Is a contact counted towards billing if it's not in any list?

[DanielH547]

I'm using the API, and one of my tasks is to remove a contact from billing if certain conditions aren't met. One of my methods was to set the contact's "permission_to_send" to "temp_hold", however, as there is no bulk update at the moment, I have to make an update request for each contact that doesn't meet all the conditions to be active. If I have 100000000 contacts that don't meet all the conditions, then I would have to make 100000000 requests! I'd rather not do that.

I do notice that there is a bulk remove from lists option. If I use that to remove the contacts from all lists instead, would that remove them from billing? That would be a life-saver if it did.

Also, I do not want to mass-delete them, because I still need to keep the relevant data on those contacts, even if they do not meet all the necessary conditions to be active.

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @DanielH547 ,

All active contacts count toward your billing, even if they're not in a list or are bouncing when sent to. Make sure to go through this article which denotes the difference between active and inactive contacts. A contact that qualifies as active would need to be removed from the account for at least one entire billing cycle, in order for it to not count toward the active total.

When you re-import a contact, as long as there's no new information being associated with a contact field, the system will restore the original info that contact had associated with a field. This does not apply to segmentations, lists, or tags.

See also:

Billing FAQ

How Billing Works

Managing and Preventing Bounces