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Email Marketing for Creators: What 6 Tools Cost at 1K, 5K, and 25K Subscribers

By Akira Endo · Published 2026-08-21 · Updated 2026-08-22

Every email marketing comparison quotes a starting price. Almost none of them tell you the number that matters, which is what you’ll pay in two years when the list you’re building today has actually grown.

That’s not a small distinction. Email tools price on list size, so the headline figure describes a moment you’ll pass through and never see again. A tool that looks like the obvious budget pick at 1,000 subscribers can be the most expensive line item in your business at 25,000 — and the tool that looked expensive at the start can quietly become the cheap one. The ranking doesn’t just shift. It inverts.

So this comparison does the thing the headline prices don’t: it prices six tools at three list sizes, using each vendor’s own calculator, and shows where the ordering changes.

All figures below were read off each vendor’s pricing page on 21 August 2026, on monthly billing, by moving the subscriber slider ourselves rather than quoting the default view. Annual billing knocks roughly 10–18% off depending on the vendor. Prices change; check before you commit.

Some links in this article are affiliate links — see our affiliate disclosure. It doesn’t change what we recommend.

What we have and haven’t tested. The pricing here is measured, not quoted: we set each calculator to 1,000, 5,000 and 25,000 subscribers and recorded what came back, and the screenshots below are those screens. We have not run all six tools as customers, and we don’t write as though we had — where we describe how a product behaves rather than what it costs, we’re relaying vendor documentation and say so.

Three questions that decide this, and one that doesn’t

1. What will this cost at the list size you’re building toward? Not today’s size. Pick the number you expect in eighteen to twenty-four months and price every candidate there as well as here. This single habit changes the answer more often than any feature comparison.

2. How far does the free plan actually go? “Free plan” means wildly different things in this category — the gap between the smallest and largest free tier here is fortyfold. For a creator with a list under 10,000, that difference can be worth more than every feature on every paid plan combined.

3. What breaks if you leave? Your list is portable; a CSV export is a CSV export. Your automations, forms, landing pages, and tagging logic are not. The switching cost isn’t the data, it’s the plumbing you rebuilt around the tool.

The question that decides less than you’d think: deliverability marketing. Every vendor in this category claims superior inbox placement, and none of them will show you a controlled comparison. Treat those claims as noise and decide on cost, capability, and exit cost instead.

What six tools actually cost

Monthly billing, entry-level paid plan, priced at each list size:

Higher tiers, same list sizes: Mailchimp Standard $24.30 / $53.89 / $158.87. MailerLite Power $39 / $69 / $239. Kit Pro $79 / — / $279. beehiiv Max $109 / $169 / $289. GetResponse Marketer $59 at 1,000 and $215 at 25,000; Creator $69 and $249. Brevo Standard $18.

Four things fall out of that table.

The ordering shuffles hard. At 1,000 subscribers, beehiiv is the most expensive contact-priced tool on the list. At 25,000 it’s the second cheapest, ahead of GetResponse, MailerLite and Kit. MailerLite goes the other way: joint-cheapest at the start, second most expensive at the end. Nothing about the products changed. Only the size of the list did.

The cheap ones get expensive fastest. That last column is the one nobody publishes. Mailchimp and MailerLite multiply by roughly 9.5× between 1,000 and 25,000 subscribers; beehiiv multiplies by 3.4×. Pick on the entry price and you are, more often than not, picking the steepest curve available — and you’ll feel it exactly when the list is finally worth something.

The spread collapses as you grow. At 1,000 subscribers the cheapest contact-priced tool costs a third of the most expensive ($14.33 against $49). At 25,000 the gap narrows to about 1.45× ($137.06 against $199). Price is a loud signal early, when the absolute amounts are small, and a quiet one later, when they aren’t.

One of them isn’t playing the same game. Brevo prices on emails sent rather than contacts stored, which makes it incomparable in a subscriber column and worth understanding separately — see below.

