Email · Buyer’s Guide
Nearly every major platform repriced in the last eighteen months, and almost all of it went one direction. Here’s what each one now costs at the sizes that matter, and which limits you’ll actually hit.
Something happened to email marketing pricing between late 2024 and early 2026, and it happened almost everywhere at once. Klaviyo started charging for every profile including unsubscribed ones. ActiveCampaign began billing new accounts for all contacts rather than active ones. Kit raised prices, in some cases by a multiple. MailerLite cut its free tier from a thousand subscribers to five hundred. And in January 2026, Mailchimp reduced its once-famously generous free plan to 250 contacts.
None of these were announced as price rises. They were changes to what counts as a billable contact, which is a considerably more effective way of raising prices because it doesn’t appear on the pricing page at all.
So this guide is organised around the thing that actually determines your bill: the billing model. Once you understand whether a platform charges by contacts, by sends, or by some hybrid, the right choice for your situation becomes reasonably obvious.
The Three Billing Models This is the whole decision
Contact-based. You pay for how many people are on your list, regardless of whether you email them. Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite and Kit all work this way. The trap is obvious once stated: a list of 40,000 people where you actively email 8,000 costs the same as one where you email all 40,000. Dormant subscribers are pure cost.
Send-based. You pay for volume dispatched, and contact storage is free or nearly so. Brevo is the significant example, offering unlimited contact storage on every plan including free, with pricing driven by monthly email volume. For a business with a large list and infrequent sends — a seasonal retailer, a membership organisation, an events business — this model can be several times cheaper than contact-based pricing for identical activity.
Hybrid and platform-specific. Beehiiv and Kit price around newsletter publishing, with the monetisation tooling as much of the product as the sending. Klaviyo bundles SMS credits alongside email.
Work out which model suits your list shape before comparing prices, because a platform that’s cheap at one shape is expensive at another.
What Each One Costs, At the Sizes That Matter Published tiers, August 2026
Comparing entry prices is close to useless, because every platform is cheap at 500 contacts and the divergence appears as you grow. Here’s the shape of it using figures published across 2026, with the caveat that promotional introductory pricing on several platforms increases after the first period — check what you’re renewing at, not what you’re joining at.
Mailchimp against Klaviyo is the clearest comparison because they’re direct competitors at similar tiers. Published comparisons put Mailchimp at roughly $13 for 500 contacts against Klaviyo’s $20; $75 versus $100 at 5,000; $110 versus $150 at 10,000; and $385 versus $720 at 50,000. The gap widens sharply at scale, and Klaviyo’s decision to bill for unsubscribed profiles makes the real difference larger than the sticker figures suggest.
MailerLite is consistently the value pick in this bracket, at around $10–$15 a month for 1,000 subscribers on its Growing Business plan and roughly $73 at 10,000, with landing pages, automation and a website builder included at those prices. Worth knowing: MailerLite manually reviews every signup and rejections are not uncommon, which is annoying if you’re rejected and a meaningful part of why their deliverability reputation is good.
Brevo starts around $9 a month and prices on send volume with unlimited contacts on every tier, free plan included. The free tier allows 300 emails a day with unlimited contact storage.
Kit retains the most generous free plan for creators — up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts — though the September 2025 price restructuring meant some existing users saw substantial increases on paid tiers.
Beehiiv is free up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends, with paid tiers starting around $43 a month billed annually. It is built for newsletter publishing specifically: referral programmes, an ad network, paid subscriptions and web hosting are core rather than bolted on.
ActiveCampaign starts around $15 a month and remains the strongest automation builder available below the enterprise tier, with the November 2025 caveat that new accounts are billed on all contacts.
Deliverability Is Not a Platform Feature The most misunderstood thing in email
Every platform advertises deliverability. Almost none of it is theirs to give.
What the platform controls: shared IP reputation, whether it lets spammers onto the network, feedback loop processing, and the technical quality of its sending infrastructure. That matters, but it’s a hygiene factor rather than a differentiator among reputable providers.
What you control, and what actually determines inbox placement: your domain reputation, your authentication setup, your complaint rate, your list quality, and your engagement rates. A platform cannot make an unengaged list deliver well. It also cannot save you from the requirements that took effect across the industry from 2024 onward.
