Encharge
Flow-based marketing automation for SaaS at a price HubSpot refugees recognize as sane
Encharge is a marketing automation platform aimed at SaaS companies that combines a visual flow builder, behavior-based emails triggered by product activity, user and company profiles, and advanced segmentation, sold on subscriber-count pricing that starts at $79/month and undercuts both the enterprise suites and Customer.io's entry point.
Overview
Encharge was created in 2018, in its own words, 'as an alternative to clunky unusable marketing automation tools,' and the product reads like a direct response to two frustrations: enterprise suites (Marketo, HubSpot's upper tiers) that need admins to operate, and email tools that cannot see what users do inside a product. The core loop is a drag-and-drop flow builder wired to behavior: send targeted emails when people do, or conspicuously do not do, something in your app, with events arriving via API or a Segment integration.
The feature set covers the standard SaaS lifecycle stack: user and company profiles for account-level context, segmentation on page views, product behavior, and third-party attributes, A/B testing, lead scoring, forms, broadcasts, and transactional email on the Premium tier. Native integrations reach the tools a SaaS go-to-market team actually runs: Stripe and Chargebee for billing events, HubSpot and Salesforce for CRM sync, Segment for events, plus Slack, Intercom, Typeform, Facebook, and Zapier, around 50 in total.
Encharge is a small, founder-led company (founded by Kalo Yankulov and Slav Ivanov, registered in Miami), and it competes on focus and price rather than breadth: there is no push, in-app, or SMS channel, no built-in CDP, and no compliance certifications to speak of. More than 4,000 companies have used it by the vendor's count. For a SaaS team whose lifecycle messaging is fundamentally email on product events, it delivers most of what Customer.io does at that job for roughly half the entry cost; the subscriber-tier pricing and email-send multipliers are the fine print to read first.
Best for
Bootstrapped and seed-stage SaaS teams (and the agencies serving them) who want behavior-triggered email automation on product and billing events without enterprise pricing, admin overhead, or channels they will not use.
Not the right fit for
- Teams that need multi-channel delivery; Encharge is email-only, with no push, in-app, or SMS, so mobile-first products should look at Customer.io or Dittofeed instead.
- Large-list senders on the entry tier; plans are metered by subscriber count starting at 2,000, and email sends are capped at 10x subscribers on Growth, so newsletter-heavy senders hit both walls.
- Compliance-sensitive buyers; Encharge publishes no SOC 2, ISO, or HIPAA certifications, which stops most healthcare and enterprise security reviews at the door.
- Teams wanting CRM-grade sales tooling in the same product; lead scoring and CRM sync exist, but pipeline management stays in HubSpot or Salesforce.
- Anyone needing Salesforce, HubSpot, or Segment integration on a budget; those connectors are gated to Premium, which starts at $129/month.
How it works
- 1
You connect your user data: events flow in through the API or Segment, billing events through Stripe or Chargebee integrations, and CRM records through HubSpot or Salesforce sync on Premium. Each person gets a profile with activity history, and B2B accounts roll up into company profiles.
- 2
Automation lives in the flow builder: a canvas of trigger, filter, and action steps. Triggers include events, segment entry, form submissions, and time conditions; actions send emails, apply tags, update fields, post to Slack, or call webhooks. Behavior-based emails key on what users do or fail to do, entering a trial, skipping activation, hitting a usage limit.
- 3
Segments filter on anything the platform sees: page views, product events, email engagement, and attributes from connected tools, and they drive both flow entry and one-off broadcasts. Lead scoring accumulates points from behavior so sales-assisted teams can route hot signups to the CRM.
- 4
Emails are composed in a mobile-responsive editor with no HTML required; A/B testing splits copy within flows, and free email verification screens addresses before they damage sender reputation. Transactional email, API events, event-based segmentation, and custom objects unlock on Premium.
Feature breakdown
23 features in 4 modulesFlow builder and automation
The drag-and-drop canvas that is the product's center of gravity.- Visual flow builder
- Trigger, filter, and action steps composed on a canvas; unlimited flows on every plan, including the entry tier.
- Behavior-based emails
- Emails fire when people do or don't do something in your product, with events delivered via API or the Segment integration.
- Negative-path triggers
- Flows can key on inaction (never activated, stopped logging in), which is where most trial-conversion revenue actually hides.
- Webhooks and Zapier
- Outbound webhooks and a Zapier connection extend flows to tools without native integrations.