The free plans are not comparable

Lumping these together as “has a free plan” is the single most misleading thing a comparison can do:

Kit’s free tier holds forty times more subscribers than Mailchimp’s or MailerLite’s. At 10,000 subscribers, staying on Kit’s free plan is worth somewhere around $130–150 a month against what the others would charge you for the same list — for as long as you can work without automation.

That last clause is doing real work, and it’s why this isn’t simply “use Kit, it’s free”. Kit’s paid tiers exist to sell you automations and integrations; the free tier is a capacity gift with a capability cost. If your business is “write a newsletter, sell a product occasionally,” you may never feel it. If your business runs on a welcome sequence that segments buyers from browsers, you’ll feel it in week one.

It’s also worth knowing exactly where that free tier stops. Set Kit’s own calculator to 25,000 subscribers and the free plan doesn’t quietly get more expensive — it greys out entirely, with the plan button replaced by “Up to 10,000 subscribers only”:

We mention this because it briefly fooled us. Drag that slider far enough and the free card still reads “$0 /mo” while the subscriber count climbs into the hundreds of thousands — it’s a disabled card, not an offer. A comparison built from a quick glance at that page would have reported a free plan with no ceiling at all.

MailerLite: cheapest to start, steepest to grow

MailerLite is the price leader at the bottom of the market and it’s not close: $19/month at 1,000 subscribers on Comfort, with every paid plan including the full feature set. The company’s own framing is that you pay for list size and sending volume, not for access to features, which is a genuinely clean model and rarer than it should be.

The catch is the curve. That $19 becomes $49 at 5,000 and $179 at 25,000 — a 9.4× climb, second only to Mailchimp’s, and enough to take MailerLite from joint-cheapest at the start to second most expensive at the end:

The free plan is also the least generous in this comparison at 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails — enough to evaluate the product, not enough to run anything on.

Strengths: lowest entry price; full feature set on every paid tier rather than gated by plan; clean, predictable pricing model.

Weaknesses: one of the two steepest cost curves here; a free tier too small to launch on; the price advantage disappears entirely by 25,000 subscribers.

GetResponse: MailerLite’s pricing twin, with more platform attached

GetResponse tracks MailerLite almost exactly on price — $19 at 1,000, $54 at 5,000, $174 at 25,000 — which makes the comparison between them a question of scope rather than cost.

Where they diverge is what’s in the box. GetResponse sells itself as a broader marketing platform: landing pages, signup forms, and unlimited monthly email sends even on Starter, with sales funnels arriving on the Marketer plan at $59 (at 1,000 contacts) and webinars above that. If you’d otherwise be paying for a separate landing page tool, that changes the arithmetic in a way the headline price doesn’t show.

Its free tier — 500 contacts with a 2,500-send monthly cap — sits between MailerLite’s and beehiiv’s. The send cap is the binding constraint rather than the contact count: 500 contacts emailed weekly is 2,000 sends a month, so you’ll hit the ceiling at roughly the list size the plan advertises.

We priced GetResponse the same way as the others, by moving its list-size slider through each tier rather than reading the default. Worth doing yourself, because the funnel feature most people are shopping for is not on the plan the headline price refers to.

Strengths: same low entry price as MailerLite with a wider platform attached; unlimited sends on every paid tier; landing pages and forms included rather than sold separately.

Weaknesses: an almost equally steep curve to 25,000; funnels and webinars sit well above the entry plan; more product than a pure newsletter operation needs.

Kit: expensive per subscriber, generous where it counts

Kit costs roughly twice MailerLite at the bottom — $39 against $19 at 1,000 subscribers — and stays more expensive through 25,000, where at $199 it’s the priciest tool in this comparison.

Then there’s the free plan, which holds 10,000 subscribers and reframes the entire comparison. For a creator between 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers who can work within one basic automation, Kit is not the expensive option. It’s free, while MailerLite and GetResponse are charging $49–$179 for the same list.

