Per-contact pricing is the trapYour bill rises with your list, not with the mail you actually send.

A contact-tier plan prices a band of list size, not a volume of mail. Cross a subscriber count, whether that count is engaged, dormant, or barely active, and the plan jumps to the next band regardless of how often you actually hit send. On Mailchimp's approximate Standard pricing, a 10,000-contact list runs near $135 a month; at 50,000 contacts it is closer to $450 a month. Klaviyo's profile-based plans move similarly: roughly $150 or more a month at 10,000 profiles, and $700 or more at 50,000. Neither number changes because you sent one campaign that month or twelve.

The mechanism is simple and, from the vendor's side, rational: list size is an easy proxy for the value a sender is getting from the platform, and it is far easier to bill on a count that only grows than on a send volume that a customer could throttle down in a bad quarter. The effect on you is that your bill rises with list size even when your actual sending stays flat or falls.

The gap between what you pay and what you use is widest for three shapes of sender.

• Newsletters with uneven cadence. A list built over years, mailed a few times a month, pays a full monthly tier for every one of those months, busy or quiet.
• SaaS teams with many inactive users on file. Trial signups and churned accounts that never get emailed again still count toward the tier that sets your price.
• Anyone who is cautious about list cleanup. Deleting names to save money means losing the suppression and consent history you would want if you ever remailed them, so the incentive runs the wrong way: keep the rows, keep paying rent on them.

That third point is worth sitting with. A pricing model that charges you to keep the compliance record you are supposed to keep is pushing in the opposite direction from good list hygiene.

The SendBunny column is send cost only, at Amazon SES's list rate of roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails, on top of a one-time $199 license. There is no contact-count line in that bill at all: a list of 5,000 or 500,000 costs the same to store, because storage sits in your own AWS account at ordinary database rates, and the only thing metered is mail actually delivered.

• You want one predictable monthly number for budgeting, and you would rather overpay in quiet months than track a variable AWS bill.
• The plan bundles tools you actually use beyond sending, like a hosted signup form, deep segmentation, or a support team you can call, and you have priced those separately and still come out ahead.
• Your list size and send cadence track closely enough that the tier and your actual usage are not far apart, so the mismatch this page describes barely applies to you.

Before switching anything, pull last year's ESP invoices next to your actual send counts for the same months. The gap between what you paid for list size and what you would have paid for the mail you sent is the rent you have been carrying. For most senders with a large, unevenly mailed list, that gap is the whole argument; for a small, actively-mailed list, it may be small enough that switching is not worth the effort.

SendBunny is a full campaign, template and transactional platform that lands in your own AWS account through a one-click CloudFormation deploy, with unlimited contacts and no contact tier at any list size. The license is $199 once, with optional $99 a year updates, and sending runs through your own Amazon SES at roughly $0.10 per 1,000 emails. It is not for you if you will not run an AWS account, or if a bundled hosted signup form matters more to you than the pricing model.