- A/B testing
- Split-test email variants inside flows to compare conversion, not just opens.
- Lead scoring
- Point-based scoring on behavior and attributes, used to route product-qualified leads to sales via CRM sync or Slack alerts.
Data, profiles, and segmentation
User-level and account-level context for targeting.- User profiles
- A complete activity view per person: events, email engagement, attributes, and flow history.
- Company profiles
- B2B account rollups linking users to companies for account-based targeting.
- Advanced segmentation
- Segments built from page views, product behavior, feature usage, email activity, and third-party attributes, combinable without limits.
- Event-based segmentation and API events
- Premium unlocks segmenting directly on custom API events for finer behavioral targeting.
- Custom objects
- Premium-tier modeling of non-person records for teams whose data does not fit a flat contact list.
- Free email verification
- Built-in address verification at no extra charge, screening bad addresses before they hurt deliverability.
Email creation and sending
Composition, broadcasts, and transactional delivery.- Drag-and-drop email editor
- Mobile-responsive design with no HTML knowledge required, plus saved templates.
- Broadcasts
- One-off sends to segments for announcements and newsletters alongside automated flows.
- Transactional email
- Receipts, resets, and system messages sent through the same platform, on the Premium tier.
- Personalization
- Merge fields and conditional content driven by profile and event data.
- Send-volume multipliers
- Monthly sends are capped at 10x your subscriber limit on Growth and 12x on Premium, with overages billed at $100 per 100,000 emails.
Integrations and team
The connective tissue to a SaaS go-to-market stack.- Billing integrations (Stripe, Chargebee)
- Subscription events (trial started, payment failed, upgraded) become flow triggers, the highest-leverage automation source for SaaS.
- CRM sync (HubSpot, Salesforce)
- Two-way contact and attribute sync on Premium so marketing automation and sales pipeline stay consistent.
- Segment integration
- Premium-tier ingestion of your existing event stream instead of instrumenting Encharge's API separately.
- Ecommerce (Shopify, WooCommerce)
- Premium connectors for product businesses running store events through flows.
- 50+ app integrations
- Slack, Intercom, Typeform, Facebook, Google Sheets, and Zapier among roughly fifty native connections.
- Unlimited team members
- No per-seat pricing on any plan, unusual at this price point.
Use cases
4 documentedFounder of a bootstrapped B2B SaaS
Trial users get a single welcome email and then silence; nobody has time to build lifecycle marketing, and HubSpot's automation tiers cost more than the hosting bill.
A trial-conversion flow triggered on signup, branching on activation events from Stripe and the API, runs unattended; the founder gets Slack pings when a high-score lead goes quiet, all inside the $79/month tier.
Lifecycle marketer at a seed-stage startup
Onboarding, upgrade nudges, and churn-risk emails live in three disconnected tools with no view of what a user actually did in-product.
Flows keyed on behavior-based triggers consolidate the lifecycle in one canvas, and event-based segments separate activated users from tourists before any email goes out.
Marketing agency running automation for SaaS clients
Clients need Marketo-style journeys but have five-figure ARR, not five-figure software budgets.
The agency standardizes on Encharge flows per client, reusing playbooks across accounts with unlimited team seats and predictable subscriber-based pricing.
SaaS with failed-payment churn
Involuntary churn from expired cards quietly eats several points of MRR each month.
A dunning flow on Stripe payment-failed events sends escalating reminders and a Slack alert to support, recovering revenue with a one-time setup.
Pricing
from $79/mo (Growth, 2,000 subscribers, billed annually)Subscriber-count tiers with monthly email-send multipliers; two self-serve plans plus custom Enterprise above 50,000 subscribers.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | $79 annual / $99 monthly per month, at 2,000 subscribers |
Price scales with subscriber count above 2,000. |
| Premium | $129 annual / $159 monthly per month, at 2,000 subscribers |
|
| Enterprise | Custom for 50,000+ subscribers |
|
Billing notes
- Annual billing saves 20% versus monthly (Growth: $79 vs $99; Premium: $129 vs $159), as of August 2026.
- Email overages are billed at $100 per 100,000 emails beyond the plan's send multiplier; heavy broadcasters should price this in.
- Both dimensions scale: subscriber count sets the base price and also sets the send cap (10x or 12x), so a growing list raises the bill twice.
- Key integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment, ecommerce) and transactional email require Premium; budget for the higher tier if your stack includes any of them.
