What bulk email costs per thousand
Bulk email is sold by subscription tier, by credit or by message, and the honest comparison is cost per thousand delivered plus the setup you had to do first. PhantomFox charges per message from a prepaid wallet, which puts a thousand messages at three dollars.
On this page
Comparing sending prices is harder than it should be, because the three common models are priced on different units and only one of them is the unit you care about. This page converts them all to the same number and then adds the cost everyone leaves out.
What are the three pricing models?
Subscription by list size, prepaid credits, and pay per message. A subscription charges for the contacts you hold whether you mail them or not, credits are bought in blocks and expire, and per message billing charges for what you sent.
The differences matter most at the edges. A large list mailed rarely is punished by subscriptions; an unpredictable volume is punished by credit blocks.
What does a thousand messages cost here?
Sending is priced per message from a prepaid wallet at three tenths of a cent each, which is three dollars per thousand messages. The wallet takes a minimum top up of twenty dollars.
There is also a single send package at twenty four dollars, valid for a year, for people who need one campaign rather than a programme. Both are listed on pricing.
| Volume | Per message here | What a subscription charges for |
|---|---|---|
| One thousand | three dollars | the contacts, mailed or not |
| Ten thousand | thirty dollars | the tier your list size lands in |
| One hundred thousand | three hundred dollars | a higher tier, monthly |
| One million | three thousand dollars | an enterprise conversation |
| One campaign a year | the single send package | twelve months of subscription |
What does every comparison leave out?
Setup. A provider that is cheaper per thousand but needs a domain, authentication records and a four week warm up has charged you a month before the first message left.
Value that month at whatever your time is worth and most price comparisons invert. A campaign that could have run in September and ran in October did not save money; it missed a quarter.
What else belongs in the total?
The cost of a bad campaign. If the send goes out on your own domain, a poor result leaves a complaint record that degrades ordinary business mail for months, and that is a real cost even though no invoice arrives for it.
Here the unsubscribes and the spam reports land on our sending infrastructure rather than on an address of yours, so a campaign that goes badly costs you that send and nothing more. That is worth counting when you compare a number per thousand.
How should you compare providers honestly?
Take cost per thousand actually sent, add the setup time valued at your own rate, and add what a failed campaign would cost you on the domain it would have used. Then compare.
On that arithmetic a cheap subscription with a four week onboarding is usually the most expensive option on the table. If you want to know what the send itself is worth once it has run, read how to read a cold campaign result, and everything else is on the answers hub.