How many contacts do you actually have? Sizing your plan before you sign up
A worksheet for estimating your real monthly send volume from list size and sequence length, so you pick a Norbelys tier by math instead of a guess.
By David Lara, Founder
Founder-reviewed ·How we research and correct articles
Most people pick a pricing tier by vibe. “We’re a small team, Starter probably fits.” “We’re scaling, better grab Growth just in case.” That’s a guess dressed up as a decision, and it goes wrong in both directions — undersizing means hitting a ceiling mid-campaign, oversizing means paying for headroom a list that never grew into it. The pricing breakdown covers what’s in each tier; this is the other half — an actual worksheet for turning your real list and sequence into a number, so the plan you pick is the one your sending volume actually requires.
The formula underneath the guess
Every cold-email plan’s real constraint isn’t “team size” — it’s three numbers: how many contacts you’re actively working, how many messages a typical contact receives across a full sequence, and how many campaigns run in parallel. Multiply the first two and you get a monthly send estimate close enough to plan against:
Monthly sends ≈ active contacts × average messages sent per contact per sequence cycle
The second number is the one people forget to estimate honestly. A four-step sequence doesn’t mean every contact gets exactly four emails — some reply after step one and stop, some bounce out before step two. Across a real list, the average lands somewhere between 2.5 and 4 messages per contact for a typical 4-step, 2-3 week sequence. Use 3.5 as a reasonable default if you don’t have your own historical number yet.
Size your own plan in five steps
Count your actually-active list, not your whole database
If you have 50,000 contacts but only 6,000 are currently enrolled or realistically going to be enrolled in a campaign this month, 6,000 is the number that matters for sizing — not the archive sitting untouched in a CSV.
Estimate your average sequence length
Count the steps in the sequence you're actually running. A 3-step sequence and a 6-step sequence produce very different volume from the identical contact list, so use your real number, not a generic assumption.
Apply a dropout multiplier
Not every contact receives every step. Use roughly 60-80% of your full sequence length as the realistic average messages-per-contact, accounting for replies, bounces, and unsubscribes stopping the sequence early.
Multiply contacts by that average
Active contacts × average messages per contact = your estimated sends for one full cycle through the list. If you re-run the same list monthly (a rolling cadence into a growing pipeline), that's your monthly send estimate.
Check campaign count separately from volume
If you run several distinct campaigns at once — different segments, different offers, different sequences — count them separately. Starter allows 5 concurrent campaigns, Growth 25, Scale unlimited; a high-volume single campaign and five smaller simultaneous ones can size very differently even at the same total send count.
What this looks like on four real list sizes
Read the pattern against Starter’s 1,000 contacts / 3,000 sends, Growth’s 30,000 / 100,000, and Scale’s unlimited / 500,000: the 800-contact list clears Starter comfortably. The 25,000-contact list is the one worth watching — it fits Growth today, but a few thousand more contacts pushes past the 30,000-contact ceiling even though send volume alone would still be fine. The contact cap, not the send cap, is what decides that one.
The mistakes that throw the estimate off
Counting your whole database instead of your active list. A CRM export with eighteen months of accumulated contacts isn’t what you’re sending to this month — size against who’s actually enrolling in a campaign in the period you’re planning for.
Forgetting concurrent campaigns multiply, not add loosely. Three simultaneous campaigns against three segments of the same 20,000-contact list isn’t “20,000 contacts, sized once” — it’s three separate volume calculations to sum, since each campaign sends its own sequence independently. Undercounting this is the single most common way a Growth account that “should” have headroom hits its send ceiling mid-month.
Sizing for a launch spike instead of a steady state. The month you import a large new list and enroll all of it at once produces a bigger number than a typical ongoing month topping up a smaller weekly batch. If that spike is one-time, size for the steady state and treat the launch month as a known, temporary overage.
If your number lands between two tiers
Undersizing is the safer mistake, and it’s worth saying why: moving from Starter to Growth partway through a billing cycle is a plan change on the same account, not a data migration — contacts, campaigns, mailbox connections, and sending history carry over unchanged. If your estimate lands close to a boundary, start on the lower tier and upgrade the moment your dashboard shows you’re consistently brushing the ceiling, rather than prepaying for headroom based on a guess about growth that might take longer than expected to materialize.
Sizing questions people actually have
What if I don't know my sequence's real dropout rate yet?
Use 3.5 messages per contact as a starting default for a typical 4-step, 2-3 week sequence. Once you've run a real campaign, replace the estimate with your own actual average from that campaign's data.
Do warmup sends count toward my plan's send limit?
No — warmup traffic runs on a separate track from campaign sending and doesn't count against your plan's monthly campaign send volume, regardless of how many mailboxes are warming at once.
I run several small campaigns instead of one big one — does that change my sizing?
It changes which limit you hit first. Several concurrent campaigns against the same contact pool multiply your send estimate while also counting against the plan's concurrent-campaign cap, not just its send cap — size both numbers separately.
What a well-verified list changes about the math
One more variable worth naming: your multiplier isn’t fixed across lists. A list that’s been deduplicated and verified before it ever enrolls in a campaign loses fewer contacts to early bounces than a raw, unverified CSV does — migrating a spreadsheet into a real audience before you size anything means more of your contacts survive to receive the later sequence steps, which nudges your real multiplier a little closer to the sequence’s full length than the 3.5 default assumes. Sizing against a messy list and sizing against a cleaned one can genuinely put you on different sides of a tier boundary — one more reason to clean the list first, then run the math.
Do the math, then pick
The honest reason to run this worksheet before signing up isn’t to save a few dollars — it’s to stop discovering your real ceiling mid-campaign, which is the worst possible moment to find out you sized wrong. Starter, Growth, and Scale map directly onto the contacts-and-sends math above, and every plan includes the same warmup, DMARC monitoring, and analytics regardless of which tier your numbers land on. Run your own list through the formula, check it against the full tier breakdown, and start on the plan your actual volume calls for — not the one that sounded right for a team your size.