The bulk sender rules, which are now enforced
Google and Yahoo announced requirements in October 2023 and began enforcing them in February 2024. Microsoft brought Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live into line from May 2025. The threshold in each case is approximately 5,000 emails per day to that provider’s consumer addresses — and Google’s classification, once triggered, is permanent even if your volume subsequently drops.
The requirements:
SPF, DKIM and DMARC all configured, with the visible From: domain aligned to your SPF or DKIM domain. A DMARC record at p=none technically satisfies the minimum, though it only monitors and offers no protection against spoofing.
Spam complaint rate below 0.3%, with Google explicitly recommending below 0.1%. That threshold is more brutal than it sounds: a send of 10,000 emails needs only 30 spam reports to breach it. Crossing 0.3% makes you ineligible for delivery mitigation.
One-click unsubscribe conforming to RFC 8058, with requests honoured within two days. Required by Google and Yahoo; recommended but not mandated by Microsoft.
TLS on connections, valid PTR records, and non-deceptive headers.
The enforcement has hardened over time. In November 2025 Google escalated from temporary 4.7.x rate-limiting failures to permanent 5.7.x rejections for non-compliant traffic. That distinction matters enormously: a rate-limited message is delayed, a rejected one is refused outright. It does not go to spam. It does not arrive at all.
“Non-compliant mail doesn’t land in the junk folder any more. It bounces at the SMTP level and the recipient never knows it existed.”
One practical note that catches people out: your complaint rate is measured across your domain, not per platform. If you send marketing through one provider and transactional through another and use a third as backup, all of it counts toward the same threshold. Consolidating or at least monitoring across all of them is the only way to know where you stand.
The Limits That Actually Bite Beyond the pricing page
Automation depth on lower tiers. Most platforms restrict automation on entry plans in ways that only become apparent when you try to build something. Branching logic, conditional splits, time delays and behaviour triggers are frequently gated. If automation is your reason for buying, verify the specific capability on the specific tier before committing.
Contact definitions. Read the fine print on what counts. Unsubscribed contacts, bounced contacts, contacts in multiple lists, and suppressed contacts are counted differently by different providers, and the differences are the single largest source of unexpected bills.
Send limits distinct from contact limits. A plan may allow 10,000 contacts and a monthly send ceiling of, say, ten or twelve times that. If you email frequently, the send ceiling binds first. Overage charges — sometimes fractions of a cent per email — accumulate quietly.
Deliverability support access. When something goes wrong, whether you can reach a human who understands DMARC is worth more than any feature. On entry tiers you generally cannot.
Custom domain authentication. Non-negotiable, and every platform supports it, but many users never configure it and send from the platform’s shared domain instead. That undermines your DMARC compliance and your reputation simultaneously.
The Comparison Table
| Platform | Billing model | Free tier | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MailerLite | Contacts | 500 subscribers | Best features per dollar for small business | Manual signup review; rejections happen |
| Brevo | Sends | 300/day, unlimited contacts | Large lists, infrequent sends | Editor and reporting less polished |
| Mailchimp | Contacts | 250 contacts | Integration breadth, familiarity | Free tier gutted Jan 2026; expensive above 5,000 |
| Klaviyo | Contacts (all profiles) | 250 profiles | E-commerce; Shopify integration is unmatched | Bills unsubscribed profiles; steep above 10,000 |
| ActiveCampaign | Contacts | None | Serious automation under $100/mo | New accounts billed on all contacts |
| Kit | Contacts | 10,000 subscribers | Creators; best free tier available | Sept 2025 repricing hit some users hard |
| Beehiiv | Subscribers | 2,500, unlimited sends | Newsletters with monetisation ambitions | Not a general-purpose marketing tool |
When Delivery Goes Wrong: A Diagnostic Order Before you blame the platform
Open rates have collapsed and everyone’s first instinct is that the platform’s reputation has degraded. Occasionally true. Usually not. Work through it in this order.
Check whether it’s one provider or all of them. Segment your last few sends by recipient domain. If Gmail collapsed and Outlook held steady, you have a Gmail-specific reputation problem and Google Postmaster Tools will tell you about it. If everything fell simultaneously, look at what you changed — a new template, a new link domain, a list import.
