Which HighLevel plan do I need? A fit guide by client count

HighLevel (also written GoHighLevel) sells agency software on three published tiers plus a custom Enterprise tier. The headline prices are simple. The total bill is not, because messaging, calling and several AI features are charged by usage on top of the plan. This guide lays out what each plan includes as of 2026-10-31, what is billed separately, and who should start where. For a plain price list of every plan and add-on, see HighLevel pricing plans explained; this page is about choosing one. Every figure carries a source number in brackets; the full list is at the bottom.

Prices change. The numbers below were read from HighLevel’s own pages on 2026-10-31. If you are reading this much later, treat them as a starting point and check the live HighLevel pricing pageaffiliate (opens HighLevel in a new tab) before you decide.

The plans at a glance

Plan	Monthly	Annual	What defines it	Source
Starter	$97	$970	3 sub-accounts, unlimited contacts, unlimited users	[1]
Unlimited	$297	$2,970	Unlimited sub-accounts, rebilling of phone and email without markup, basic API access	[1]
Founder	$497	$4,970	Rebilling with markup, SaaS mode, and the plan’s other listed features	[1][2]
Enterprise	Contact sales	Contact sales	Account management, custom development, white label mobile app and HIPAA compliance included	[1]

A naming note. This guide uses “Founder”, the name on the $497 plan card [1]. The same page’s FAQ calls it the “Pro Plan ($497/mo)” and its add-ons text says “Agency Pro” [1], and HighLevel’s help center uses “$497 Founder Plan” and “Pro Plan” for it in the same paragraph [7]. Founder, Pro and Agency Pro are aliases for one $497 tier; if you see any of them in HighLevel’s docs, read it as this plan.

The annual price works out to ten months of the monthly price on all three published tiers: $970 against $1,164 on Starter, for example. That is arithmetic on the listed prices, not a separate claim from HighLevel [1].

What each plan means in practice

Starter: $97 per month

Starter caps you at three sub-accounts [1]. A sub-account is the container HighLevel uses for one business: its contacts, pipelines, automations and messaging. If you run your own business plus two clients, you are at the limit. The plan has no contact or user caps according to the pricing page, and it includes 24/7 support and what the page calls “All Core Features” [1].

Starter is a sensible place to build and test your own systems before you sell anything to anyone. It is a poor fit once you pass three sub-accounts, because the next step is a jump to $297 rather than a per-account fee.

Unlimited: $297 per month

Unlimited removes the sub-account cap [1]. It also adds rebilling of phone and email usage without markup, and basic API access [1]. The rebilling detail matters: HighLevel’s help center says that on this plan you can pass usage costs through to clients but cannot mark them up, and that sub-accounts get a 10% discount compared with Twilio in most categories such as phone numbers and US/Canada SMS and calling [3]. Phone rebilling on this plan only works when the client uses LC Phone, HighLevel’s built-in phone system, and not their own Twilio account [3]. Rebilled clients are charged through your own connected Stripe account, the card on file must be the client’s and not yours, and HighLevel sets a default 1.05x multiplier (5%) on rebilled phone charges to cover your Stripe fees [3].

One wording trap: the pricing page’s FAQ says that on “the Unlimited and Pro plans” you can rebill usage costs, “often adding a markup” [1]. The Unlimited plan card (“no markup”) and the help center both say markup is only available on the $497 plan [1][2][3], so do not price an Unlimited-plan offer around a markup.

This is the plan most agencies with a handful of clients end up on, because it is the first one without a hard account limit.

Founder: $497 per month

Founder is where the reselling features sit. The pricing guide in HighLevel’s help center states that rebilling with markup is available only on the $497 plan, as part of SaaS mode, with the margin set in sub-account settings or the SaaS Configurator [2]. As with at-cost rebilling, you need your own Stripe account connected to your agency account first [3]. The pricing page’s FAQ ties SaaS mode to this plan and describes it as a way to sell subscriptions from your website and rebill usage such as SMS, email and WordPress hosting, with you setting the price [1]. The plan card also lists “Founders Club Access”, “HL Partner Network Access” and “The Most Free AI” [1]; we have not verified what those mean in practice.

One related limit: SaaS Multi-Brands, which lets an agency run up to two separate brand identities from one SaaS account, is described in the help center as exclusive to the $497 plan and as being in private beta [7]. Do not plan around it until it is generally available.

Enterprise

HighLevel lists Enterprise as custom-priced through its sales team, with dedicated account management, custom development, premium support, and white label mobile app and HIPAA compliance included [1]. We have no price to quote.