Kit is also the tool in this group most explicitly built for people selling things to an audience rather than for marketing departments: its free tier includes unlimited landing pages and forms, unlimited broadcasts, and the ability to sell digital products and subscriptions. The paid tiers buy automation depth, not permission to send email.

Its paid trial is 14 days with no credit card required — the only tool here where we could confirm no card up front, which matters if you’ve been burned by a trial that auto-billed.

Strengths: by far the largest free tier at 10,000 subscribers; selling digital products is a first-class feature rather than an add-on; no card required to trial the paid plans.

Weaknesses: roughly double MailerLite’s price per subscriber on paid tiers; the most expensive option at 25,000; the free plan’s automation limit is a genuine constraint, not a nudge.

beehiiv: worst entry price, best price at scale

beehiiv has the highest entry price here at $49/month on Scale, which is where most comparisons stop and dismiss it:

Follow the curve and the picture changes. beehiiv rises 3.4× between 1,000 and 25,000 subscribers, against 9.4× for MailerLite, arriving at $169 — second cheapest at that size, behind only Mailchimp’s stripped-down Essentials plan. It climbs more gently than anything else here, which is another way of saying it’s the tool whose relative position improves most as you grow.

The product is also pointed at a narrower job: newsletters as a business, with an ad network, paid subscriptions at a 0% take rate on Scale, recommendations, and a sponsorship storefront on Max. Those are revenue features rather than marketing features, and they’re worth nothing to a creator who isn’t monetising a newsletter directly — and quite a lot to one who is.

Its free Launch plan covers 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends and no credit card required.

Strengths: the flattest cost curve in this comparison; the cheapest full-featured plan at 25,000; built around newsletter monetisation rather than generic email marketing; free to 2,500 with unlimited sends.

Weaknesses: the highest entry price, which makes it look wrong on every comparison that stops at 1,000 subscribers; its best features are irrelevant unless the newsletter itself earns money.

Mailchimp: the cheapest numbers, with the most asterisks

Mailchimp posts the lowest figure in this comparison at both ends of the range — $14.33 at 1,000 subscribers on Essentials, $137.06 at 25,000 — which is not what most creators expect from the incumbent everyone assumes is expensive.

Read the page carefully before treating that as settled, because two things are working on you at once. The prices displayed by default are discounted 15% for the first twelve months; the standard rates sit underneath in smaller type, and those are the ones you’ll be paying in year two. And the footnote says plainly that overages apply if you exceed either the contact or the send limit, which means the headline is a floor rather than a bill:

Essentials is also the thinnest plan here in feature terms — automations, the thing most creators actually want email software for, are a Standard feature at $24.30/$53.89/$158.87. Compare Standard rather than Essentials and Mailchimp stops being the cheapest and becomes mid-pack.

Its free plan covers 250 contacts, matching MailerLite for the smallest free tier in this group.

Strengths: the lowest headline price at every list size we checked; enormous integration ecosystem; the default nobody gets fired for choosing.

Weaknesses: the cheap plan omits automation; overage charges make the bill less predictable than the table suggests; the displayed price is a first-year promotional rate.

Brevo: priced on sends, which changes the question

Brevo is the one tool here that doesn’t price on list size at all. Contacts are effectively unlimited; you pay for emails sent. Starter is $9/month and Standard $18/month, both starting from 5,000 emails per month, with Professional at $499 from 150,000:

That model rewards a specific shape of business and punishes another. A large list you email rarely is cheap on Brevo and expensive everywhere else. A small list you email daily is the reverse. Multiply your list by how many times a month you actually send: 5,000 subscribers emailed four times is 20,000 sends, and 25,000 subscribers emailed four times is 100,000 — a very different tier from the $9 headline.

The free plan follows the same logic: unlimited contacts with a 300-emails-per-day cap, and no credit card. For a creator with a big list and an occasional newsletter, that is a genuinely usable free tier rather than an evaluation one.

