GoHighLevel Pricing: What It Really Costs Per Month

GoHighLevel charges $97, $297, or $497 per month depending on plan. Those prices have not changed. What has changed is everything billed on top: phone numbers, every SMS segment and its carrier fee, call minutes, emails, and AI usage. A small agency on the $97 Starter plan realistically pays $179.60 per month. This page shows the full rate card, then lets you run your own numbers. If you are weighing this plan against Keap, see what switching actually saves in year one before you pick a platform.

GoHighLevel pricing plans

There are three public plans plus a custom Enterprise tier. Contacts and users are unlimited on all of them, so list size never changes your bill. Sub-accounts are the real dividing line: Starter caps at three, and everything above that needs Unlimited or Agency Pro.

Annual billing costs exactly ten times the monthly price on every tier, so committing for a year saves two months. Prices come from GoHighLevel's pricing page.

The usage costs nobody advertises

GoHighLevel resells phone and email through its own wallet, and those charges land on top of your plan. The company says so plainly on its pricing page: your subscription covers platform features, while telecommunications and AI carry usage-based costs. Here is the current rate card.

The single most misleading number in every other pricing breakdown is the SMS rate. GoHighLevel publishes $0.00747 per segment, but the recipient carrier adds its own fee on top, between $0.0035 for AT&T and $0.0050 for US Cellular. Send 1,000 segments and you pay about $11.47, not $7.47. That is 54% above the advertised rate.

Two more details catch people out. Inbound SMS is billed as well, and on three of the five US carrier groups a reply costs more than the message that prompted it. And segments are not messages: one emoji can turn a single 160-character text into three billed segments. Both are worked through in the SMS section below.

Rates are from the LC Phone Pricing and Billing Guide and the HighLevel Pricing Guide. Segment rules come from How to Calculate SMS and MMS Costs, and registration fees from the A2P 10DLC fee reference. All four were checked on August 10, 2026.

GoHighLevel SMS pricing

GoHighLevel bills SMS at $0.00747 per segment in the US and Canada, in both directions. Carrier fees land on top and change the real number. Delivered cost runs $0.01097 to $0.01247 per outbound segment depending on the recipient carrier. Inbound can reach $0.01747, which is more than most sends cost.

This is where the usual advice gets it backwards. Most breakdowns say inbound SMS is free. The HighLevel billing FAQ answers that directly: the native phone system charges for inbound and outbound at the same rate. Its carrier fee table then shows inbound surcharges that run higher than outbound on three of the five carrier groups. A reply from a Verizon number costs 21% more than the message that prompted it. On US Cellular the gap is 40%. Two-way conversations are the expensive part of GoHighLevel, and no pricing page says so.

Three numbers circulate for the same rate, which is why no two blog posts agree. The LC Phone billing guide lists $0.0083 and applies a 10% discount on US and Canada traffic, landing at $0.00747. The HighLevel A2P article puts the Twilio passthrough rate at $0.0079. Model with $0.00747, the rate on the guide HighLevel links from its own pricing page.

Segments, emojis, and the 3x trap

A segment is 160 characters of plain GSM-7 text, not one message. Any emoji or non-Latin character switches the message to UCS-2 encoding, which cuts the limit to 70 characters. Concatenated segments hold 67. One emoji turns a 160-character message from one segment into three.

That is a 3x bill for one character. Say you send a 160-character promo to 5,000 contacts. Plain text costs $57.35. Add a single emoji and the same send costs $172.05, a difference of $114.70. Hidden characters do the same damage silently: HighLevel documents the phrase "Hey there" pasted from a web page arriving as four segments instead of one, because the paste carried invisible formatting. Paste as plain text (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows) and run your copy through a segment calculator before any large send.

MMS costs about three times as much as text

Adding an image moves the message to MMS rates. HighLevel bills $0.0220 per outbound MMS in the US and Canada, plus carrier fees between $0.0070 and $0.0100. Delivered, that is about $0.031 per picture message against $0.011 for plain text. Inbound MMS is cheaper but still billed.

Receiving costs $0.0165 to a local number and $0.0200 to a toll-free number. A 1,000-message MMS campaign runs about $31 against $11.47 for the same campaign in text. You can attach up to 10 files totalling 5MB per message. Anything larger goes to your media library and sends as a link instead, which is worth knowing before you design a campaign around images.

A2P 10DLC registration is the fee nobody budgets

Every US business sending SMS from a local number must register a brand and campaign with The Campaign Registry. GoHighLevel bundles brand registration, campaign vetting, and $3 fast-track processing into a single charge at signup. A standard business pays $24.50 once, then $10 per month per campaign, indefinitely.

Monthly campaign fees sit on top and follow your use case, not your tier: $2 for a sole proprietor starter campaign, $10 for a standard campaign, $1.50 for a low-volume mixed campaign, $3 for a registered charity, $5 for emergency services. A standard registration therefore costs $144.50 in year one. Extra campaigns under the same brand cost $15 each. Resubmitting a rejected campaign has been free since February 1, 2026.

One caution on those figures. The LC Phone billing guide lists slightly lower one-time fees ($23.48 and $68.63) than the dedicated A2P article. Budget for the higher pair, since the A2P article is the more recently updated of the two.

International SMS costs several times more

You pay the destination country rate, not your own. Sending from a US number to an Australian mobile bills at Australian rates, which HighLevel documentation puts near $0.0515 per segment. That is roughly six times the US list price. Australian MMS costs $0.35 per message in both directions.

