Cresca Pricing Guide: Choosing the Right Plan
Cresca has four plans, and the difference between them is scale rather than features. Every paid tier includes the same AI capabilities, automation, analytics and integration access. That makes the choice simpler than most pricing pages, but it also means the decision is about understanding your own usage.
The plans
Contact count is the primary constraint on each tier, and send volume is matched to it:
| Plan | Price | Contacts | Emails / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 | 50 |
| Professional | $29/mo | 5,000 | 5,000 |
| Premium | $49/mo | 25,000 | 25,000 |
| Ultra | $99/mo | 55,000 | 55,000 |
The distinction that matters: contacts, not sends
Most email platforms price on send volume, which leads to a specific mistake: teams add contacts freely because sending is a separate allowance, then discover that their contact count, not their sending, has pushed them into a higher tier.
Cresca prices on contacts, and sends are matched to the plan's contact limit. If you are on Professional, the constraint is 5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails per month. This is more predictable, because your contact count is a number you can see and control, while your send volume is a lagging consequence of how you segment.
The practical implication: audit your contact list more often than your send volume. Contacts accumulate; sends are a choice.
When the Free plan is genuinely enough
Free covers 50 contacts and 50 emails per month. That is a real working allowance for a specific stage: you are validating an idea, you are collecting your first signups, or you are sending a small internal or transactional list.
The mistake to avoid is treating Free as a trial and building a workflow that assumes more capacity. If you are planning a launch that will add 300 contacts, you are not on the Free tier in any meaningful sense.
Working out which paid plan you need
Count three things before choosing.
- Contacts you will hold in 90 days, not today. At Professional you hold 5,000. If you add 400 contacts a month, you have roughly a year of headroom; if you add 2,000, you do not.
- Whether your contacts are all mailable. A list of 8,000 with 40% unengaged is really a 4,800-contact problem, and cleaning it may keep you on a lower tier. Suppressed and bounced addresses should not be counted as active contacts.
- Whether you send to your whole list monthly. If you send to segments rather than everything, your send allowance lasts, but your contact count still applies.
When to upgrade
Upgrade when a limit is about to block a send, not when you cross it. Running a campaign that quietly truncates at the contact limit is worse than paying for the next tier, because the failure is silent and the campaign looks successful.
Watch for these signals:
- You are deleting contacts to stay under a limit. That is a sign you should either clean the list properly or move up a tier.
- You are scheduling sends across two days to stay within the monthly allowance. Workable, but it is a constraint you are managing rather than a choice you made.
- You have a launch or seasonal peak coming that will add contacts faster than usual.
When not to upgrade
Do not move up a tier to solve a deliverability problem. A larger plan does not improve inbox placement. If your mail is landing in spam, the cause is authentication, list quality or sending reputation, and paying more will not change it.
Do not upgrade for a feature. There are no features reserved for higher tiers: AI generation, automation workflows and analytics are included from Professional upward, and API access is on every plan including Free.
Comparing against other platforms
When comparing cost, compare at the same contact count and check what is bundled. A cheaper per-contact price that excludes automation or charges for AI usage is not cheaper in practice.
Also check what happens at the tier boundary. Some platforms bill incrementally for contacts over the plan limit, which makes costs hard to predict. Cresca's tiers are fixed: you are on a plan or you are not, and the cost of the next tier is known in advance.
Annual versus monthly commitment
Paying annually reduces the effective monthly cost, and the trade-off is flexibility. If your contact count is stable and you are confident in the platform, annual is straightforwardly better value. If your list is changing shape quickly, or you are still evaluating, monthly costs more but lets you move without losing prepaid time.
The decision hinges on one question: is your contact count predictable over the next twelve months? If you cannot answer that with some confidence, monthly is the lower-risk choice even at a higher rate.
What happens when you approach a limit
Know the behaviour before you hit it, because the failure mode matters more than the limit itself.
A contact limit is reached when you try to add contacts beyond the plan allowance. A send limit is reached during a campaign. Both are better handled before the fact: check your headroom before a campaign or an import, rather than discovering the constraint mid-send when the only remaining option is to upgrade immediately or split the work.
The worst version of this is a campaign that silently reaches fewer people than intended. If a send cannot complete, you want to know before it starts, not from a lower-than-expected open count afterwards.
Counting contacts correctly
What counts as a contact differs between platforms, so compare like for like. Suppressed addresses, hard bounces and unsubscribed contacts should not be consuming your allowance, because they cannot be mailed. If your list holds a large share of those, your usable list is smaller than the number you are comparing, and a platform that counts only mailable contacts may be cheaper at the same headline tier.
The short version
Cresca's plans differ by scale, not features. Count the contacts you will hold in 90 days, not today, and clean unengaged addresses before deciding, since a smaller clean list may keep you on a lower tier. Upgrade before a limit blocks a real send rather than after, and know which limit you are approaching before you start a campaign.
Do not upgrade to fix deliverability, which is not a pricing problem.
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