Campaign Refinery

Campaign Refinery is an email platform from Campaign Refinery LLC that puts list quality and inbox placement at the center of everything else. Its homepage headline is "Publish, grow, and operate an audience you own", and the product covers hosted newsletters, campaigns, automation, analytics and what it calls "deliverability-first infrastructure", plus "deep MCP support". The footer describes it as "The email operating platform for serious newsletter businesses." Where most platforms treat list cleaning as a side tool, Campaign Refinery starts there: a new customer usually connects an existing email service provider, has the list scanned and cleaned, and then decides whether to keep sending from the old provider or move sending into Campaign Refinery.

List cleaning and protection

The cleaning goes beyond checking whether an address exists. The site lists invalid and disposable email detection, spam trap detection, bot and fake signup detection, known complainer detection and engagement-based reputation scoring, and it says it detects seed accounts and sophisticated spam traps as well. Three pieces keep a list clean after the first pass. Real-time protection verifies new subscribers the moment they join, so bad addresses never enter the list. Automatic re-cleaning rescans the whole list every 90 days, because, as the site puts it, "Lists decay." And the Deliverability Health Score gives "a letter grade from A to F with a full breakdown of what's in your list and what's hurting you", plus a branded report a sender can share with a team. The sample report on the homepage breaks results into spam traps removed, bots detected, invalid addresses and complainers flagged.

The first clean is free. The FAQ says Campaign Refinery cleans every contact in the connected ESP account at onboarding, up to 10,000: a list of 500 gets 500 cleaned, a list of 15,000 gets the first 10,000. Anything beyond that uses credit-based pricing, which the site calls 40-67% lower than competitors, with no subscription, and the FAQ adds that "BYO credits never expire." There is an entry condition: the account needs an active ESP account with sending history, and the company reserves the right to decline accounts that do not meet its activity guidelines.

For list cleaning the FAQ names native API integrations with Kit, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Beehiiv and Go High Level. Connecting one takes "60 seconds", and the contacts are imported automatically.

The campaign platform

Every plan includes the full sending platform at no extra charge. The pricing block is blunt: "Every customer gets full access. Not a trial. Not a limited version. The whole thing." That platform includes unlimited email sends ("No volume caps, ever"), unlimited active contacts ("Your list size is never penalized"), a visual automation builder for drip sequences, triggers and flows, full campaign management with templates, scheduling and sending, real-time analytics for opens, clicks, revenue and engagement, subject line split testing, and advanced segmentation using behavioral and data-driven filters.

The catch that makes the $0 price possible is the sending route. The free platform sends through the customer's own relay: Campaign Refinery supports Mailgun, SendGrid and Amazon SES through multi-relay SMTP support. The site frames it as optional and gradual: a sender can clean the list and keep sending from the current ESP, then connect a Mailgun, SendGrid or Amazon SES account and send through Campaign Refinery "when you're ready", with "No pressure, no timeline." The relay account and its sending costs sit with the customer.

Three tiers

The homepage sets out three ways to work with the company.

Bring Your Own, "Clean lists. Your infrastructure.", is from $0 to start. The sender connects an ESP, gets the first 10,000 contacts cleaned free with a health score, and keeps sending from that ESP or routes mail through Campaign Refinery on their own relay.

Managed Infrastructure, marked most popular, is from $299/mo. The sender applies, completes an onboarding call, and moves onto Campaign Refinery's infrastructure with managed sending IPs. The tier adds volume discounts, priority support and a scale path as the list grows. Managed and Done For You customers move to Campaign Refinery's infrastructure as part of onboarding.

Done For You is for senders with steady lead flow. The applicant submits lead volume, audience profile and sending goals, and the company selects offers, builds automation flows and manages deliverability. It is paid on a CPM plus a revenue split after costs, with no upfront fees and a minimum daily lead volume.

Results the company claims

The homepage publishes its own benchmarks, attributed to its customer base. It gives an average open rate above 40% against an industry average of about 21%, and a 37% lift after cleaning, to about 29%, "over the industry baseline of ~21%, based on average Campaign Refinery customer results." It puts complaint rates for its customers below 0.05%, against about 0.5% on a typical uncleaned list, and warns that "A 0.1% complaint rate is enough to get you blacklisted." Bounce rates are given as below 0.3%, against 2-5% on an uncleaned list and a 2% risk threshold. The blog adds that the company has "sent billions of emails for our customers". A footer note says results come from real customers but are not guarantees.

Customer quotes back this up: GymLaunch credits the platform with taking email "from $0 to $3.6M in our first 12 months", The Email Experience reports stats that "increased 4x immediately after switching", and WebinarKit says "Not inboxing is a thing of the past."

Data, support and resources

On data the FAQ says: "Your data is never sold, shared, or used for any purpose other than cleaning. Period." The site links documentation, a support page, a partner program, a refund policy and an acceptable use policy. Its blog runs long deliverability guides, from SPF, DKIM and DMARC to open source and self-hosted email, plus how-tos for cleaning Klaviyo and Kit lists and setting up Go High Level webhooks, and a free tools section sits in the main menu.

Who it suits

Campaign Refinery suits a newsletter business or creator whose revenue depends on landing in the inbox, and who has a list on Kit, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Beehiiv or Go High Level that has not been cleaned in a while. The free clean up to 10,000 contacts and the $0 platform make it cheap to try, and a sender comfortable running a Mailgun, SendGrid or Amazon SES account gets unlimited sends and contacts without a platform fee. A larger sender who would rather not run a relay can apply for Managed Infrastructure, and a lead-generation business can hand the whole program over through Done For You.

It is a weaker fit for a brand-new sender with no ESP history, since the free cleaning requires sending history, and for anyone who wants a hosted sending service at $0 without setting up a relay account.