Country-by-country rates live in CSV attachments at the bottom of the LC Phone billing guide, not on any pricing page. If you run campaigns outside North America, download those before you model anything. Sending one test message to a real number in the destination country is the fastest way to confirm what you will actually be charged.

Put your real segment volume into the calculator at the top of this page to see what messaging does to your monthly total. The three worked examples below show how quickly it takes over the bill.

What GoHighLevel actually costs at three sizes

These totals come from the calculator above, using the published rates and one local number per sub-account. They exclude optional add-ons so you can see the unavoidable floor.

The pattern is consistent: the bigger you get, the less the plan fee matters and the more usage dominates. At 15 sub-accounts, usage alone is $627.10 per month, more than twice the Unlimited plan price. Turn on AI Employee Unlimited across those 15 sub-accounts and you add $1,455 per month, taking the real bill to $2,379.10 against a $297 sticker.

AI Employee pricing is per sub-account

This is the most expensive misunderstanding in GoHighLevel pricing. AI Employee Growth costs $50 per month and AI Employee Unlimited costs $97 per month, but both are charged per enabled sub-account, not per agency. Ten sub-accounts on the Unlimited AI tier is $970 per month, which is more than the $497 Agency Pro plan those sub-accounts sit inside.

AI Employee Unlimited also does not make AI calls free. HighLevel states that phone system charges still apply to all calls regardless of plan, so a Voice AI conversation costs you the AI subscription plus the underlying call minutes. Agent Studio is never included in any tier.

If you skip the subscription and pay per use, be aware the pricing model changed in 2026. Conversation AI is now billed on token usage rather than a flat rate per message, and Voice AI was unbundled on May 20, 2026 into a $0.045 per minute voice engine plus a separate text-to-speech rate that ranges from $0.015 to $0.170 per minute depending on provider, plus language model tokens, plus the phone minutes. Any calculator still quoting $0.02 per AI message or $0.13 per AI minute is running on retired 2025 pricing.

Rebilling and SaaS Mode margins

Rebilling is how agencies turn usage from a cost into revenue. On the $297 Unlimited plan you can pass phone and email through to clients at cost. On the $497 Agency Pro plan you can apply a markup and keep the difference, which is the core of SaaS Mode.

The markup is a multiplier you set, and HighLevel publishes no cap on it. Its own documentation shows 1.5x and 2x examples. At a 2x multiplier, the 15 sub-account agency above turns $627.10 of monthly usage into $627.10 of monthly margin. That is the number that makes Agency Pro pay for itself: you need roughly $200 of monthly usage at a 2x markup to cover the $200 gap between Unlimited and Agency Pro.

One detail worth knowing before you model client pricing. HighLevel used to add a 5% Stripe markup on top of carrier charges, and it removed that permanently on October 1, 2025, so phone usage now bills at true carrier passthrough. One help article still describes a 5% location-level markup, so if your own numbers look high, check the detailed transactions under Agency View, Settings, Billing and compare them against the raw carrier rate.

Costs this calculator deliberately leaves out

Some charges depend on choices the calculator cannot guess, so rather than invent a number we list them here with the published rates:

• A2P 10DLC registration: $24.50 one-time for most businesses and $71.91 at high volume, then $2 to $10 per campaign per month. Resubmissions became free on February 1, 2026.
• WhatsApp: $10 per month per enabled sub-account, plus per-message rates by country.
• Workflow premium executions: $0.01 each, or a Workflow Pro tier at $10, $25, or $50 per month.
• Call recording at $0.0025 per minute, storage at $0.0005 per minute per month, and transcription at $0.024 per minute, which costs more than the call itself.
• Add-ons: SEO at $79, branded client portal at $49, prospecting at $29, online listings at $30, dedicated IP at $59, HIPAA compliance at $297, premium support at $500, and the white label mobile app at $497.

Two structural gotchas belong here too. Wallet auto-recharge cannot be switched off, and if the same recharge triggers more than three times in seven days HighLevel moves you up to the next preset tier, so your cash outflow steps up in jumps rather than smoothly. And usage fees apply during the free trial, so a trial is only free if you send nothing.

Is GoHighLevel worth the money?

For a solo operator replacing a stack of separate tools, Starter at a real $116 to $180 per month is straightforward value, because the alternative is paying separately for a CRM, a scheduler, an email tool, and a funnel builder. For an agency, the answer depends entirely on whether you rebill. If you do, usage stops being a cost and becomes margin, and Agency Pro pays for itself quickly. If you do not, usage is pure overhead that grows with every client you add.

• Choose Starter if you run three or fewer businesses and want the cheapest real entry point.
• Choose Unlimited at four or more sub-accounts, or when you want to pass usage through at cost.
• Choose Agency Pro only if you will actually sell software to clients and mark usage up.
• Model AI Employee separately: at scale it can cost more than the platform itself.

All three plans start with a 14-day free trial, so the cheapest way to settle the question is to run your real volumes against the rates above. Usage charges for SMS, calls, and email still apply during the trial, so top the wallet up lightly and watch what one normal week costs. If you have seen offers promising far longer, why there is no 90-day GoHighLevel trial separates the real offers from the recycled ones.

If you are testing the platform and decide against it, our guide on cancelling the GoHighLevel trial walks through doing it before billing starts.