The True Cost of GoHighLevel: Plans, Usage, Email, Phone and AI Add-Ons

Key takeaways

• The plan lists at $97, $297 or $497 a month, with a 14-day free trial.[1]
• For a business that texts at event volume, the plan is the smallest line on the bill. In our illustration, it's about 22% to 26% of the total at webinar and event volumes.
• Texting is the line that grows fastest: per-segment fees, carrier fees on outbound and inbound texts, and a 5% markup that HighLevel's own docs disagree about.
• A2P 10DLC, AI Employee and add-ons each add a fixed monthly line per sub-account.
• HighLevel still doesn't replace attribution, design or project management. Budget for those separately.

GoHighLevel's plan costs $97, $297 or $497 a month.[1] For a coaching or event business that texts its registrants at volume, that's the smallest line on the bill. Email, texts, carrier fees, A2P campaign fees and AI are all billed as usage on top, and at event volumes they cost two to four times the plan in our illustration below.

At low volume the plan is still most of the bill. So the honest answer depends on how much you send. Here's every line, dated, with the math at three volumes.

Line 1: the plan (and which one a single business needs)

HighLevel sells three plans: Starter at $97 a month ($970 a year) with three sub-accounts, Unlimited at $297 ($2,970 a year) and Agency Pro at $497 ($4,970 a year).[1]

A single coaching or event business usually needs Starter. Unlimited makes sense once you run several brands or want room for more sub-accounts. Agency Pro is for agencies reselling HighLevel to their own clients.

One catch if you buy through an agency. On Agency Pro, the agency can rebill usage to its clients and set its own markup.[3] So a client's texting rate can sit above HighLevel's list rate. Ask your agency for its rates in writing.

Line 2: LC Email

LC Email costs $0.675 per 1,000 emails on every plan. Email validation costs $2.50 per 1,000 addresses.[4]

That makes email cheap per send. 100,000 emails cost $67.50. The bigger cost is a bad list: sending to dead addresses hurts deliverability long before it hurts the invoice. Validate an imported list once before the first send.

A dedicated email IP is an add-on at $59 a month.[1] Most coaching businesses don't need one. It's for senders with high, steady volume who want their own reputation.

Line 3: texting, segments, carrier fees and the 5% markup

This is the line that surprises people.

The base rate. US texts cost $0.00747 per segment, outbound and inbound, 10% under Twilio's $0.0083 list rate.[5][6] Replies cost money too.

Carrier fees. Carriers add their own fee per segment, and inbound texts carry them too. As of September 2026, Twilio lists AT&T at $0.0035 outbound and $0.0035 inbound, T-Mobile at $0.0045 and $0.0025, Verizon at $0.005 and $0.007, and other carriers at $0.0042.[6] They keep rising: AT&T's SMS fee went from $0.0030 to $0.0035 on 1 April 2026, with Verizon increases from 1 May.[7]

Segments. A standard text holds 160 characters. Past that, each segment holds 153. Add an emoji or some smart punctuation and the limits drop to 70 and 67.[8] In TrueDialog's analysis of about 50 million business texts, the average message was 153 characters and only 2% used emojis.[9] The average sits seven characters under the limit. A link or one curly apostrophe tips many reminders into two billed segments, and every line above doubles.

The 5% markup. HighLevel's documents disagree. One help article says a fixed 5% markup applies to certain pass-through charges, including carrier fees and A2P fees.[10] The latest phone pricing guide says the 5% applies only if your agency has rebilling enabled.[5] A spend guide says there's no markup on rebilled carrier and A2P charges.[11] The A2P fee article says there's no markup from HighLevel.[12] Budget for 0% to 5% on those lines, and check a real wallet transaction to see what you're charged.

You pay per segment whether or not the text lands, so delivery is a cost issue too. With trigger links on the brand's own domain and a fresh number registered to the brand's A2P campaign, we see 95% or more of reminders delivered. We haven't found a method-disclosed industry benchmark to set beside that.

Phone numbers and calls are small lines: $1.15 a month for a local number, $2.15 for toll-free, $0.0166 a minute for outbound calls and $0.01165 inbound.[5] HighLevel has announced voice price changes from 13 October 2026, so recheck call rates after that date.[13]

Line 4: A2P 10DLC registration

If you text US numbers from a 10-digit long code, you register a brand and a campaign. Through HighLevel, registration is a one-time $22.50 (sole proprietor or low-volume standard) or $64.00 (high-volume standard). The monthly campaign fee is $2.00 for sole proprietors, $10.00 for standard and $1.50 for low-volume mixed. Daily caps are 3,000, 6,000 or 600,000 segments depending on type.[12]

Campaign resubmissions have been free since 1 February 2026; they used to cost $15.[5] That matters, because rejected campaigns are common and the fix is usually wording.

