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The industry standard for pricing marketing automation subscriptions is based on the number of contacts stored in an instance database. This became the norm as it was thought that contact count was a reasonable approximation of an organization’s size, and how much budget they could afford for their marketing communications initiatives.

Unfortunately for agencies and their clients, subscription-based marketing automation tends to become increasingly expensive over time as arbitrary contact tiers or thresholds are exceeded with continued use.

The “per-contact” pricing model of conventional marketing automation vendors far exceeds their actual cost of server capacity to store & process those contacts. When you invest in your own marketing automation infrastructure with our unique solution, you pay only the wholesale cloud cost of storage and processing power to host additional contacts and automations for your clients.

With our most economical cloud provider, resizing a server from 240 to 360 GB disk and 8 to 16 vCPUs increases it from $30/mo up to $60/mo. Such a server could host multiple Mautic instances with up to 200,000 contacts combined, depending on the complexity of the campaigns. As an example, your agency could host 10 instances with 20,000 contacts, 5 instances with 40,000 contacts, or 2 instances with 100,000 contacts, and so on.

Compare that with Hubspot Marketing Hub where a paltry 2,000 contacts are included with the $800/mo “Professional” plan, and every additional 5,000 contacts are billed at $225/mo. Consider that an instance with 20,000 contacts (a typical size for a marketing automation database) costs $1,925/mo with Hubspot.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s entry-level “Growth” plan at $1,250/mo includes 10,000 contacts, with every additional 10,000 contacts billed at $100/mo. Seems a bit better for a power user, until you consider Salesforce’s other limitations. Growth is capped at 50 landing pages, 50 forms, 50 automation rules, and 100 MB storage. If you go over, you’re forced to upgrade to the Plus plan at $2,500/mo to increase the limit to 100 automation rules and 500 MB storage.

With the Autoize™ solution for resellers based on Mautic open source marketing automation, there are no additional software licensing costs regardless of the level of usage. You can resize (scale vertically) or add additional servers (scale horizontally) to your Docker Swarm to extend capacity for pennies on the dollar.  What monthly prices you set for your clients, whether it’s a flat rate or based on contact tiers, to use your agency’s marketing automation product is up to you.