Email marketing: the advertised price is a floor, and the ceiling behaves differently everywhere

Almost every email platform prices by the number of people on your list, which makes the advertised figure a starting point rather than a price. MailerLite says so on the card, quoting its paid tiers from five hundred subscribers and noting that they scale. Mailchimp bands explicitly, with its entry tiers priced for a nought-to-five-hundred contact band. The number you compare is therefore the number paid by the smallest customer the platform has, and your bill depends on a curve that is rarely drawn anywhere.

Kit's is drawn, because our reading of it drove the pricing slider through its whole range rather than reading the card. Its creator tier starts near a thousand subscribers and more than triples by ten thousand, then keeps climbing through fifteen, twenty, twenty-five and thirty-five thousand. Nothing about that is unreasonable — sending to more people costs more — but it means a comparison of entry prices between two platforms is a comparison of the two cheapest points on two different curves, and the curves are not parallel.

The entry figures themselves still tell you something, so here they are for the platforms we can price in every market we publish: Brevo starts at £6 a month, Constant Contact at £6, and GetResponse at £13. Treat each as the price for a small list and ask the platform what it becomes at the size you expect in a year, which is a question their sales pages answer readily and their pricing cards do not.

The second variable matters more than most buyers realise, and it is what happens when you cross a limit. Mailchimp's free tier stops sending when you exceed its contact or send allowance. Constant Contact does the opposite: exceeding your send allowance does not pause anything, it adds a fraction of a penny per extra send to the bill. One fails closed and one fails open, and neither is wrong — but the first can silently halt a campaign and the second can silently enlarge an invoice. Which of those you would rather explain afterwards is a genuine product difference, and it is decided long before you hit the ceiling.

The third variable is how deep the free tier goes, and in this category the word covers an unusually wide range. Kit's free plan runs to ten thousand subscribers, which is the deepest we have compiled in email and four times beehiiv's two and a half thousand, though it excludes automations and sequences. MailerLite's free plan stops at two hundred and fifty subscribers with a monthly send cap. Between those two, 'has a free tier' spans two orders of magnitude and tells you nothing on its own.

Then there is a pricing model that is not a subscription at all. Substack charges nothing to publish at any subscriber count — its own words are that it is free no matter how many subscribers you have — and takes a tenth of each paid transaction instead, on top of payment processing and a recurring-billing fee. beehiiv aims directly at that arrangement by taking no platform share at all and charging a subscription instead, leaving you only the payment processor's percentage and per-transaction fee. Those two are not competing on price in any sense a table can capture: one is free until you earn and expensive thereafter, the other is a fixed cost that never scales with revenue.

So the comparison depends on whether you charge readers. If you do not, a revenue share costs nothing and the subscription platforms are competing on list-size curves and features. If you do, the crossover is a straightforward calculation: a tenth of your subscription revenue against the monthly fee of a platform that takes nothing, and the answer flips at a revenue figure rather than a subscriber count. A large free list on a revenue-share platform is genuinely free; a small paying list on one can cost more than a subscription would.

One caution about the state of our own coverage here. Nine of the fourteen records we file under email marketing carry no captured pricing at all, so several well-known platforms are absent from our comparisons rather than present with estimates. And three of the platforms discussed above are ones we hold affiliate relationships with, which is disclosed below and changes nothing about the figures, since every price here resolves from a dated record rather than being chosen.

The practical sequence, then. Estimate the list size you expect in twelve months rather than the one you have. Get the price at that size, not the card price. Ask what happens when you exceed a limit, and prefer the failure mode you can live with. And if readers will pay you, run the revenue-share arithmetic before assuming the free platform is the cheap one.