One email campaign a month on Free: why we built it that way
I got an email last month from a plumber in Bristol. He'd been using Konnect for three weeks on the Free plan and asked a single question: 'Why can I only send one campaign a month?' Not angry. Genuinely curious. That question made me realise we'd never explained the thinking behind that choice.
The solopreneur's real calendar
When we set out to build Konnect, we didn't start with enterprise use cases or team hierarchies. We started with how a solo operator actually works. A mortgage broker with 47 clients. A recruiter managing a network of candidates. A trades person who needs to reach out to past customers for repeat work.
These people don't live on their email client. They live on their phone. They're not crafting ten campaigns a week; they're thinking about their pipeline between calls and site visits. The plumber wasn't asking for unlimited campaigns. He was asking whether one a month made sense for how he actually works.
It does. Most solo operators we spoke to during product development touched base with their clients monthly or quarterly. A builder might re-engage past customers every few months. A consultant might circle back to prospects once a month. The rhythm of a solopreneur's outreach is fundamentally different from a marketing department's.
The problem with 'unlimited everything'
You see a lot of free CRM tiers that claim unlimited contacts, unlimited campaigns, unlimited messages. They're betting you'll hit a friction point and upgrade. That's fine for some tools, but it bothered us.
If you're a solo operator and you've got Konnect on your phone, you're making real client decisions. You're considering whether to push a campaign or wait. You're thinking about your message. You're not drowning in bulk sends. Giving you unlimited campaigns on the Free plan would actually make the product less useful, not more. You'd lose that intentionality.
The constraint of one campaign a month is a honest one. It says: this plan is for you to manage your core list, log your calls and meetings, and stay in touch at a human pace. You're not running a marketing factory. You're running a business where relationships matter.
What one campaign actually covers
When we designed the campaign feature for Konnect, we made it simple. You pick your list, you write a message (or use one of our starter templates), and you send it to your clients or prospects. That's it. No segmentation complexity. No A/B testing setup. No email design builder. Just communication.
One monthly campaign is enough to say: 'I'm running a discount this month.' Or: 'Here's what we've been working on.' Or: 'Let's catch up, I haven't heard from you in a while.' It's the kind of outreach that a solo operator actually does, and it actually works. We've watched customers use that monthly slot to reconnect with cold leads, follow up on quotes, or remind past clients they exist.
If you're on the Pro plan (£24.99 a month or £199.99 a year), you get five campaigns. If you're on Plus (£39.99 a month or £349.99 a year), you get twenty. The step up exists because your practice changes once you've got team members or you're managing a larger pipeline. But on Free, one campaign a month isn't a limitation. It's a feature.
Why we didn't do the usual freeware trap
Plenty of free CRM tools work like this: give you almost everything, restrict one random thing, hope you get frustrated and pay. We could have done that with campaigns. We could have given you five and throttled them after that, or charged you per send, or made the interface clunky until you upgraded.
We didn't, because that's not how we think about Free. It's a real plan for a real use case. You get a genuine mobile CRM: your client list, your activity log, your call history, a business card scanner (on Plus+), voice-to-note (on Plus+), and yes, one email campaign a month. You can actually run a business on it. Thousands of freelancers, consultants, and small-team operators do.
The restriction isn't there to annoy you into upgrading. It's there because it matches how you work. And if you outgrow it, the upgrade path is clear. You move to Pro or Plus, your data moves with you, and you get more campaigns because your business has changed.
The Bristol plumber's answer
I wrote back to the plumber and explained this. He replied a week later: he'd used his monthly campaign to reach out to fifteen past customers about a new service offering, got three qualified leads, and was now on the Pro plan so he could touch base more often. Not because he needed to, but because his business had shifted.
That's the story we're always looking for. Not the upgrade itself, but the moment when a constraint becomes a real decision to invest in your business tools because they're actually working.
The email campaign limit isn't arbitrary. It's based on how solopreneurs and small teams actually sell. One a month is your baseline. If you need more, we've built something worth paying for.
The next time you're evaluating a Free plan, ask yourself: is this genuinely useful for my business right now, or is it just a bait-and-switch? If Konnect's Free tier sounds like it fits how you actually work, you'll know it's the right fit.