Value assessment: At 2,000 subscribers, $79/month for unlimited flows, behavior triggers, billing-event integrations, and unlimited seats is among the best capability-per-dollar in SaaS marketing automation; the same money buys a fraction of this from HubSpot, and Customer.io starts at $100 with a steeper learning curve. Value erodes in two places: the Premium gate on Segment/CRM/transactional (which most scaling teams eventually hit, effectively making $129 the real price) and subscriber-based metering that charges for dormant contacts unless you prune. As an email-only lifecycle engine for a sub-50k-contact SaaS, it is hard to beat on price.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Genuinely easy flow builder; the 'alternative to clunky tools' pitch holds up, and non-technical founders ship working automations in an afternoon.
- Behavior-based email on product and billing events at a bootstrapper price, the core Customer.io use case at roughly half the entry cost.
- Stripe and Chargebee integrations make dunning and upgrade flows first-class rather than API projects.
- Unlimited flows and unlimited team members on every plan, with free email verification included.
- User and company profiles give B2B teams account context that plain email tools lack.
- Founder-led and focused: the product targets SaaS lifecycle email and does not sprawl into channels or modules that dilute it.
Limitations
- Email is the only channel: no push, in-app, or SMS, so any multi-channel roadmap means a future migration.
- No published security certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA), which rules it out for compliance-driven buyers.
- Segment, HubSpot, Salesforce, ecommerce integrations, and transactional email are all Premium-gated; the advertised $79 entry excludes much of what scaling teams need.
- Send caps tied to subscriber multipliers (10x/12x) plus $100 per 100k overage can surprise high-frequency senders.
- Small team behind the product; support is responsive by reputation, but there is no enterprise support organization, SLA tier, or professional services bench.
- Company and funding details are thin on the public record, so buyers wanting vendor-durability evidence must settle for its 2018 founding date and 4,000-company usage claim.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesEncharge vs Customer.io
from $100/mo (Essentials)Encharge does the SaaS email-automation core (flows, behavior triggers, billing events) for less money and less setup; Customer.io adds real-time segmentation at scale, four more channels, objects, a CDP, and HIPAA-grade compliance for a higher floor. Choose Encharge when email on product events is the whole requirement; choose Customer.io when channels, data volume, or a security review will decide the deal.
Full Encharge vs Customer.io comparisonEncharge vs Userlist
from $149/mo (Basic, up to 10,000 users)Both serve B2B SaaS lifecycle email; Userlist's edge is native account modeling (many-to-many user-company relationships, company-triggered campaigns) and white-glove onboarding, while Encharge's is a cheaper entry point, a slicker flow canvas, and broader integrations like Chargebee and Facebook. Account-structure-heavy products lean Userlist; price-sensitive teams with simpler account needs lean Encharge.
Full Encharge vs Userlist comparisonEncharge vs Bento
from $29/mo (up to 5,000 active users, unlimited marketing sends)Bento bundles marketing plus transactional email with active-user pricing from $29/month and an obsessive deliverability culture; Encharge counters with a more conventional marketing-automation feature set: lead scoring, CRM sync, company profiles, and a more polished flow builder. Deliverability-first senders and lean operators pick Bento; teams wanting classic SaaS marketing-automation ergonomics pick Encharge.
Full Encharge vs Bento comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- First flows on imported contacts run the same day; wiring product events via API or Segment and billing events via Stripe typically takes a few hours to a few days of developer time.
- Learning curve
- Low; the flow builder is the gentlest in this category, and most teams operate it without a dedicated ops person.
- Onboarding
- Self-serve with live chat on Growth and a Slack channel on Premium; Enterprise adds free onboarding and a dedicated account manager.
- Migration notes
- Inbound migration is mostly CSV import plus re-instrumenting events; Segment users on Premium can re-point the stream. Outbound, contacts export cleanly but flow logic rebuilds by hand, standard for the category.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web appREST API
- API
- API for events, contacts, and attributes; API events and event-based segmentation are Premium features; outbound webhooks on all plans.
- Compliance
- GDPR-aligned practices (self-described); no published SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA certification
- Data residency
- Not publicly specified.
- SSO
- Not publicly advertised.
- Security notes
- Buyers with formal security requirements should request documentation directly; the public site does not carry a trust or compliance page comparable to enterprise-oriented rivals.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Live chat (all plans)Slack support channel (Premium)Dedicated account manager (Enterprise)
- Documentation
- Help documentation plus an unusually deep marketing blog with teardown-style guides that double as product education.