Check your complaint rate against the threshold. Postmaster Tools reports it. Anything approaching 0.3% explains everything else you’re seeing, and nothing you do to the content will help until it comes down.
Check authentication is still passing. DNS records get edited during site migrations, and an SPF record that broke six weeks ago produces exactly this pattern. Send yourself a message and inspect the headers for SPF, DKIM and DMARC results.
Check what you imported recently. A list acquired from an event, a partner or an old CRM export is the most common cause of a sudden reputation drop. Addresses that haven’t been mailed in two years contain spam traps, and a single trap hit can affect delivery for weeks.
Check your link domains. If you shortened links through a shared URL shortener, you inherited whatever reputation that shortener’s other users have earned. Use a branded tracking domain instead.
Then, last, consider the platform. Shared IP pools do get polluted. But it’s the sixth thing to check, not the first, and switching platforms to escape a problem you’re actually causing yourself simply relocates it.
What Migration Actually Involves The cost nobody quotes
Comparison articles present switching as a matter of exporting a CSV. It isn’t, and understanding why makes the platform decision feel appropriately weighty.
Automations do not transfer. Not between any two platforms. Every sequence, trigger, condition and delay is rebuilt by hand in the new tool’s logic, which differs from the old one’s in ways you discover during the rebuild. For a mature programme this is the largest single cost, and it’s entirely invisible on any pricing page.
Templates rarely transfer cleanly. Exported HTML usually imports, and usually looks slightly wrong, and the fixing takes longer than rebuilding.
Historical reporting stays behind. Your engagement history, your per-campaign performance, your year-on-year comparisons — all of it lives in the old platform and mostly cannot be brought across in usable form. Export what you need before you cancel.
Sending reputation restarts. This is the real risk. You are moving to new IPs and, if you change your sending domain, a new domain reputation. Expect two to four weeks of degraded placement while you re-warm, and plan the migration for a quiet trading period rather than the week before your biggest campaign of the year.
Integrations need rebuilding. Every connection to your store, your CRM, your forms, your ad platforms. Some have one-click equivalents; some don’t.
None of this argues against migrating when the reason is good. It argues against migrating for a modest price difference, which is the reason most people cite and the one that most reliably turns out to have been a mistake.
Which One, Honestly
Small business, general purpose, tight budget: MailerLite. It has been the value answer for several years and the 2026 repricing round left it relatively better positioned than most.
Large list, low send frequency: Brevo, and it isn’t close. The send-based model is worth multiples at this shape.
E-commerce on Shopify or WooCommerce: Klaviyo, and accept the cost. The purchase-data integration and revenue attribution genuinely have no equivalent, and for a store doing real volume the fee is a rounding error against the revenue the flows produce. Omnisend is the budget alternative if the pricing is prohibitive.
Newsletter as the business: Beehiiv if monetisation is the point, Kit if audience-building is. Both are purpose-built in a way that general platforms with newsletter features are not.
Complex automation, B2B: ActiveCampaign. Nothing else at the price matches the builder.
Already on Mailchimp and unhappy: the honest advice is that migration is more painful than most guides admit. You rebuild automations, re-authenticate your domain, and typically take a deliverability dip for two to four weeks while the new sending reputation establishes. Migrate for a structural reason — the billing model is wrong for your list shape, or you need capability that doesn’t exist — not because a comparison article said something else is $20 cheaper.
Before You Migrate Anywhere
Clean the list first. On contact-based pricing you’re about to start paying for every dormant address you carry over. Suppress or remove anyone who hasn’t opened in twelve months before you move, not after — it reduces your bill and improves your starting engagement rate on the new platform simultaneously.
Set up authentication on the new domain before the first send. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, custom domain authentication inside the platform. Sending unauthenticated even once, at volume, to a fresh IP is how programmes get throttled from day one.
Warm up gradually. Send to your most engaged segment first, in small volumes, and expand over two to three weeks. A new sending reputation built on high engagement is durable; one built on a full-list blast is not.
Keep the old account open for a month. You will discover something that didn’t transfer.
Pricing figures reflect published tiers and comparisons available during 2026; several platforms use promotional introductory rates that increase on renewal, and contact-counting definitions vary between providers. Bulk sender requirements verified against Google, Yahoo and Microsoft published sender guidelines. This article contains no affiliate links.