The catch is that Brevo’s pricing page publishes the entry volume and the $499 tier and not much between them, so you can’t model your own send volume before signing up. That’s the same problem we hit pricing Podia’s email add-on: the number that decides whether it’s cheap for you is the one that isn’t on the page.

Strengths: unlimited contacts; free tier that scales with list size rather than capping it; cheapest option by far for large lists mailed infrequently; no card to start.

Weaknesses: the pricing model makes it hard to compare against everything else; mid-range send volumes aren’t published; frequent senders will find the model works against them.

Which one fits which creator

You have fewer than 10,000 subscribers and simple automation needs → Kit, on the free plan. Nothing else here comes close on capacity, and paying $49–$179 elsewhere for a list Kit will host for nothing is hard to justify. Revisit when you need real automation.

You’re building toward a large list and want the mildest curve → beehiiv. It costs the most today and the least at 25,000. If you’re confident about growth, the entry price is the wrong thing to optimise.

Your newsletter is the product → beehiiv, on Scale. Paid subscriptions at a 0% take rate and the ad network are the reason to be there. No general-purpose email tool offers an equivalent.

You want the lowest bill right now and you’ll re-evaluate → MailerLite. It’s genuinely the cheapest way to start, and the full feature set on every paid tier is a real advantage. Just diary a review at 5,000 subscribers, because the curve steepens after that.

You’d otherwise pay for landing pages and funnels too → GetResponse. At the same entry price as MailerLite it bundles more of the stack. Price the bundle, not the plan.

You have a big list you email occasionally → Brevo. Nothing else here prices on sends, and for a monthly newsletter to a large list that model is dramatically cheaper. Work out your monthly send volume first.

You want the lowest number on the invoice and can live without automation → Mailchimp Essentials. It posts the lowest figure at every list size we checked. Budget for the standard rate rather than the first-year promotional one, and read the overage terms before you rely on it.

Frequently asked questions

Is the cheapest email tool at 1,000 subscribers still cheapest at 25,000? Usually not, and the movement is large. beehiiv is the most expensive contact-priced tool at 1,000 and the second cheapest at 25,000; MailerLite does the reverse. Only Mailchimp holds the bottom of the range at both ends, and it does so with a feature-thin plan and overage charges attached. Price every candidate at the size you’re growing into rather than the size you’re at.

Why compare at 25,000 subscribers rather than 100,000? Because 25,000 is roughly where a creator business becomes a business, and because it’s the last list size at which all six of these tools still publish a price you can check. Above it, several switch to “contact sales”, which is its own kind of answer.

Can I really run a business on a free email plan? On Kit’s, up to 10,000 subscribers, if one basic automation is enough for you. On beehiiv’s, up to 2,500 with unlimited sends. GetResponse’s 500 contacts and MailerLite’s 250 are evaluation tiers rather than operating ones.

How much does annual billing save? Between roughly 10% and 18% depending on the vendor, and the discount is applied to the same list-size tiers, so it doesn’t change any of the rankings above — it shifts every number down by a similar proportion.

What actually makes switching hard later? Not the list. Automations, forms, landing pages, and tag structures are what you rebuild, and none of them export. If you expect to grow past your first tool, keep the plumbing simple early.

Bottom line

The honest summary of this category is that there is no cheapest email tool — there’s only the cheapest one at your list size and sending habit, and the answer moves underneath you as you grow.

If your list is under 10,000 and your automation needs are modest, Kit’s free plan is the strongest offer in this comparison by a wide margin, and it costs nothing to find out. If you’re growing fast, beehiiv’s flat curve is worth its awkward entry price. If you mail a large list infrequently, Brevo’s send-based model is in a category of its own. And if you simply want the smallest number on the invoice, Mailchimp Essentials posts it — with the most conditions attached.

What none of them deserve is a decision made on the headline price alone. Whichever way you lean, every tool here lets you start free. Take the two that fit your situation, import a few hundred subscribers, and send one real broadcast from each before you commit to anything.