GoHighLevel pricing explained: the plan is not the bill

We make Drry, which overlaps with some of what GoHighLevel does, so read this with that in mind. GoHighLevel costs $97, $297, or $497 a month (or custom pricing at Enterprise), but that subscription buys platform access only: every SMS, email, call, phone number, and AI response is billed on top as metered usage from a wallet that recharges itself. The plan is not the bill, and understanding the gap between the two is the whole point of this guide.

A note on names before we start: the vendor's pricing page calls the $497 tier Agency Pro, while a lot of third-party articles call the same tier "SaaS Pro" or "Agency SaaS Pro." Same plan, same price. We use the vendor's name throughout so you can reconcile what you read elsewhere.

The four tiers

GoHighLevel sells to agencies, and the plan ladder reflects that. You are not buying more features as you climb so much as buying the right to run more client accounts and to make money on top of them.

• Starter, $97 a month ($970 a year): the core platform, capped at 3 sub-accounts. No SaaS mode, no white-label desktop app, no API access, and no rebilling of any kind.
• Unlimited, $297 a month ($2,970 a year): unlimited sub-accounts, and marked as the most popular plan. This is where rebilling starts, but only at cost, with no markup.
• Agency Pro, $497 a month ($4,970 a year): built for agencies going SaaS. The distinguishing feature is rebilling with markup, meaning the agency keeps the margin on usage it resells.
• Enterprise, custom pricing: contact sales. Adds a white-label mobile app, HIPAA support, and a dedicated success manager.

Annual billing is exactly ten times the monthly price on every tier, so you get two months free, about 17% off, paid upfront. Base plan prices did not change from 2025 into 2026, which is genuinely worth noting: the sticker price has been stable. There is no free plan at any tier, though every tier includes a 14-day trial.

The wallet: why the subscription is only half the bill

Here is the single most important thing to understand before you sign up. Your GoHighLevel subscription pays for access to the software. It does not pay for anything the software actually sends. Text messages, emails, phone calls, phone numbers, and AI responses are all metered separately and drawn from an Agency Wallet, a prepaid balance that auto-recharges whenever it drops below a threshold you set.

Auto-recharge is a sensible piece of engineering (nobody wants a campaign to halt mid-send because a balance ran dry) but it changes the psychology of the bill. Your subscription is a number you approve once a month and feel. Your wallet is a number that tops itself up quietly in the background while you work. Agencies routinely describe being surprised by their real GoHighLevel spend, and this mechanism is why: nothing is hidden, but nothing asks for your attention either.

The practical advice is boring and effective. Set the recharge threshold and recharge amount deliberately rather than accepting defaults, then check the wallet ledger monthly against your plan invoice. Treat them as two separate line items in your own books, because that is what they are.

The published usage rates

These are the vendor-published US and Canada rates. Rates outside North America differ, and telecom pricing moves, so treat these as a starting point for your own math rather than a permanent quote:

• SMS: $0.00747 per segment, charged both inbound and outbound, plus carrier surcharges on top. AT&T, for example, adds $0.0035 per SMS. Those surcharges are real money: on that one carrier alone the surcharge is roughly half the base rate again, so your effective per-segment cost runs meaningfully above the sticker number. Do not budget off $0.00747 alone.
• MMS: $0.0220 outbound. Roughly three times an SMS segment, which matters if your campaigns lean on images.
• Voice: $0.0166 per minute outbound, $0.01165 per minute inbound.
• Phone numbers: $1.15 a month local, $2.15 a month toll-free. Small individually, but agencies provisioning a number per client location should multiply.
• Email: $0.675 per 1,000 sends. Email validation is separate at $2.50 per 1,000.
• A 5% markup at sub-account level applies on pass-through telecom categories: A2P registration, carrier fees, and verified caller ID.

AI pricing, and the per-sub-account multiplier

AI is priced as its own product line, and this surface changes faster than the rest of the pricing page, so verify current rates before you commit. As published, there are two seat-style plans:

• AI Employee Growth: $50 a month per enabled sub-account. Includes 1,000 Conversation AI responses and 100 Voice AI minutes a month, with overage billed at pay-per-use rates.
• AI Employee Unlimited: $97 a month per enabled sub-account. Unlimited Conversation AI, Voice AI, Content AI, and Reviews AI.

Read those four words again: per enabled sub-account. This is the trap. An agency running 10 sub-accounts on AI Employee Unlimited pays 10 times $97, which is $970 a month, more than triple the $297 subscription those sub-accounts live in. AI is not an add-on to your agency account; it is an add-on to each client account you switch it on for.

There is a pay-per-use alternative, and for light or uneven usage it is often the cheaper path: Content AI at $0.063 per image and $0.0945 per 1,000 words, Reviews AI at $0.01 per review, and workflow AI premium actions at $0.01 per execution. Run your actual expected volumes against both structures before enabling seats across the board.

