ActiveCampaign power, no contact bill?The automations you rely on, without the contact count driving the price.

ActiveCampaign prices its Plus plan by contact count, and every automation you build, welcome series, cart recovery, lead scoring, runs against that same list. The result is a bill that climbs even when the automations themselves stay simple: the logic did not get more complex, the number of people it touches just grew.

The deeper issue is where the stack lives. Your audience and the automations built around it sit on ActiveCampaign's servers; you configure them through ActiveCampaign's interface, but the account, and everything running inside it, is theirs to host, price and, under their own policies, suspend.

None of that is unusual for a hosted marketing platform, and ActiveCampaign is a genuinely capable one. The point of naming it plainly is that a decision to switch should weigh the actual number on the invoice against the actual number of automations you would need to rebuild, not against a vague sense that ownership is better in the abstract.

Stay on ActiveCampaign if its CRM is genuinely your system of record, the place sales tracks deals and pipeline, because SendBunny does not attempt to replace that. Stay too if you will not create or use an AWS account for any reason; that alone rules SendBunny out.

• Switch if your bill tracks contact count more than the complexity of what you actually automate.
• Switch if you want email and a transactional API in one platform you control, rather than renting a CRM to get campaigns.
• Switch if you are ready to run the platform in your own AWS account.

ActiveCampaign's Plus tier bills by contacts on the account, not by how many emails or automation runs those contacts trigger. SendBunny is a one-time $199 license, then Amazon SES for sending, about $0.10 per 1,000 emails, at $0 in a quiet month.

At 50,000 contacts the two bills diverge because they measure different things. ActiveCampaign charges for the audience sitting in the account; SendBunny charges for the mail that leaves it. A list heavy with contacts you rarely email costs ActiveCampaign the same regardless, and costs SendBunny next to nothing until you actually send to them.

1. Export contacts as a CSV from ActiveCampaign.
2. Buy SendBunny, then click the one-click Create stack button in AWS; the pre-filled template finishes in roughly ten minutes.
3. Import the CSV; re-imports enrich existing rows instead of wiping them, so it is safe to run more than once.
4. Recreate your priority automations in SendBunny and point app sends at the new install.
5. Cancel ActiveCampaign once you have confirmed the new stack is live.

Automations do not travel with the CSV. ActiveCampaign's flows are built on its own triggers and logic, so anything beyond a plain broadcast needs rebuilding by hand in SendBunny before you cancel. If ActiveCampaign also serves as your CRM, expect that piece to stay where it is; this move is about owning email, not replacing a sales pipeline.

There is also no vendor account left to suspend once you have moved, but AWS's own rules for SES still apply to your sending, and an account with a poor bounce or complaint rate can still land in review with Amazon the same as any other sender.