The costs that sit on top of the plan

The pricing page marks Conversation AI, Voice AI, Reviews AI, email and SMS marketing, and inbound and outbound calling with an asterisk meaning “usage based charges apply”, and lists no rates for them on the page itself [1]. The rates live in help center articles. The ones we could read on 2026-10-31:

• Email: $0.675 per 1,000 emails on every plan [2][4]. The LC Email article says both inbound and outbound messages are billed, including To, CC and BCC recipients [4]. Email validation is a separate $2.50 per 1,000 [2][4].
• SMS (US and Canada): $0.00747 per segment, outbound and inbound, which HighLevel describes as a 10% discount on a $0.0083 list price [5]. Carrier fees can apply on top.
• Phone numbers and calls: $1.15 per month for a local number, $2.15 for toll-free, and $0.0166 per minute for outbound calls in the US and Canada [5].
• Workflow premium features: $0.01 per execution for premium triggers and actions; standard steps are not charged, and some actions such as ChatGPT are priced differently [2]. An optional Workflow Pro subscription lowers the per-execution rate: $10, $25 or $50 a month for the agency, including 10,000, 30,000 or 65,000 executions [2].
• US text registration (A2P 10DLC): HighLevel says these are passthrough fees from The Campaign Registry, Twilio and carriers with no markup. The one-time fee, which bundles brand registration, vetting of your first campaign and $3 fast-track processing, is $22.50 for a sole proprietor or low-volume standard brand and $64.00 for a high-volume standard brand. Each additional campaign under the same brand carries a $15.00 vetting fee, and monthly campaign fees run from $1.50 to $10.00 depending on campaign type [6]. HighLevel’s newer phone pricing guide (updated 2026-10-12) lists the same one-time fees but higher monthly fees: up to $2.10 for a sole proprietor campaign, $1.50 to $10.50 for low volume and $10.50 for high volume [8]. The same guide says a 5% markup is applied to pass-through charges, including A2P fees, at the sub-account level when rebilling is enabled [8]. HighLevel notes these provider prices can change, so check the fee shown in the Trust Center before you submit [6].

HighLevel funds usage from a wallet. When the balance drops below the minimum, it automatically charges the agency’s card on file to refill it [2]. Check the minimum and recharge amounts in your own account before you connect real clients, because the help center page does not state defaults [2].

Email sending also ramps up. New sub-accounts start at 250 emails a day, reach 10,000 a day by day seven, and from day eight are limited to 25,000 a day on a shared sending domain or up to 550,000 a day with a dedicated sending domain [4]. The same article contains figures that conflict with each other on the exact limits, so treat these as approximate [4].

Add-ons worth knowing

The pricing page lists optional add-ons. The ones agencies ask about most [1]:

Add-on	Price listed	Source
AI Employee Growth Plan	$50 per month per sub-account	[1]
AI Employee Unlimited Plan	$97 per month per sub-account	[1]
Branded Client Portal App	$49 per month per sub-account	[1]
White label mobile app	$497 per month ($1,491 per quarter per the help center)	[1][2]
Dedicated email IP	$59 per month per IP	[1]
HIPAA compliance	$297 per month	[1]
Premium support	$500 per month	[1]
WordPress hosting	From $10 per month per site	[1]

The page says most of these can be resold with your own markup on the plan it calls “Agency Pro” [1], which is the $497 Founder tier (see the naming note above).

Which HighLevel plan should you start on?

Solo consultant or in-house marketer, one business, maybe two clients: Starter. You get unlimited contacts and users for $97 and room for three accounts [1]. You can start the 14-day trial on HighLevelaffiliate (opens HighLevel in a new tab) to find out whether the usage fees fit your volume [1].

Agency with four or more clients, passing costs through at cost: Unlimited. The $297 plan removes the cap and lets you rebill phone and email at cost, with the LC Phone limitation noted above [1][3].

Agency that wants to charge a markup on messaging or sell the platform as a branded SaaS product: Founder. It is the only published tier where the help center says markup is allowed [2][3]. Do the math first. The extra $200 a month over Unlimited has to be covered by markup income, and the Stripe and support work of running a SaaS offering is real.

Regulated or enterprise buyers needing HIPAA, dedicated support or custom development: read the Enterprise terms with sales. HIPAA is also listed as a $297 per month add-on [1].

If you want to model the plan cost against your own client count and margins, the Agency Profit calculator takes your numbers rather than ours.

Who should not pick HighLevel on price alone

• You only need a CRM for a small sales team. A per-seat CRM may cost less and do enough; see alternatives.
• You will never rebill or manage multiple client accounts. Much of the plan structure is built around agencies; a single business pays for sub-account capacity it will not use.
• You cannot tolerate variable bills. Usage fees for messaging, calling and AI scale with volume and with client behavior.
• You need published, fixed pricing for every feature. Several rates are in help center articles that have been revised, and some pages disagree with each other, as noted above.

Pros and cons of HighLevel’s pricing structure

What works in its favor

• Flat plan prices that do not scale per contact or per user on the published tiers [1].
• No sub-account cap from $297 [1].
• Month-to-month billing and a 14-day trial [1].
• Messaging rates are published in the help center and, for A2P, described as passthrough [5][6].

What works against it

• Usage charges are real and sit outside the plan price [1][2].
• The markup-and-resale features require the most expensive published plan [2].
• Naming and page-to-page inconsistencies (Founder, Pro, Agency Pro) make it harder to be sure you are reading about the same tier [1][2].
• The jump from three sub-accounts to unlimited is a step from $97 to $297, with nothing in between [1].

Before you buy

1. Count the sub-accounts you will need in the next six months, not today.
2. Decide whether you will mark up usage. If not, Unlimited covers at-cost rebilling for LC Phone clients [3].
3. Estimate monthly messages and emails per client using the rates above.
4. Start the trial and read the wallet settings before connecting a real client.
5. Re-check the price on HighLevel’s page the day you pay.