- Community
- No formal user community; support is vendor-direct and founder-adjacent.
Company
- Founded
- 2018
- Headquarters
- Miami, Florida, US (registered address)
- Ownership
- Privately held, founder-led
- Founders
- Kalo Yankulov (co-founder, marketing), Slav Ivanov (co-founder, product)
- Employees
- Not disclosed; small founder-led team
- Funding
- Not disclosed.
Timeline
- 2018Founded by Kalo Yankulov and Slav Ivanov as an alternative to hard-to-use marketing automation platforms.
- 2020Public launch; early traction among bootstrapped SaaS companies priced out of enterprise automation suites.
- 2021Ranked first for Marketing Automation Leader on GetApp with a 100/100 data-driven score.
- 2023Premium-tier depth grows: transactional email, custom objects, and event-based segmentation round out the SaaS feature set.
- 2026Reports more than 4,000 companies have used the platform, sending hundreds of millions of messages.
Integrations
- Stripe
- Chargebee
- HubSpot (Premium)
- Salesforce (Premium)
- Segment (Premium)
- Shopify and WooCommerce (Premium)
- Intercom
- Slack
- Typeform
- Google Sheets
- Zapier and webhooks
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Encharge?
Encharge is a marketing automation platform for SaaS companies built around a visual flow builder and behavior-based emails: messages triggered by what users do, or fail to do, in your product. It covers segmentation, user and company profiles, lead scoring, broadcasts, A/B testing, and, on Premium, transactional email.
How much does Encharge cost?
Growth starts at $79/month billed annually ($99 monthly) for 2,000 subscribers, and Premium at $129/month annually ($159 monthly) at the same subscriber count. Prices scale with list size, Enterprise covers 50,000+ subscribers, and there is a 14-day free trial with no free plan.
What is the difference between Encharge Growth and Premium?
Growth includes the flow builder, behavior emails, segmentation, and Stripe, Chargebee, Zapier, and webhook integrations with sends capped at 10x subscribers. Premium raises sends to 12x and adds transactional email, API events, event-based segmentation, custom objects, and the HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment, Shopify, and WooCommerce integrations.
Does Encharge have email send limits?
Yes. Monthly sends are capped at 10x your subscriber limit on Growth and 12x on Premium; beyond that, overages bill at $100 per 100,000 emails. Teams sending frequent broadcasts to their full list should do this math before choosing a tier.
Can Encharge send transactional email?
On the Premium plan, yes: receipts, password resets, and system notifications can run through the same platform as marketing flows. Growth-tier users need a separate transactional provider.
Does Encharge integrate with Stripe?
Yes, natively and on every plan. Stripe (and Chargebee) subscription events such as trial starts, failed payments, and upgrades can trigger flows directly, which makes dunning and expansion campaigns a configuration task rather than an engineering project.
Is there a free plan?
No. Encharge offers a 14-day free trial on both self-serve plans but no permanent free tier, and pricing starts at $79/month on annual billing.
Is Encharge SOC 2 or HIPAA compliant?
Encharge does not publish SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA certifications. Teams subject to formal security or healthcare compliance reviews should request documentation from the vendor directly, or consider a certified alternative like Customer.io.
Who is behind Encharge?
Encharge was founded in 2018 by Kalo Yankulov and Slav Ivanov and remains a small, privately held, founder-led company registered in Miami, Florida. The vendor reports more than 4,000 companies have used the platform.
Encharge or Customer.io for a SaaS startup?
If your lifecycle messaging is email triggered by product and billing events, Encharge does that job well from $79/month with an easier learning curve. Customer.io justifies its $100+ entry when you need push, in-app, SMS, real-time segmentation at scale, compliance certifications, or CDP-grade data routing.
Editorial verdict
Encharge is the pragmatic pick for SaaS lifecycle email: the flow builder is genuinely pleasant, behavior and billing-event triggers cover the automations that actually move SaaS revenue, and the pricing respects a bootstrapper's budget. Its boundaries are just as clear: one channel, no compliance certifications, and a Premium gate in front of the integrations most scaling stacks require, which makes $129/month the realistic price for serious use. Buy it as a focused email-automation engine you may eventually outgrow, not as a platform bet; at this price, that is a fair trade.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.