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Understand contact-based billing
Understand contact-based billing

If you exceed a contracted allowance, you're billed overages per contact, message, or Insight record.

Laura Russell avatar
Written by Laura Russell
Updated over a week ago

Depending on your account package, you might have a contracted allowance for:

  • contacts

  • message sends

  • custom Insight data

The fixed price, allowance, and overages (if applicable) appear on your monthly invoice. Overage are charged at the rate stated in your contract.


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.

Any contact not meeting this criteria is not charged for. For example, contacts uploaded during the billing period, not sent to, and then deleted before the bill run, aren’t charged for. This means that if you mistakenly upload a list you aren’t penalized.


Uploading 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 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

  • Contacts who are suppressed on all channels are not billable.

  • Contacts who retain at least one marketable channel are billable.

  • Contacts who are suppressed only at an address book level are billable.

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