Voice AI deserves a specific warning, because it is stacked rather than single-rate. You pay a $0.045 per minute voice engine rate, plus text-to-speech at anywhere from $0.015 to $0.170 a minute depending on which provider you use, plus the underlying LLM token costs. We are deliberately not quoting you a single blended per-minute figure, because the honest answer depends on your TTS provider and your conversation length, and any blended number would be a guess dressed as a fact. Price the components against your own configuration.

Rebilling, and why the agency model needs the $497 tier

If you take one thing from this guide, take this. GoHighLevel's entire appeal to agencies is the ability to resell the platform to clients under your own brand and keep the difference. The permission to do that is tiered, and the tiering is strict:

• Starter ($97): cannot rebill at all. Every message and minute your clients consume comes out of your wallet with no mechanism to pass it on.
• Unlimited ($297): rebill without markup. You can pass usage costs through to clients at cost, which stops the bleeding but earns you nothing.
• Agency Pro ($497): rebill with markup. You set the price your clients pay for usage and keep the margin.

So the business model everybody describes when they pitch you on GoHighLevel, buy usage wholesale, sell it retail, bank the spread, requires the top tier. If your plan is to run a SaaS agency on this platform, your real entry price is $497 a month, not $97. Budget accordingly, and be skeptical of any pitch that quotes you the Starter price alongside a rebilling business plan, because those two things cannot coexist.

To be fair to GoHighLevel: at $497 with unlimited sub-accounts and markup rebilling, the economics for a working agency are genuinely strong. Spread across 20 client accounts that is about $25 per client in platform cost, before whatever margin you make on usage. That is a good deal for that buyer. The problem is not the price; it is people buying it who are not that buyer.

What moved in 2026

The honest summary of the last year: the sticker price is stable, the usage bill is not. Base plan prices held steady from 2025 into 2026 at $97, $297, and $497. Underneath that, usage costs moved in several places:

• US carrier fee increases took effect in 2026, AT&T in April and Verizon in May.
• A route pricing update landed in May 2026.
• A voice engine rate change also landed in May 2026.
• A2P resubmission fees became free in February 2026, which is a small win in the other direction.

This is the structural consequence of usage-based pricing: your platform vendor can leave its own prices untouched while your bill goes up, because most of your bill is telecom pass-through that neither of you controls. Not a criticism, just a thing to plan for. If you are modelling GoHighLevel costs a year out, model the subscription as flat and the usage as drifting upward.

Who GoHighLevel genuinely suits

GoHighLevel is a powerful product and, for the buyer it was designed for, very good value. That buyer is a marketing agency managing campaigns across many client accounts, that wants one control panel for CRM, pipelines, calls, SMS, email, and automations, and that intends to resell all of it under its own brand. If that is you, the $497 tier is a legitimately cheap operating system for a real business, and the usage metering is arguably the fairest way to price a product whose costs are genuinely variable.

It suits you less well if you have one business, one audience, and no clients. The sub-account architecture, the SaaS mode, the rebilling engine, the white-label layers: none of that does anything for a single operator, and you pay for the platform that carries it.

Where Drry enters (our pitch, disclosed, and narrow)

We will be direct: these are different products for different buyers, and we are not going to pretend they compete head to head. GoHighLevel is an agency operating system aimed at marketing agencies running many client accounts. Drry is for one coach running one community. If you are an agency reselling marketing services to clients, GoHighLevel is built for exactly that and Drry is not. Go buy GoHighLevel.

The case where we are worth a look is narrower and specific: you are one coach who got sold an agency tool to run a single community. It happens constantly, usually via an affiliate video, and the result is paying for a control panel you do not need and metering a bill you do not have the volume to justify. If that is your situation, here is what we do instead:

• A genuinely free plan: 100 members, 5 GB of storage, unlimited courses and a community feed, no card required. GoHighLevel has no free tier at any price.
• Then flat $29 or $99 a month. Courses, community, funnels, and email in one place, with email included rather than metered per send. The free plan covers 100 sends a month and paid plans are unlimited, so there is no wallet to auto-recharge and no per-segment arithmetic to do.
• 0% platform fee on member paymentson every plan including free, with only Stripe's standard processing applying. Payments run through your own Stripe account.

That is the entire argument, and it is a fit argument rather than a quality one. A flat price is better than a metered one only when your volume is small and your needs are simple, which describes one coach and one community and describes almost nothing about an agency. If you have clients, we are the wrong tool and we would rather tell you that here than after you sign up. If you want the wider field, our Skool pricing guide runs the same disclosed-vendor math on a platform aimed at the same coach.