GoHighLevel usage fees explained: what adds to your bill

The agency wallet is a prepaid balance. HighLevel charges your card to load it, and every usage-based service deducts from it: phone, email, email validation, AI, address autocomplete and premium workflow actions. It doesn't pay your subscription. When the balance drops under your threshold, it charges your card again for the recharge amount.

That's why people see a random $20 charge the day they turn on texting. HighLevel's own phone billing FAQ answers exactly that one: the wallet auto-recharged because the balance dropped below the threshold. It's prepaid credit, and you can see every charge by product and sub-account under Settings > Billing > Wallet & Transactions.

Two things catch people out. Usage is billed during the free trial too. And if the wallet goes negative, HighLevel pauses those services until a payment goes through, so a declined card can stop a client's texts mid-campaign.

US and Canada rates in USD. Other countries have their own rate sheets attached to HighLevel's phone pricing guide, and the in-app Wallet Pricing page (a Labs toggle under Settings > Labs) lists every wallet-billed product for 27 countries.

A one-segment text to a Verizon number is $0.00747 plus the $0.0050 carrier fee, so about 1.25 cents. Replies cost the same $0.00747 because inbound texts are billed too, plus an inbound carrier fee.

Segments are where the bill doubles quietly. 160 plain characters is one segment and 161 is two. Add a single emoji and the whole message switches to Unicode, where a segment is only 70 characters. A friendly 140-character text with a smiley at the end is now two segments.

You also pay for every text HighLevel hands to the carrier, delivered or not, and HighLevel doesn't refund undelivered ones. Texting a dirty list costs real money. Number Validation ($0.005 per check) can skip invalid numbers before the send.

Outbound calls are $0.0166 a minute and inbound calls answered in the app are $0.01165 a minute, billed in full minutes, so a 61-second call is two. If the number forwards to someone's cell, both legs are billed, which is $0.02 a minute.

The sneaky one is call recording storage. It's $0.0005 per minute per month for every recording you keep, old ones included, billed daily per sub-account. Set auto-delete under Settings > Phone Numbers > Advanced Settings > Voice Calls > Call Recording if nobody listens back to old calls.

HighLevel also starts a conference call on every outgoing call so transfers are instant, which is why conference charges show up even when you never transferred anyone. If you'd rather keep a client's existing number, see Use your own phone number.

$0.675 per 1,000 emails on every plan, so a 10,000-person newsletter is $6.75. HighLevel counts incoming and outgoing email, including CC and BCC, and forwards are billed at the same rate. Email validation is extra at $2.50 per 1,000.

New sub-accounts also ramp up: 250 emails on day one, up to 10,000 on day seven, then 25,000 a day on the shared domain. That's a sending limit, not a spend limit, but it does stop a brand-new account from blasting your whole list on day one.

To text US numbers from a local number you register a brand and campaign. The one-time bundle is $22.50 for Sole Proprietor or Low Volume and $64 for High Volume, which includes a $3 fast-track fee. Then each campaign has a monthly fee from $1.50 to $10.50 depending on the type.

Both start the moment you submit, approved or not. Resubmitting a rejected campaign is free since February 1, 2026. If a client churns, delete their campaign or the monthly fee keeps coming.

Without a plan, AI agents are pay per use: Voice AI by the minute, Conversation AI by tokens, Reviews AI at a cent per reply. AI Employee is a monthly plan per sub-account that includes allowances. When an allowance runs out, the AI pauses by default unless you turn on Extra Usage in AI Suite.

Do the math per client before buying it. 100 minutes of Voice AI on a $0.10 model is $10 pay per use, so Growth at $50 only makes sense if the client also uses a lot of Conversation AI or reviews. Unlimited at $97 breaks even around 970 voice minutes a month on that same model. Phone charges are on top on every plan.

One that surprises people: Ask AI and AI Studio are free for you as an agency user, but a client's own team using them inside their sub-account is billed pay per use unless that sub-account has an AI Employee plan. That's the "I didn't know Ask AI cost money" thread on Reddit.

Inbound and custom webhooks, Google Sheets, Slack, Marketplace apps and LC apps inside a workflow. Each sub-account gets 100 free runs for life, then they're $0.01 each. Workflow Pro bundles bring that down: $10 a month for 10,000, $25 for 30,000 or $50 for 65,000, per sub-account. The full breakdown is in GoHighLevel workflows.

The part to respect: workflows never stop when the allowance runs out. They keep going and bill the overage. On Reddit someone ran a workflow with six premium iMessage app actions on 83,000 contacts and reported a $5,500 bill, with only 56 messages delivered. They thought their $50 recharge setting would protect them. It won't, because that number is a top-up size.

Marketplace apps can also charge their own per-use price on top. Check the price on the action before you add it, and test a new workflow on a handful of contacts before you point it at a big list.

$10 a month per WhatsApp-enabled sub-account, plus Meta's per-message rate. Since October 1, 2026 HighLevel dropped its 5% processing fee, so you pay Meta's published rate exactly: a US marketing message went from $0.0263 to $0.0250.

The same day, two free categories became billable. Free-form service replies are charged after the first 1,000 per phone number each month, and utility messages inside an open 24-hour window are charged too. Conversations that start from a Click to WhatsApp ad stay free for 72 hours, and customers calling the business on WhatsApp is free.

Honestly, yes, if you leave the defaults. Auto recharge can't be turned off, and the recharge amount isn't a ceiling. HighLevel can also raise it for you: with Smart Adjustment on (it shows as Auto-update), if the same amount triggers more than three times in seven days it moves up a level, for example $200 to $500. You can turn that part off from the three-dot menu next to the auto recharge settings.

AI spending limits are off by default too, and when you do set one, the default behaviour is to keep the AI running and just email you. You have to pick Block AI at the limit for it to actually stop.

There's no single master spend cap across everything as of October 31, 2026. Premium workflow actions in particular have no stop. So you stack the controls below, and put each client on rebilling so their card carries their usage.

HighLevel always charges your agency wallet first. With rebilling on, your Stripe charges the client's card to fill their own sub-account wallet, so their usage is covered by them. The client needs a card on file.

What you can rebill depends on your plan. Unlimited ($297) rebills phone and email at cost. Founder ($497) adds your own markup and is required to rebill AI Employee. Premium workflow actions default to 1.2x and WhatsApp to 1.05x, and you change those per product. For Voice AI and Conversation AI you can charge a fixed rate per minute or per message, so the client sees the same price every month while you absorb the token swings.

One small thing: when rebilling is on, A2P fees and carrier fees get a fixed 5% added at the sub-account level. With rebilling off, you pay the base rate. I'm on the $497 plan because Hexona resells with its own pricing, but for most people starting out, rebilling at cost on $297 is enough to stop usage eating your margin. The markup side is in SaaS mode guide.

It depends completely on the client, so here's a worked example you can swap your own numbers into. One local number, one standard A2P campaign, 500 texts out and 300 in (Verizon fees), 2,000 emails and 200 minutes of inbound calls.

HighLevel posts every rate change on its changelog. These are the ones that touch the numbers on this page.