a flat fee that doesn’t move with send frequency.
- The crossover between the two sits between 1.4 and 1.7 sends a month at every list size tested, from 1,000 to 100,000 contacts.
- Send-based pricing makes growing your list free and resending expensive. Contact-based pricing flips that: storage costs, a second send this month is close to free.
- Contact-based pricing, ours included, is the wrong model for someone who mails a big list rarely. That’s not a fit worth chasing. It’s a fact worth stating.
The two models, in one line each
Contact-based pricing puts you on a ladder keyed to how many contacts you have, moving you up or down as your list does. What you send doesn’t set the price, only whatever cap the plan puts on sending. EmailFig prices this way, and so does most of the field. See the full price comparison across ten tools for what that ladder actually costs at each size.
Send-based pricing puts you on a ladder keyed to messages delivered: a subscription, a per-thousand rate, or both. Store as many contacts as you like; the bill only moves when you press send. MailBluster prices this way. So does Amazon SES itself, at the bottom of the stack: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, no monthly fee, no minimum. We wrote up what the full SES bill actually looks like once the plan tiers and add-ons AWS doesn’t put in the headline rate get added in.
Who each one suits
A big list you rarely mail wants send-based pricing. Email 200,000 people once a quarter and a send-based tool bills the sending fee three times a year and nothing else, while a contact-based tool bills the storage every single month regardless. At MailBluster and SES’s combined $0.70 per 1,000, that quarterly send costs $140 each time it goes out and nothing in between; a contact-based ladder at that size runs into three figures a month, every month, whether or not anything was sent.
A small list you mail constantly wants contact-based pricing. Storage is a rounding error at that size. The volume of sends is what would run up a per-email bill instead, and a daily sender crosses the crossover point in this post inside the first week of the month.
The hidden asymmetry
Send-based pricing makes growing your list free. Add ten thousand contacts and nothing on the bill changes until you next hit send. Contact-based pricing makes growing your list the thing that costs money: a new subscriber can push you up a tier the day they sign up, whether or not you’ve mailed them yet.
Flip it around and the asymmetry reverses. On send-based pricing, a resend is never free. The newsletter you already wrote costs the same to mail twice as it did the first time. On contact-based pricing, a second send to the same list this month is close to free, since the flat fee already covers it.
It’s the same bet, stated from the other side: send-based pricing charges for activity, contact-based pricing charges for standing inventory.
The crossover, worked out
MailBluster’s Pro plan is $60 a year, or $5 a month, plus $0.60 per 1,000 emails sent. It requires its own SMTP account to actually deliver anything, so add Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000: $0.70 per 1,000 emails combined, on top of the $5 base. EmailFig’s BYOS plan is the fair comparison, since it also assumes you’re running your own SES account, and it’s a flat monthly fee that doesn’t care how many times you send.
At 25,000 contacts, EmailFig BYOS is $34 a month. Mailing that list once through MailBluster and SES costs $5 plus 25 lots of $0.70, or $17.50, for a total of $22.50, still cheaper than EmailFig. Mail it twice and the sending line doubles to $35, for a total of $40, above EmailFig’s flat $34. The tie sits between those two frequencies.
The same arithmetic run at other sizes:
| Contacts | EmailFig BYOS | MailBluster + SES, per send | Crossover |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $6.00/mo | $0.70 | 1.4 sends/month |
| 5,000 | $10.00/mo | $3.50 | 1.4 sends/month |
| 10,000 | $16.00/mo | $7.00 | 1.6 sends/month |
| 25,000 | $34.00/mo | $17.50 | 1.7 sends/month |
| 50,000 | $65.00/mo | $35.00 | 1.7 sends/month |
| 100,000 | $120.00/mo | $70.00 | 1.6 sends/month |
Crossover = (EmailFig BYOS price - $5) / (MailBluster + SES cost per send). Swap in your own list size, the BYOS price for it from the pricing page, and MailBluster’s $0.70-per-1,000 rate at that size, and you get your own number. It holds close to 1.5 across two orders of magnitude of list size because EmailFig’s contact-based ladder gets cheaper per contact as the list grows, at close to the rate MailBluster’s per-email fee stays flat. Two very different pricing shapes, landing on almost the same answer.
Two cases
A monthly newsletter to 25,000 people sends once a month. That’s below the 1.7-send crossover at that size, so MailBluster plus SES, at $22.50, beats EmailFig’s flat $34. Send-based pricing suits this reader.
A product mailing a receipt, a reminder and a status update to the same 25,000 accounts is several sends per contact every month, not one send to the whole list. Counted the same way as the newsletter above, three sends to the full list already costs $5 plus 75 lots of $0.70, or $57.50, well past EmailFig’s flat $34, and a real transactional volume runs far higher than three. Contact-based pricing suits this reader, and specifically its BYOS side: EmailFig’s managed plan includes ten emails a month for every contact, a real cap, while BYOS carries none, since Amazon bills the sending directly.
Where this leaves an infrequent sender
Contact-based pricing, EmailFig’s included, is the wrong model for someone who mails a big list rarely. The math above says so plainly: below about 1.5 sends a month, a per-email bill beats a flat one at every size checked here. That’s not a caveat to bury. It’s the honest answer for that reader, and MailBluster or plain Amazon SES fit them better than we do.
Brevo splits the two models rather than choosing one. Its free plan caps monthly sends, not contacts: storage is unlimited, and the send allowance runs out around 9,000 emails a month. See our Brevo pricing breakdown for the full comparison. That’s a third axis again, useful for a reader whose list is enormous and whose sends are the scarce resource, a different reader from either case above. Free tiers compared walks through that same contact-versus-send split across every free plan in the category, not just Brevo’s.
Whichever axis your account runs into first is the one worth pricing against, not the one your current tool happens to bill on.