Paying for contacts you never email

Contact-based pricing bills you for a stored row, not a delivered message. Which rows count is a policy each vendor sets, and vendors disagree: Mailchimp bills you for an unsubscribed contact until you archive or delete it by hand. MailerLite, beehiiv, EmailOctopus and Kit all stop billing the moment someone unsubscribes. Neither approach is hidden, but almost nobody reads both help pages before picking a tool.

Key Takeaways

• Mailchimp counts unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts toward your bill. You have to archive or delete them by hand to stop paying. Cleaned (bounced) contacts don’t count.
• BigMailer counts unsubscribed and bounced contacts toward your bill until you manually delete them.
• MailerLite, beehiiv, EmailOctopus and Kit exclude unsubscribed contacts from the billable count automatically.
• EmailOctopus doesn’t deduplicate across lists: the same person on three lists is billed as three contacts.
• EmailFig excludes unsubscribed and cleaned (bounced) contacts automatically, and counts each person once no matter how many lists they belong to.

The bill is for rows, not messages

A contact-based plan prices what’s stored, not what’s sent. That’s simpler to understand than a per-email rate, but it hides a question every vendor answers differently: does a row that can never receive another email still count against your tier?

Four kinds of contact commonly sit on a list without being mailable: someone who unsubscribed, an address that hard-bounced, a signup that never confirmed on a double opt-in list, and the same person imported twice under two email addresses or two lists. Whether each of those is billable is a documented rule, not a guess, so it’s worth reading rather than assuming.

Unsubscribed contacts: the vendor split

The clearest test is the simplest one: does a contact who clicked “unsubscribe” still count toward your plan?

As of September 2026. Vendor policies, unlike prices, don’t move on an annual-billing toggle, but check the current page before you rely on any single row.

Two vendors bill for a row that can never be mailed again. Five don’t.

Mailchimp: unsubscribed until you say otherwise

Mailchimp’s own contact-count reference is explicit: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your monthly limit. Cleaned contacts, meaning hard bounces, don’t. The only way to stop paying for someone who unsubscribed is to select them and click Archive, or delete them outright, and Mailchimp’s help center confirms neither happens on its own: “Archived contacts don’t count toward your billing tier,” but nothing in the unsubscribe flow archives a contact for you.

Run the arithmetic on your own list rather than a borrowed average, because unsubscribe rates vary too much between a cold B2C list and an opt-in newsletter to generalize. Open a segment for Unsubscribed, read the count, and compare it to your Subscribed count. Whatever fraction that unsubscribed segment is of your total is exactly the fraction of your Mailchimp bill you’re paying for people who can never be mailed again, until you archive them. That fraction is also what can push a list across a tier boundary it didn’t actually earn; see the pricing cliff for how far one contact can move a bill.

BigMailer: the same rule, on the BYOS side

BigMailer prices by contacts stored, same shape as Mailchimp, and the same gap shows up. Its own help center: “BigMailer automatically handles bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints. Those contacts are not deleted from your Lists, but rather tagged with status for appropriate action.” Freeing that billing headroom means exporting the unsubscribed and bounced segments and deleting them in bulk, something BigMailer’s docs suggest doing “once every 6-12 months,” with one added restriction: you can’t delete a contact who was emailed in the last 21 days. If you’re comparing BigMailer against a bring-your-own-SES alternative, our BigMailer comparison covers the rest of what its plans include.

The other axis: counted twice for being on two lists

A contact who signed up for two of your lists is one person. Whether they’re billed as one contact depends on whether the vendor stores contacts once per account or once per list.

EmailOctopus stores them per list, and says so plainly: “Each list you create in your EmailOctopus account is completely independent, so if you have duplicates across your lists, they will be counted multiple times towards your billing.” A subscriber on three lists is three billable rows, and EmailOctopus’s own advice is to consolidate into one list if you want to stop paying for the other two.

Kit takes the opposite approach and names it: “We’re subscriber-centric, rather than list-centric,” meaning one person is one billable row no matter how many tags, sequences or forms they’re attached to. EmailFig works the same way: a contact exists once per account, and list membership is a separate join, so being on five lists costs nothing extra. The billing count only tracks the contacts table, never how many lists reference it.

What EmailFig excludes, and what it doesn’t

EmailFig only bills a contact whose status is subscribed. Three other statuses exist, and none of them count: unsubscribed (opted out, or the target of a complaint), cleaned (a hard bounce, repeated soft bounces, or a CSV row whose status column said cleaned), and pending (a double opt-in signup that hasn’t confirmed yet). See Contact statuses explained for what sets each one.

An unsubscribe click, a spam complaint, a bounce or a manual suppression all move a contact to unsubscribed or cleaned. A suppressed address is never a billable one. See Suppressions: why an address can’t be re-added.

What this doesn’t cover: a contact who is still subscribed but hasn’t opened or clicked anything in months. They haven’t unsubscribed, so they’re mailable, so they count, the same as on every contact-based vendor in the table above. That’s a list-hygiene decision, not a billing one, and it’s the same decision on any platform.

Auditing your own list

Three checks, in order.

Find your vendor’s actual rule. The table above covers seven vendors; if yours isn’t one of them, search its help center for “billing” and “contact count” rather than assuming either behavior. A pricing page rarely states it; a billing FAQ usually does.

Segment by status and read the gap. On EmailFig, filter the contacts table by status, or build a segment, to see subscribed against unsubscribed and cleaned side by side. If your vendor bills for unsubscribed rows, that gap is money; if it doesn’t, the gap still tells you how much of your list history is dead weight worth exporting for your records before you archive it.

Decide delete, suppress, or leave it. These aren’t the same action, and mixing them up either costs you money or costs you a compliance mistake. In EmailFig, deleting a contact stops them counting toward your plan but doesn’t record an opt-out, so a later re-import of the same file brings them back. Suppressing an address makes the opt-out permanent: a re-import is silently skipped, and the row can’t be resurrected by accident. Anyone who already unsubscribed or bounced is suppressed automatically and doesn’t need either action, since EmailFig already excludes them from the count. Someone who’s simply gone cold but never unsubscribed is the case where you choose: delete them if you’re comfortable they might come back on a future import, or suppress them if you want that address to never be mailed again regardless of what gets imported later. Clean your list of inactive contacts walks through finding that group with a starter segment.

None of this changes what a vendor charges per row. It changes how many rows are actually yours to pay for. If you’re pricing out a move off a platform that bills for the unsubscribed portion of your list, the number on today’s invoice and the number you’d actually be billed for elsewhere can differ before you’ve changed a single send. See the full price comparison across ten tools for what a clean list costs at your size, then subtract whatever this piece found sitting on it. EmailFig’s pricing and how EmailFig’s tiers work show what a list your size costs once only the mailable rows are counted.