In November 2025, ActiveCampaign changed its contact counting policy to include bounced, unsubscribed, and inactive contacts in your billable contact total. Customers who had been cleaning their lists — a standard email hygiene practice — suddenly found their contact counts (and bills) increasing without adding a single new deliverable subscriber.
Illustrative example based on reported customer experiences.
ActiveCampaign excels at email automation. Everything else requires add-ons, integrations, or separate subscriptions.
Email Marketing & Automation
CRM & Pipeline Management
SMS Marketing
2-Way SMS Conversations
Appointment Booking
Landing Pages & Funnels
Reputation Management
Missed Call Text-Back
AI Conversation Assistant
Unified Inbox (all channels)
Contact Billing Policy
Trustpilot Score
Unlimited Users
ActiveCampaign pricing and policies from activecampaign.com, accessed April 2026. Contact billing policy change effective November 2025.
ActiveCampaign is powerful for email. But when businesses need more, the gaps become expensive.
ActiveCampaign's CRM is a $68/month add-on — and even with it, you're getting basic deal pipelines, not a full customer relationship platform. There's no native calling, no reputation management, no booking system, no social inbox. Command Center is the full platform from the start.
ActiveCampaign positions itself as a 'Customer Experience Automation' platform, but the CRM functionality requires a separate purchase.
ActiveCampaign now charges for every contact in your database — including bounced addresses and people who unsubscribed years ago. Customers who maintained clean lists found their contact counts jumping 20–60% overnight. List hygiene no longer saves you money with ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign's SMS feature (available on Plus and above) is outbound-only marketing SMS — not 2-way conversational texting. There's no missed-call-text-back, no SMS inbox, and no real conversation thread. Command Center includes full 2-way SMS in all plans.
ActiveCampaign has no tools for requesting Google reviews, monitoring online ratings, or responding to customer feedback. Businesses that rely on reviews for customer acquisition need a separate platform. Command Center includes reputation management as a core feature.
“ActiveCampaign's November update added 3,000 unsubscribed contacts to our billable total and bumped us to the next pricing tier. We weren't adding contacts — they just changed the rules. We switched to Command Center the following month.”
“We needed a CRM and found out ActiveCampaign charges $68/month extra for basic pipeline management. Command Center has it all included.”
Stephanie W.
Insurance Agency, Dallas TX
“Trustpilot shows 2.8 stars for a reason. Support tickets took a week. Command Center has an actual person on our account.”
Nathan V.
SaaS Startup, San Francisco CA
Command Center includes CRM, email, SMS, booking, and reputation management — with contact billing that only counts people you can actually reach.