Understanding how contacts are billed helps you avoid unexpected charges and manage your data more effectively. Dotdigital bills based on the highest number of marketable contacts in your account during a billing period. This includes contacts who are subscribed, sent to, or suppressed at the contact level.
How we determine which contacts are chargeable
An account is charged for contacts that:
are subscribed on at least one channel when the bill run happens.
Currently available channels are email and SMS.
were deleted or suppressed at a contact level during the billing period, but were either sent to during the billing period or created prior to the billing period.
To be suppressed at a contact level means that the contact is suppressed on all channels that you hold data for.
Billing is based on the peak number of contacts in your account during the billing period. This includes contacts who were sent to, even if they were later deleted or suppressed.
However, contacts that are imported but not sent to, and then permanently deleted within the same billing period, are not billed. For example, if you accidentally upload a list and delete it before sending, you won’t be charged.
Once permanently deleted, contacts can’t be recovered or viewed in your account.
Upload new contacts
Dotdigital considers a contact to be a person you can market to. When uploading new contacts they are therefore assigned the status Subscribed.
If you are sending to new contacts through an email Double opt-in program and they haven’t yet clicked the confirmation link, they are assigned the status Pending and are unbillable until they complete the opt-in process, unless they are already subscribed on another channel.
Suppressed contacts and billing
Dotdigital bills contacts based on their marketable status across email and SMS channels. To be excluded from billing, a contact must be fully suppressed on all active channels.
Contacts suppressed on both email and SMS are not billable.
Contacts with at least one marketable channel, such as subscribed to SMS but suppressed on email are billable.
Contacts suppressed only at the list level and not at the contact level are also billable.
Learn more in Add and remove suppressions from a list.
Dotdigital uses the email and mobilenumberID system fields to determine a contact’s subscription and suppression status. Contacts with email addresses or phone numbers stored in custom fields are not considered marketable and cannot be used for sending. These contacts are not counted for billing purposes unless their data is mapped to the correct system fields.