Plans, seats, and sending limits
By Clint ParsleyLast updated
In short. Five tiers from Free to Business ($399/mo). Paid tiers meter platform sends per month; mailbox sends never count against a plan and are capped at 250 to 1,000 per mailbox per day. Seats bill as you invite people. The 30-day trial unlocks every feature with a flat 1,000-send cap, and you pick a plan at the end.
SEMAOS has five tiers. The metered number is platform sends (broadcasts and anything else routed through SEMAOS's infrastructure); sending through your own connected mailbox never counts against the pool on any tier, because that volume rides your own account. Mailbox sending has its own limit instead, a daily cap for each mailbox: 250 a day for a personal Outlook account, 400 for a personal Gmail account, and 1,000 for a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. Free allows one connected mailbox per user, and every paid plan allows three. Contacts are unlimited on every tier. Here are the real numbers the product enforces:
| Free | Solo | Starter | Team | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price / month | $0 | $35 | $79 | $199 | $399 |
| Platform sends / month | none (mailbox only) | 7,500 | 25,000 | 75,000 | 200,000 |
| Seats included | 1 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 20 |
| Max seats | 1 | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Extra seat / month | n/a | n/a | $25 | $19 | $15 |
| Custom sending domains | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| Connected mailboxes per user | 1 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Active sequences | 2 | 5 | 10 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Overage per 1,000 platform sends | n/a | $0.90 | $0.75 | $0.60 | $0.40 |
Annual billing gives two months free on any paid tier (you pay 10 months for the year); annual per-seat rates are $250 on Starter, $190 on Team, and $150 on Business.
How does the 30-day trial work?
The trial unlocks every feature, including your own custom sending domain and up to 8 seats. It is an allowance, not a copy of a tier: what's capped is SES sending at 1,000 platform sends for the whole trial, counted across all 30 days rather than reset each month. Sending through your connected Gmail or Outlook doesn't count toward that 1,000 and stays capped at 250 to 1,000 per mailbox per day, by kind of account, the entire time. A trial allows three connected mailboxes per user, like a paid plan.
A card is collected at signup through Stripe, but nothing is charged while the trial runs. Reminder emails go out 10 days and 3 days before it ends. If you closed your account during the trial, those two emails tell you instead that it closes when the trial ends and its data is deleted 30 days after that, with a link to Settings → Billing, where Keep my account undoes the close.
When the trial ends, pick a plan to keep every feature. The tier you started your trial from is already selected on the billing page, so you're not pushed onto Team by default. Starting a plan charges your card for the first month right then (unless a comp covers it):
- If the card is declined, nothing changes. Your trial continues exactly as it was, and you can update the card under Settings → Billing and try again.
- If your bank asks you to confirm the payment, the billing page links to Stripe's secure payment page, and your plan starts once you confirm there. That confirmation is the card issuer's extra security check, usually 3D Secure, which Stripe explains in its 3D Secure guide. If you leave the page first, the change waits in your invoice list as "Plan change waiting on your bank", with a Pay link to the same page. If you don't confirm, the change is dropped within a day and you aren't charged.
Nothing is charged automatically. If you don't pick a plan and haven't closed your account, it moves to the Free plan: you keep sending through your connected Gmail or Outlook mailbox (capped at 250 to 1,000 emails a day, depending on the kind of account), and your data stays put. What pauses until you choose a paid plan: broadcasts, any extra teammate seats, and every connected mailbox but your default (see below). Running sequences pause too, and you resume them yourself, up to 2 at a time on Free; choosing a plan doesn't restart them. Your custom sending domains and any custom tracking domain are removed, so after you upgrade you add them again and update their DNS records to match the ones we show. Your contacts, templates, sequences and send history stay.
How do seats work?
Every tier includes some seats; inviting a teammate past that count adds a per-seat subscription item, prorated from the day you invite them, at the rates in the table. Prorated means what Stripe's proration docs describe: the first charge is the share of the seat price for the part of the billing period that is left.
The seat is charged when you send the invite (any account credit is used first); if the card is declined, or your bank asks to confirm the charge, no seat is added and no invite goes out. Removing a member ends their seat charge.
Free and Solo are single-seat tiers, so invites are unavailable on them. Starter allows up to 5 seats total (3 included, then up to 2 more at $25 each); a sixth teammate means moving up to Team, where seats are unlimited. Business is unlimited too. Manage members under Settings → Team.
What happens if I hit my send limit?
