ManyChat Pricing Explained: Every Tier, Every Overage Rate, and What an Active Contact Costs

ManyChat has five plans. The published prices, taken from ManyChat's pricing page as of publication, are $0, $14/mo, $29/mo, $69/mo and $139/mo. The number that determines which one you land on is Active Contacts, not messages or seats or automations, and the difference between the sticker price and your actual invoice comes down to how many of those you touch in a month.

Here's what each plan includes.

The five plans

Annual totals, as published: Essential is $168 billed annually (18% off), Pro is $348 (25% off), Business is $828 (30% off), and Advanced is $1,668 (30% off).

Those annual totals are exactly twelve times the monthly figures in the table, which tells you the headline prices are the annual-billing rates. ManyChat runs a monthly/annual toggle and advertises "save up to 30%", so paying month to month costs more than $14, $29, $69 and $139 respectively. The pricing page does not display the monthly-billing figures alongside the annual ones, so we're not going to invent them. Flip the toggle on ManyChat's page before you budget. The overage table further down confirms the gap exists: overage rates are listed separately for monthly and annual billing, and the monthly rates are higher across every tier.

ManyChat also notes that prices exclude tax and that the final price depends on your billing country, so the number on the checkout page is the one that counts.

What an Active Contact actually is

ManyChat's own definition: an Active Contact is "a real person you interact with during a monthly billing period, whether that happens through a message or an automation." One person equals one Active Contact for that month regardless of how many messages you exchange with them. A contact counts as active when messages are sent or received through ManyChat via automations, AI, Broadcasts, or the Inbox.

Two consequences worth understanding before you pick a plan.

First, a single comment-reply automation that fires on a viral Reel can burn through your allowance in an afternoon, because every unique person who triggers it becomes an Active Contact. Volume of people, not volume of conversation, is the meter.

Second, Broadcasts count. If you send a broadcast to your list, every recipient you reach that month is an Active Contact. On Pro's 2,500 allowance, one broadcast to a 4,000-person list puts you 1,500 contacts over before anyone replies.

Active Contacts are calculated monthly on both monthly and annual plans, and overages are billed monthly either way. An annual commitment does not smooth out a spiky month.

Overage pricing, and why it usually means you should upgrade

ManyChat publishes a per-contact price for every contact beyond your included allowance. The Free plan has no overage option listed (marked N/A), so it's a hard 25.

Run those numbers against the tier prices and the pattern is immediate: overages are priced so that the next plan up is nearly always the cheaper way to buy contacts.

Take Essential at $14 for 250 contacts. Reach 1,000 contacts in a month and the 750 extras cost $75 at $0.10 each, for a total of $89. Pro covers 2,500 contacts for $29. You'd be paying triple Pro's price for less than half of Pro's allowance.

Same story one tier up. Pro at $29 covers 2,500. Hit 5,000 and the 2,500 extras cost $125, taking the bill to $154. Business covers 7,500 for $69, which is under half that for 50% more headroom.

The one place the math changes shape is Advanced. Its overage rate is $0.004 per contact on monthly billing, roughly a sixth of Business's $0.025, so Advanced is the tier where going over stops being punitive. At 40,000 contacts on Advanced, the 15,000 extras add $60 to the $139 base. On Business's rate that same 15,000 would have cost $375.

The practical read: treat overage rates on Essential, Pro and Business as a signal to move up rather than as a usage-based pricing model. ManyChat states that if you exceed your limit and upgrade within the same billing cycle, the overage fees incurred so far are forgiven and the extra contacts count toward your new plan's allowance. That's an unusually merchant-friendly rule and it makes upgrading mid-month the correct move rather than a penalty. You can also set an overage threshold to cap how many additional contacts you're willing to pay for, or block overages entirely.

What else moves the bill

Contacts are the meter, but four other limits decide which tier you can live on.

Which channels you get depends on the tier. Free and Essential let you connect any 2 eligible channels, and per ManyChat's comparison table those are Instagram, Facebook Messenger, TikTok and Telegram. WhatsApp, SMS and Email are not available on Free or Essential at all. Pro is the first tier that unlocks them, with any 3 channels connected. Business and Advanced connect all eligible channels. If WhatsApp is the reason you're looking at ManyChat, Pro at $29/mo is your actual floor, not $14.

AI starts at Pro. ManyChat AI, which replies in DMs and comments and answers FAQs in your tone of voice, appears on Pro, Business and Advanced. Free and Essential do not list it. Broadcasts start at Pro too.

Users and Inbox seats are different numbers. Pro includes 3 users but only 2 Inbox seats. Business includes 5 users and 3 Inbox seats. Advanced includes 10 users and 5 Inbox seats. If your team's job is answering messages rather than building automations, the Inbox seat count is the constraint that matters, and it's always the smaller of the two.

