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When GetResponse fees climb with every new contact and the help desk goes quiet, the cost of staying often outweighs the effort of moving.
by Isabella Torres · Last updated: 2026-05-31Most teams do not leave GetResponse because of one big problem. They leave because of a slow accumulation of small ones: a bill that grows every time the list does, a builder that takes three clicks to do one job, and a support reply that lands two days late. This guide walks through exactly how to move, what comes with you, and how to keep every contact and automation intact.
The good news is that switching is far less dramatic than it sounds. With a clean export and a hands-on import, most senders are up and running in an afternoon, not a quarter.
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Key Takeaways
GetResponse is a capable platform, and for some senders it is the right fit. But three patterns push people toward the exit, and they tend to show up together as a list grows and a team gets busier.
Cost at scale. GetResponse prices by contact count, so the bill climbs every time you add subscribers, even the ones who never open. For a list that is growing the way you want it to, that creates a strange penalty: success costs more. Teams switching to Mailsoftly usually do the math on twelve months of projected list growth and realize the line keeps bending up. Flat, tier-based pricing removes that anxiety because you know what next quarter costs before you get there.
Complexity. GetResponse has accumulated funnels, webinars, conversion tools, and a sprawling automation canvas. If you actually use all of it, great. If you mostly send newsletters and a welcome sequence, you are paying for surface area you never touch, and the interface makes simple jobs feel heavier than they are. Many marketers want the ninety percent of features they use every week to be fast, not a buffet they navigate around.
Support gaps. When a campaign is stuck and a send window is closing, a slow or templated support reply is the most expensive thing a platform can hand you. The single most common reason teams cite for moving is wanting a real human who answers quickly and actually solves the problem, not a chatbot that loops you back to a help article.
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The biggest fear about any migration is loss: losing subscribers, losing the segments you spent months refining, losing automations that took an afternoon to build and a year to tune. In practice, almost everything that matters comes across. Here is what transfers and how.
The one thing worth doing before you export is a quick cleanup. A migration is the perfect moment to drop contacts who have not opened anything in a year. You move a healthier list, you protect your deliverability from day one, and on flat pricing you are not paying to carry dead weight anyway.
Here is the full process, start to finish. You can do every step yourself, or hand the whole thing to the migration team and review the result. Either way, the order is the same.
Inside GetResponse, open your contacts area and export your lists to CSV. Include every custom field, tag, and the subscription date so nothing gets stranded. If you keep separate lists for different products or regions, export them individually and label each file clearly. This single CSV set is the backbone of the whole move, so take a minute to confirm it opens cleanly and the columns line up before you go further.
Upload your CSV files and map the columns to the right fields. First name maps to first name, the loyalty tier field maps to a custom field, and so on. The importer preserves opt-in status, so unsubscribed and bounced contacts stay out of your sends. If a field does not have an obvious home, you can create a new custom field on the spot rather than dropping the data.
You do not have to do steps 1 through 4 alone. The migration team will take your GetResponse export, map every field, recreate your segments, rebuild your key automations, and run a deliverability check before your first send. Most accounts are fully migrated in one to two hours of hands-on work.
Before a single campaign goes out, authenticate your sending domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. This tells inbox providers your mail is legitimate and keeps it out of the spam folder. Then send a few test emails to seed addresses across the major providers and confirm they land in the primary inbox. Skipping this step is the one mistake that turns a smooth migration into a deliverability scare, so it is worth the extra fifteen minutes.
Recreate your welcome series, abandoned-flow follow-ups, and re-engagement sequences using the automation builder. Match the triggers and the delays to what you ran in GetResponse, then run each flow with a test contact to confirm the timing and branching behave. Turn the live versions on only after you have watched a test contact move through every step. This is the step the migration team handles for most accounts, which is why complex senders still finish in an afternoon.
The clearest way to weigh the move is to look at the three things that actually drive the decision: what you pay, how you get help, and how fast you can get a campaign out the door. Mailsoftly pricing below is verified (as of 2026-04-15). GetResponse plans are sold by contact count and change with promotions, so rather than guess at numbers, the table focuses on the model and the experience.
| What matters | GetResponse | Mailsoftly |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Scales with contact count | Flat tiers, predictable bill |
| Free plan | Limited free option | Free: 500 contacts, 2,000 emails/mo |
| Entry paid tier | Varies by list size | Basic: $39/mo annual, 5,000 contacts |
| Support | Tiered, can be slow | Human support, fast replies |
| Migration | Self-serve | Free hands-on, done for you |
| Ease of use | Feature-heavy, steeper learning | Streamlined for everyday sends |
For the full ladder of plans and contact tiers, the Mailsoftly pricing page lays out every option from Free through Enterprise. The headline numbers worth remembering: the Free plan covers 500 contacts and 2,000 emails per month with no credit card, Basic runs $39 per month on annual billing for 5,000 contacts, Business is $79 per month annual for 15,000 contacts, and Premium is $159 per month annual for 30,000 contacts. Enterprise is custom for unlimited sending. Because those tiers are flat, the price you sign up at is the price you keep until you choose to move up.
A few questions come up in almost every migration conversation. Settling them up front removes most of the hesitation.
Do I have to cancel GetResponse before I move? No. Keep both accounts active during the switch. Migrate your data, verify deliverability, run a test campaign or two, and only cancel GetResponse once you are confident everything sends correctly. Running in parallel for a short window is the safest path and costs you nothing extra in effort.
Will my reporting history come across? Open and click history from past GetResponse campaigns stays in GetResponse, which is normal for any platform move. What matters going forward, contacts, segments, and engagement signals, starts fresh and clean on the new side, which is often healthier than dragging years of noisy data along.
What about my signup forms? Recreate your forms and embed the new code on your site, or point existing forms at the new list. The migration team can help you swap these so there is no gap in new subscriber capture during the transition.
The migration is the start, not the finish. A focused first week locks in deliverability and proves the move was worth it.
By the end of that week, you will have sent live campaigns, confirmed inbox placement, and watched your automations run. At that point, canceling GetResponse is just housekeeping.
For the broader landscape, see our full comparison of best email marketing services covering every major platform.
Looking for a simpler Getresponse alternative? See why teams switch to Mailsoftly as a Getresponse alternative — free hands-on migration in 1-2 hours, no contracts, real human support.
For most teams, the hands-on work takes one to two hours, and the account is fully live the same day. A larger list with many complex automations may stretch across a day or two, but the heavy lifting, exporting, mapping, importing, and deliverability checks, is usually done in a single working session with the migration team alongside you.
No. Your contacts, custom fields, tags, and opt-in status all transfer through the export and import. Segments are recreated from the same underlying data, and automations are rebuilt step by step so the triggers and timing match what you ran before. The migration team tests each flow with a sample contact before it goes live, so nothing silently breaks.
The migration itself is free, including the hands-on help. You can start on the Free plan with 500 contacts and 2,000 emails per month and no credit card, then move to a paid tier only when your list needs it. Paid plans start at $39 per month on annual billing for 5,000 contacts, so most teams test the full experience before they pay anything.
Yes, and it is the recommended approach. Keep both accounts active until you have migrated your data, verified deliverability, and sent a couple of live campaigns successfully. Only then cancel GetResponse. Running in parallel for a short window removes all risk of a gap in your sending.
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