How the numbers are recorded

Every vendor is priced at the same eight list sizes: 500, 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000 and 100,000 contacts. The breakpoints never move, which is what makes one snapshot comparable to the next.

A list size that falls between a vendor's own tier stops is recorded at the stop the vendor would actually bill, which is the stop above. Where that matters the cell note says so.

Two prices are recorded per cell: the month to month price, and the per month cost of paying for a year up front. Several vendors show only the annual figure by default and label it per month, which makes them look cheaper than a monthly biller will pay.

When a vendor publishes no annual price, the annual column is left empty. It is not filled with a guess.

Brevo prices on emails sent per month, not on list size, so it cannot be placed at a contact breakpoint without an assumption. SideBySend assumes four sends per contact per month, which is one weekly campaign and nothing else.

Automations, welcome sequences and transactional mail all add volume on top of that. A Brevo bill for a list that runs sequences will be higher than the number in the table.

Vendors disagree about which contacts they bill for. One of the seven counts people who have unsubscribed until they are archived, two make it depend on the account or on which limit binds first, and four leave them out. So the same list can produce different bills at the same headline price.

That rule is recorded per vendor for unsubscribed, bounced and unconfirmed contacts, each answer carrying its own confidence rating. Where no readable vendor page settles the question the answer is left blank rather than inferred.

Each cell carries one of four ratings. Verified means the number was read off the vendor's own pricing page, calculator or the pricing data that page shows buyers, with a source link and a date. An archived copy of the vendor's own page counts as verified for the date of that capture, and we link the archive. Derived means it follows from a published rule. Estimate means the sources disagree, only third party trackers report it, or the stop is interpolated. Two trackers agreeing makes an estimate, not a verified cell. Not published means the vendor sells nothing there.

Mixing these ratings in one table is deliberate. A pricing table that looks uniformly confident is lying somewhere.

Add ons are excluded: SMS credits, dedicated IPs, branding removal, extra CRM pipelines, transactional email sold as a separate product. Tax is excluded. Nonprofit and promotional discounts are excluded unless a vendor publishes them as standing pricing.

Feature parity is not claimed. The cheapest paid plan at a given list size may not include automation, landing pages or extra seats. Plan names are shown in every cell so the comparison stays honest.

A wrong cell gets fixed in the next snapshot, and the correction is written into the changelog rather than quietly overwritten. The point of the archive is that old numbers stay readable.

Not a review site. There is no scoring of deliverability, no template gallery walkthrough and no verdict on which platform is better. Those judgements go stale, and plenty of other sites already make them.

Not a lead generator either. There are no vendor links dressed up as recommendations and no ranking that changes for money. Where a Visit link can earn a commission, the page that carries it says so before the link, and the numbers stay where they are. The disclosure page has the long version.