Line 5: AI Employee and Voice AI

AI is billed per sub-account. AI Employee Growth is $50 a month and includes 1,000 Conversation AI responses and 100 Voice AI minutes. Unlimited is $97 a month. Voice AI usage costs $0.045 a minute for the engine, plus text-to-speech from $0.015 a minute.[14]

Workflows have their own meter for premium actions. You get 100 lifetime premium executions free, then $0.01 each, or a Workflow Pro tier: $10 a month for 10,000 executions, $25 for 30,000 or $50 for 65,000.[15]

Add-ons stack up the same way: WhatsApp at $10 a month per sub-account, a branded client portal app at $49, HIPAA at $297, and WordPress hosting from $10 a month.[1] WhatsApp also bills per message: $0.0263 for marketing and $0.0036 for utility messages in North America.[16]

The monthly total at three volumes

Here is what the lines above add up to. These are illustrations built from published rates, not client bills.

Line	Small coach (Starter)	Webinar business (Starter)	Multi-city event brand (Unlimited)
Plan	$97.00	$97.00	$297.00
LC Email	25,000 → $16.88	100,000 → $67.50	300,000 → $202.50
Texts out + in	2,000 + 500 → $18.68	10,000 + 2,000 → $89.64	50,000 + 10,000 → $448.20
Carrier fees	~$11	~$54	~$268
Phone numbers	1 → $1.15	2 → $2.30	5 → $5.75
A2P campaign	$10.00	$10.00	$10.00
AI Employee	None	Growth $50.00	Unlimited $97.00
Total	~$155	~$370	~$1,330
Plan share	~63%	~26%	~22%

Assumes single-segment texts, a blended carrier fee of about $0.0045 outbound and $0.0043 inbound, one standard A2P campaign, no calls, no one-time A2P fee, no 5% markup and no payment processing. Two-segment reminders roughly double the SMS and carrier lines. A 5% markup on carrier and A2P fees would add about $1, $3 and $14.

The small coach's plan is still most of the bill. The webinar business and the event brand flip: usage is roughly three times the plan.

That lines up with what we see. In our experience, the plan fee is only 25% to 40% of a texting event business's monthly HighLevel bill, and on the event funnels we run, usage runs 1.5 to 3 times the plan fee in launch months. Neither figure has an industry benchmark; they come from our builds.

Hormozi makes the point that you only know what a customer costs when you count everything it took to get them, software included. Put the full HighLevel bill into your acquisition cost, not just the plan.

The international SMS trap

US rates don't travel. Twilio's list prices per outbound segment are $0.056 to UK mobiles, $0.0515 to Australia, $0.0832 to India and $0.241 to the Philippines.[17] The Philippines rate is about 32 times HighLevel's US rate. Egypt is $0.3959 per text, about 48 times Twilio's own US list rate.[18]

If an event draws international registrants, one reminder sequence to a few thousand of them can cost more than a month of US texting. Segment international contacts out, use email or WhatsApp for them, and check the country rate before any send.

What GHL doesn't replace (and what those cost)

HighLevel replaces a lot: in our builds, usually the email tool, SMS tool, scheduler, forms and pipeline tool. It doesn't replace these:

• Attribution. HighLevel stores first and latest attribution on each contact, not multi-touch revenue attribution.[19] For high-ticket ad spend we add Hyros, which starts at $230 a month for up to $20,000 in tracked monthly revenue.[20]
• Delivery and project management. ClickUp Unlimited is $7 per user a month billed yearly.[21]
• Design. A Figma full seat is $16 a month.[22]
• Custom front ends. Vercel Pro is $20 a month.[23]
• Behavior analytics. Microsoft Clarity is free.[24]

As an illustration from October 2026 list prices, the core software for a 10-person agency on our stack runs about $900 to $1,400 a month before usage, excluding Hyros. That's our estimate, not a benchmark. The tool-by-tool breakdown is in our agency tech stack.

How we keep usage costs down

If you decide to start a trial, our referral link is /ghl. Paid link: we earn a commission if you sign up through it. The 14-day trial is HighLevel's standard offer.

For where HighLevel is worth the money and where it isn't, read our GoHighLevel review, which has no referral link. For the full map of what it should own, see the GoHighLevel guide. If you're comparing it with your current platform, the full bill matters more than the plan; we cover that in GoHighLevel vs Kajabi, ClickFunnels and Kartra.

If you want us to model your real monthly bill from your list size and send schedule, book a strategy call.