Email sending has its own caps. Pro sends up to 10k emails, Business up to 30k, Advanced up to 100k. Free and Essential have no email channel.

The Free plan, honestly

Free gets you 25 Active Contacts a month, 2 channels, up to 4 active automations, 1 user, a basic unified Inbox with 1 seat, self-serve support only, and "Powered by Manychat" appearing the first time you message a contact. No credit card required.

Twenty-five contacts is a demo allowance. It's enough to build a comment-to-DM flow and watch it work on your own account. It is not enough to run anything, and with no overage option on Free, the flow simply stops covering new people once you're out. Treat it as a sandbox with a hard wall.

If you want to test a paid tier properly, ManyChat offers a 14-day free trial on Essential or Pro (paid plans require a card). It also states that if it's been under 30 days since you bought a plan, you can cancel and get a refund by messaging support.

Upgrade and downgrade rules that catch people

Upgrades take effect immediately and start a new billing period, with the unused portion of your current plan prorated as credit. Downgrades don't take effect until your next billing period on monthly plans, and annual plans cannot be downgraded until the term ends. You can switch monthly to annual at any time with the unused monthly amount credited, but you cannot switch annual back to monthly until the annual term is over.

That asymmetry is the thing to weigh before taking the 30% annual discount on Business or Advanced. If your contact volume is seasonal and you size the plan for your peak, you're locked at peak pricing for twelve months.

Who this pricing model suits badly

ManyChat is a social messaging and marketing automation platform. It is a Meta Business Partner and a TikTok partner, and its own description of the product is helping creators and social-first businesses turn engagement into conversations across Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, Email and SMS. Judged on that job, the pricing is coherent: you pay per person reached, because reaching people is the point. A creator running comment-to-DM funnels gets exactly the meter they should have.

The model fits worse when the job is ecommerce customer support on your own storefront.

Support volume is driven by orders, not by audience. A store with 800 orders a month generates support conversations from a subset of those buyers, repeatedly, throughout the month. Under a per-contact meter, one customer who messages seven times about the same delayed order costs the same as one who says thanks and leaves, which sounds generous until you notice the inverse: your bill scales with how many distinct people touched your automations, including everyone who triggered a flow and got an answer they didn't need to follow up on. The meter counts reach. Support costs are driven by resolution.

Then there's the channel question. ManyChat's channel list is Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and Email. Your product pages, cart and checkout are not on that list. If most of your pre-purchase questions arrive on the storefront (sizing, stock, shipping cost at 11pm before someone abandons a cart), a social messaging platform isn't positioned where the questions are. Our roundup of customer service chatbots covers tools built for that surface, the Tidio alternative breakdown walks through what happens when a chat tool bills its AI layer separately, and if the pricing is what's pushing you to shop around, the ManyChat alternative comparison sorts the options by which reason you're leaving.

Where Ernest fits, and where it doesn't

Ernest is an AI agent for Shopify and WooCommerce stores, billed by conversation rather than by contact: Free at $0 for 100 conversations that never expire (a real free plan, not a trial), then $49/mo for 500, $149/mo for 2,000, and $299/mo for 10,000. AI is included at every tier, with no per-seat and no per-resolution fees. A customer who messages seven times about one order is one conversation, and a month where a flow gets triggered by a thousand people who never needed help doesn't exist, because Ernest answers questions on your storefront rather than broadcasting to an audience.

On connect it imports your Shopify catalog and policies, scrapes the rest of your site, looks up live order status, and handles cancellations and returns with your choice of full automation or one-click approval. Refunds always require your approval.

The honest limits, because a comparison that skips them isn't worth reading. Ernest has no Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram or SMS channels at all. It runs on your storefront widget and email, with escalation to a human by email. If your customers reach you in Instagram DMs, Ernest cannot answer them and ManyChat can. Ernest also does nothing outbound: no broadcasts, no campaigns, no lead capture into a CRM. If the reason you're pricing ManyChat is to run comment-to-DM funnels or send broadcasts to a list, these are not competing products and Ernest isn't the answer.

The overlap is narrow and specific: a Shopify or WooCommerce store, roughly one to fifteen people, that was considering ManyChat as a way to handle customer questions and wants a bill it can predict from order volume. For more on what that looks like day to day, see AI customer service for Shopify.

If you're staying with ManyChat, the single most useful thing you can do before committing is estimate your monthly Active Contacts honestly, including broadcast recipients, then check that number against the tier table above. The overage rates on Essential, Pro and Business are steep enough that guessing low costs more than sizing up.