Platform sends stop at the limit, and a sequence step that would go out over the platform pauses rather than fails. Steps sent from a connected mailbox keep going, because mailbox sends never count against the pool. Two ways forward: upgrade the tier, or enable the on-demand bank under Settings → Billing. The bank is a dollar balance (not a credit count) drawn at your tier's overage rate, so $50 on Starter covers about 66,000 extra sends at $0.75 per 1,000.
The bank is part of the paid plans. You can't top it up on Free or during a trial, because a trial sends from its 1,000-send trial allowance instead. Top-ups are also off while the account is paused, read only, closed, on hold, or has sending suspended. If a renewal payment has failed, you can still top up during the 7-day grace that follows.
Paused sequences resume automatically after a top-up. Usage is visible under Settings → Usage, with warnings at 80% and 100% of the monthly pool.
Everyone on the team can see Settings → Usage, because knowing how much of the monthly send pool is left changes whether it's a good day to enroll a large list. What members don't see there is the money: the on-demand bank balance, the last top-up, and the log of what each draw paid for are visible to admins only, the same as Settings → Billing.
What do the account statuses mean?
Your account is always in exactly one state, and each one gates something specific:
| Status | What it means | What's blocked |
|---|---|---|
| Trialing | In the 30-day trial | Nothing; SES sending is capped at 1,000 for the trial (mailbox sends don't count) |
| Active | Paid and current, or on the Free plan (including a trial that lapsed to Free) | Nothing (Free is mailbox-only: no platform sending) |
| Past due | A renewal payment failed and Stripe is retrying the card | Nothing for 7 days after the first failure. A banner names the moment sending pauses, and SEMAOS emails you on the day it fails and again the day before the pause. If the invoice is still unpaid after 7 days, the account is paused (see below). Updating the card on the billing page pays the invoice (if it was already paid, say on Stripe's hosted page, nothing is charged and the modal says so). A plan change still waiting on your bank's confirmation is not paid, and the modal tells you if it was dropped |
| Read-only | SEMAOS support put the account on hold, or it's an older trial that ended before expired trials started moving to Free | All writes and sends. Contact support |
| Send-suspended | Hard-bounce rate reached 10% | Sending, until support reactivates. A declined renewal in the meantime still emails you; the card update keeps billing in good standing for when sending is restored |
| Paused | A renewal stayed unpaid for 7 days (or Stripe gave up retrying it), or an operator paused the account | Sending on every channel, your connected mailbox included; you can still edit. For a payment pause, updating your card pays the outstanding invoices, including the current billing period (if there is nothing left to charge — already paid, or account credit covers them — nothing is charged and the modal says so), and sending resumes as soon as Stripe confirms the payment. A plan change still waiting on your bank's confirmation is not paid, and the modal tells you if it was dropped. A subscription that never collected a payment moves to Free instead |
| Canceled | Account closed | All writes and sends; data purges after 30 days (kept while a payment dispute on the account is open) |
The send-suspension threshold and the deliverability mechanics behind it are covered in the deliverability guide.
How do upgrades and downgrades apply?
Upgrades take effect immediately: Stripe charges the prorated difference and the new limits apply on the spot. If your bank asks you to confirm the charge, the billing page links to Stripe's secure payment page, and the upgrade applies once you confirm there. If you leave the page first, the change stays in your invoice list as "Plan change waiting on your bank", with a Pay link to the same page. If you don't confirm it, it's dropped within about a day and you aren't charged.
Downgrades schedule for your next renewal date, so you keep what you paid for through the current period; a banner shows the pending change and you can cancel it any time before it lands. Both live under Settings → Billing, along with invoices and your card.
What happens to my extra mailboxes on Free?
Free allows one connected mailbox per user, and paid plans and trials allow three. When an account moves to Free, whether a trial ends without a plan or a paid plan ends, each person keeps their default mailbox. Their other mailboxes are parked: they stay listed under Settings → Mailbox, nothing sends from them, and their connection is kept. A parked mailbox doesn't count toward Free's limit of one, and you can disconnect it at any time.
Contacts in a sequence who were sending from a parked mailbox continue from that person's default mailbox until a paid plan brings it back, and then they return to it. If that mailbox needed reconnecting before it was parked, their emails send from your sending domain until you reconnect it. Choose a paid plan again and they come back as they were: a working one sends again without a reconnect, and one that needed reconnecting before it was parked still does. Moving between paid plans never parks anything, because every paid plan allows three.
A sequence set to send only from one mailbox works differently: if that mailbox is parked, its contacts wait for it instead of moving to the default. They pick up once a paid plan brings the mailbox back, or once the sequence is set to send from each enroller's own mailbox (see building sequences).