Why we don't bill you for subscribers you never email
Charging by list size quietly punishes the thing that makes email work. Here is why DearReach bills on sends instead.
Most email tools price on list size. You pay for every address you are holding, whether you write to it or not. It sounds fair until you notice what it does to your behaviour.
List-size pricing teaches bad habits
When the bill goes up with every contact, you start doing arithmetic instead of publishing. Should you keep the 4,000 people who signed up two years ago and have not opened since? Should you import that conference list? Should you prune, and if so, when?
You end up with two bad options. Keep everyone and pay for silence, or delete people and lose the ones who would have come back.
Neither of those is a writing decision. They are billing decisions wearing a strategy costume, and they push you toward exactly the behaviour that hurts deliverability: sending to stale addresses so the cost feels justified, or hesitating to send at all.
Sending is the thing that costs something
Holding a row in a database costs almost nothing. Delivering a message costs real money and, more importantly, spends real reputation. Every send is a small bet on whether a mailbox provider still trusts your domain.
So that is what we price. DearReach plans are unlimited on subscribers and metered on sends. Free, Starter at $29, and Pro at $99, with a monthly send allowance on each. Keep every address you have ever collected. Pay for the messages you actually put in flight.
What changes when the meter moves
Once storage is free, the healthy choices get easier:
- Segment without penalty. Writing to the 800 people who clicked last month costs less than blasting all 6,000, which is also the version that lands better.
- Keep your archive. Old subscribers stay searchable and suppressible. You do not lose the record of who once said yes.
- Re-engage on your schedule. A quiet segment can sit untouched for a quarter without showing up on your invoice.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Suppression and consent history are only useful if you keep them. A pricing model that charges rent on your own history encourages you to throw it away, and then you have no idea who unsubscribed in 2024.
The honest trade-off
Send-based pricing is not automatically cheaper for everyone. If you have a small list and mail it daily, you will hit a send allowance before you would have hit a contact tier. We think that is the right way round: the plan grows with the work you are doing, not with a number sitting in storage.
What you get in exchange is a bill you can predict from your publishing calendar rather than from your import history.
See the current plans on the pricing section of the home page, or read Plans and billing for how the allowance is counted.