Drip Pricing Guide for 2026

The billing model in one paragraph

Drip charges by active contacts with unlimited email sends inside every band, which inverts the tradeoff of volume-metered infrastructure tools. A store emailing its list daily pays the same as one emailing weekly at the same contact count, so send frequency experiments, replenishment timing tests, and multi-step winback ladders cost nothing extra to run. The bill instead tracks audience size: grow the list and the slider moves, keep a bloated list of one-time buyers and the meter charges for all of them. Pricing is based on list size and send volume with no hidden fees, billed monthly, and the plan re-prices as the contact count crosses each band.

Two structural details complete the model. First, there is a single plan rather than feature-gated tiers: the $39 entry unlocks the full automation surface, and higher bands buy headroom rather than features. Second, trial terms are genuinely low-friction, with no credit card required to start, though unlimited sends are not available during the free trial and full unlimited sending unlocks once billing details are entered. Free migration and personalized onboarding are bundled for paying customers, which keeps switching costs honest for stores leaving a starter mailer.

Plan tiers, verified

The verified $39-per-month band covers 1 to 2,500 people and includes unlimited email sends, dynamic segments, onsite campaigns, up to 50 workflows, unlimited sub-accounts, open API access, email support, and free migration with personalized onboarding. For a small store, this is a complete automation stack on day one: cart and browse abandonment, post-purchase education, VIP ladders, and replenishment timing all compose on the visual canvas without a feature upsell. The up-to-50-workflows cap is the structural constraint to watch: fifty concurrent workflows comfortably hold a small store's program, but a catalog with many product-specific journeys should map workflow count before assuming headroom.

Beyond 2,500 contacts the price climbs on the official page's list-size slider, with each band buying a larger contact allowance while sends stay unlimited and the feature set stays constant. Because slider step prices shift over time, this guide does not hard-code the upper bands; read your exact band off the live pricing page for today's number rather than trusting a cached table. What is structurally stable is the shape: single plan, contact meter, unlimited sends, monthly billing, no annual-commitment lock-in advertised at research time. Stores forecasting growth should therefore model the contact trajectory explicitly, since a list doubling from 2,500 to 5,000 moves the whole subscription, not just an overage line.

Support depth also scales with spend in one verified respect: all paying customers receive email support, with live chat support additionally available on higher bands. The official page also notes Monday-through-Friday email support coverage with onboarding and guidance on marketing best practices, deliverability, and compliance. Teams planning agent-assisted operations should treat support hours as incident-response context: automation incidents outside coverage windows are handled by internal runbooks, a discipline our discussion scenarios on incident response and rollback explore.

Limits, overages, and the fine print

Drip's limit that matters is contacts, so forecasting means modeling list growth and hygiene rather than send calendars. Project three numbers: current active people, twelve-month list size at healthy growth, and the dormant share collecting dust. Because every profile in the band costs the same whether it buys monthly or bounced two years ago, sunset automation and re-engagement pruning are direct cost controls. A store adding a thousand one-time buyers per quarter without ever sunsetting will watch the slider move on the strength of dead weight, which is exactly the failure mode our sunset-policy and cost-attribution scenarios are written to prevent.

There are no per-email overages to model, which simplifies budgeting for high-frequency senders but removes the safety valve that volume meters provide: the only direction is the next band. The workflow cap of 50 at entry is the second limit to track as programs complexify, alongside sub-account sprawl, which is unlimited and therefore a governance surface rather than a cost surface. Trial limits are the third fine-print item: unlimited sends are excluded during the free trial, so trial-phase send tests understate production freedom, and billing activation is the gate to full throughput. No credit card is required to start the trial and no charge lands until an upgrade with payment details is submitted.

What the free trial really proves

The trial proves automation fit rather than sending economics: full feature access lets a store build real workflows, wire onsite tracking, test dynamic product blocks, and validate revenue dashboards before paying. Free rein across the platform during evaluation means the canvas, segmentation, and commerce integrations can all be judged on production-shaped work rather than demo clicks. Free migration further de-risks the decision, since the in-house team handles the move from the previous mailer.

The honest boundary is that trial-phase sending is throttled relative to paid unlimited sends, so deliverability warm-up, high-frequency cadence tests, and burst campaigns cannot be validated until billing is active. Treat the trial as a builder evaluation and the first paid month as the sending evaluation, with suppression, sunset, and frequency-cap policies already drafted before the first unlimited broadcast. Agent-assisted teams should use the trial to confirm the API surface supports their segmentation and trigger patterns, since agent access runs through the open API rather than a governed agent protocol.

Who Drip is for

Drip fits commerce brands that need more than starter flows: multi-step winback, VIP ladders, replenishment timing, post-purchase education, and onsite intent capture composed on one canvas. Stores with demonstrated browse and purchase intent signals get the most from dynamic segments and product-content blocks, and revenue dashboards tie each automation to money rather than opens. Teams wanting workflow depth without the heaviest enterprise process find Drip's single-plan simplicity calming next to multi-tier competitors.

Drip is a weaker fit for SaaS teams whose core workflows are billing-triggered. Trials, seats, dunning, and plan-change onboarding sit outside Drip's commerce-first data model, and agent access stays conventional-API shaped without an MCP-native layer. Commerce category leadership still belongs to Klaviyo, detailed in our Klaviyo pricing guide, which commerce teams should benchmark head to head. SaaS readers can safely skip to the SaaS-native picks and treat Drip as the honest commerce answer it is.

Agent and MCP fit

Agents operate Drip through its open API rather than a native MCP server, which shapes the governance story. Routine work such as segment audits, workflow performance reviews, campaign drafts, onsite-signal checks, and revenue-dashboard pulls can be scripted or agent-assisted, but every flow needs custom tooling and scoped credentials instead of a governed protocol. Approval discipline therefore lives in team process rather than platform primitives: require agents to propose audiences and drafts, keep bulk-send approval human, and log every agent API call for the audit practices our discussion scenarios detail.

Onsite behavior tracking is the data surface agents will lean on most, since browse and intent signals feed segments that target demonstrated interest rather than static lists. Treat that surface as untrusted-input territory: tracking data arrives from browsers and third-party sources, so agents consuming it need the same validation and anomaly checks as any pipeline reading external events. Run Drip agents inside the supervised sending pipeline from our 15-tool comparison: agents draft and analyze, humans approve, delivery carries the store's reputation, and attribution closes the loop.

Where Drip fits

Drip wins commerce automation with visual workflows, onsite tracking, product-content blocks, and unlimited sends at $39 for up to 2,500 contacts. SaaS teams should benchmark their billing-event requirements separately before adopting a commerce-first data model.

The decision rule is the business model: stores with carts and catalogs should shortlist Drip against Klaviyo; subscription software with trials and seats should evaluate a lifecycle specialist. Teams whose transactional reliability is the top risk should instead compare the developer APIs in our Resend guide, while journey complexity at scale points to our Customer.io guide.

Verdict and checklist

Choose Drip when commerce automation depth is the constraint and the list sits near the $39 entry band: trial without a card, validate workflows and onsite tracking, activate billing for unlimited sends, and map the 50-workflow cap plus contact-slider trajectory before committing. Build sunset and suppression hygiene from week one so the contact meter charges buyers rather than ghosts. Re-verify your exact band at Drip pricing, then return to the pricing index for the full verified set.