Store as many contacts as you like. You are billed on sends.
Every plan includes unlimited contact storage — Spark at ₹300 / $7 a month included. Your bill is set by how many emails you send, so a list that grows does not cost you anything until you email it.
Bluey does not charge for stored contacts on any plan. Billing is on emails sent: Spark runs from ₹300 / $7 a month for 6,000 emails, Grow from ₹2,500 / $30 for 50,000, and both allow unlimited contacts. That means a lead magnet that adds 20,000 subscribers, a Shopify import of 200,000 customers, or a decade of accumulated CRM records all cost nothing to hold. Most platforms invert this and bill per contact stored, which is why their invoice grows in months when you barely send. If you email a large list infrequently, the gap between the two models is usually bigger than any feature difference.
The bill grows in the months you did least
The tell is always the same. You look at an invoice that went up, and nothing about your marketing changed. You did not send more campaigns. You did not add a feature. What changed is that the list got bigger — a webinar, a lead magnet, a seasonal promotion — and on a per-contact platform, that is the whole billing mechanism.
It gets worse in the direction that should be getting better. The more successful your list building, the higher the fixed monthly cost of doing nothing. Teams end up doing list hygiene for billing reasons rather than deliverability ones, archiving contacts before a renewal date, and — the part nobody admits — quietly deciding not to run a lead magnet because of what it would do to the invoice.
That is a pricing model shaping your marketing strategy, which is exactly backwards.
Why per-contact pricing punishes the wrong thing
A contact sitting in a database costs a platform almost nothing. A contact you email costs bandwidth, reputation and infrastructure. Per-contact billing charges for the first and treats the second as free, which is why it feels arbitrary — because relative to the actual cost of serving you, it is.
The practical consequence shows up in a specific shape of list. Most lists grow faster than sending frequency does: they accumulate through events, downloads, seasonal campaigns and one-off promotions, and get emailed weekly at most. Under per-contact billing you pay the same for a 50,000-person list emailed monthly as one emailed daily — a tenfold difference in the work done, for an identical bill.
- You are charged monthly for contacts who have not opened anything in two years.
- On some plans you are charged for contacts who have already unsubscribed — people who explicitly asked you to stop.
- Crossing a tier boundary by a single contact can move you a whole bracket. Going from 2,000 to 2,001 marketing contacts on HubSpot Professional moves you to the 5,000 tier.
- Suppressed and archived contacts often still count, depending on the plan, which is why the archive workflow exists at all.
- Growth is billed immediately; the revenue from that growth arrives later, if at all.
The same list, at different sending frequencies
The per-contact column is the typical mid-tier curve used by our cost calculator, anchored on the published figures in our comparison pages. It is an illustration of the model, not a quote for a named platform — real pricing varies by plan, region and contract. Bluey figures are exact.
| Scenario | Per-contact model | Bluey |
|---|---|---|
10,000 contacts Emailed once a month — 10,000 sends | ~$135/mo | $14/mo |
10,000 contacts Emailed weekly — 40,000 sends | ~$135/mo | $30/mo |
25,000 contacts Emailed once a month — 25,000 sends | ~$270/mo | $30/mo |
50,000 contacts Emailed once a month — 50,000 sends | ~$450/mo | $30/mo |
50,000 contacts Emailed weekly — 200,000 sends | ~$450/mo | $84/mo |
When this does not help you
Send-based billing is not universally cheaper, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. The two models cross over at a point that depends entirely on your cadence.
- You email a small list very often. A 2,000-person list emailed daily is 60,000 sends a month — per-contact pricing may well be cheaper for you.
- Your product sends many transactional or notification emails per user per month. High cadence on a compact list is the case send-based billing handles worst.
- You are under about 500 contacts, where several platforms are free and no billing model matters yet.
- You are on a grandfathered plan from before a competitor's repricing. Those are often far cheaper than anything currently published, and worth keeping.
What you give up
- A predictable flat number. Your bill moves with sending volume, so a heavy campaign month costs more than a quiet one. Some finance teams prefer a fixed line item even when it is a larger one.
- The discipline that per-contact pricing imposes. It is a blunt instrument, but it does force list hygiene. On send-based billing nothing stops you hoarding dormant contacts — and they still damage deliverability even when they cost nothing.
- Bluey does not send SMS. If your recovery strategy depends on it, an omnichannel platform will do more regardless of billing model.
Questions
Is contact storage really unlimited on every plan?
Yes, including Spark at ₹300 / $7 a month. There is no contact ceiling on any tier and no archive workflow to manage, because storage is not the billing unit. What scales with the plan is sending volume and feature limits like the number of automations.
What happens if I import a 200,000-contact list?
Nothing happens to your bill. You will pay for the emails you send to them, so a one-off campaign to all 200,000 puts you in a higher send tier for that month. Holding them costs nothing in the months you do not.
Do unsubscribed contacts count against anything?
No. You cannot email them, so there is nothing to charge for. This is worth checking against your current platform — several plans count unsubscribed contacts toward your billable total, which means paying every month for people who asked you to stop.
So should I keep every contact forever?
No, and this is the honest caveat. Storage being free removes the billing reason to clean your list, not the deliverability reason. Contacts who have not engaged in a year hard-bounce, complain, and occasionally turn out to be spam traps — all of which harms delivery for the contacts who do open. Run a re-engagement sequence quarterly and suppress the non-responders.
How do I know which model is cheaper for me?
Divide last month's emails sent by your total contacts. Below about four, you are sending fewer than one email per contact per week and per-contact billing is charging you for storage you are not using. Above about ten, your cadence is high enough that per-contact pricing may genuinely win. The cost calculator does this against your actual bill.
Keep exploring
Check it against your own bill.
Seven days of full access, no credit card. Or put your list size and send volume into the calculator first — it will tell you if switching would not save you anything.