Email Platform Pricing Compared

Every email platform looks affordable on the day you sign up. Mailchimp's Essentials plan starts at $13 a month, MailerLite's Comfort plan at $12, Kit's Creator plan at $33. Those numbers are close enough together that choosing between them on price alone is nearly arbitrary.

Two years later the same three companies are paying wildly different amounts for what looks like the same activity. The gap doesn't come from the entry price. It comes from what each platform counts, and the platforms count fundamentally different things.

Here's how the models actually work, using figures published on each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026.

The two models that matter

Nearly every email platform bills on one of two bases. It charges for the people on your list, or it charges for the messages you send them.

Per-contact pricing means your bill tracks list size. Send one campaign a month or twenty, the cost is the same, because you're paying for the audience rather than the activity. Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Kit all work this way in different flavours.

Per-send pricing inverts that. Your list can be enormous and it doesn't matter, because you pay for volume dispatched. Brevo is the clearest example, with its plans quoted in emails per month rather than contacts. Its Starter plan begins at 5,000 emails a month and its Professional plan at 150,000.

A few platforms straddle both. MailerLite charges on subscriber count and send volume together, so its Comfort plan at $12 a month covers up to 1,000 subscribers and 10,000 monthly emails, and you can exceed either ceiling.

What each platform charges for

Vendors publish tier prices through interactive calculators that change with the list size you enter, and those figures move. Take the entry prices above as the shape of each plan rather than as a quote, and run your own number through the vendor's calculator before you commit.

Choosing by the shape of your list

The useful question isn't which platform is cheapest. It's whether your list is big and quiet or small and chatty.

A media business with 80,000 subscribers who get one email a week is paying per-contact rent on 80,000 people to send four campaigns a month. On a per-send model the same operation looks much cheaper, because volume dispatched is modest relative to audience size.

A B2B company with 4,000 contacts running eight automated sequences, a weekly newsletter and behavioural triggers has the opposite problem. Send volume per contact is high, so per-send billing punishes exactly the behaviour that makes the programme work. Per-contact billing lets frequency be free once you've paid for the audience.

Most teams pick a platform before they know which of those they are, which is how the mismatch happens. If you're early enough that you genuinely don't know, that's an argument for a platform you can leave cheaply rather than for a clever guess.

The tier ratchet

Per-contact pricing doesn't rise smoothly. It steps. You sit comfortably inside a band, add a few hundred signups over a quiet quarter, and cross into the next one, at which point the price for the whole band applies.

What makes this bite is the asymmetry. Crossing up happens automatically as a consequence of doing your job. Coming back down requires someone to deliberately delete contacts, and almost nobody does, because deleting contacts feels like destroying an asset and there's rarely a person whose job it is.

The result is a bill that only travels in one direction. If you're on a per-contact plan, put a recurring reminder in a calendar to review the list against the tier boundary. That single habit is worth more than any negotiation.

What counts as a billable contact

This is the detail most worth checking before you sign, and the one buried deepest.

Vendors differ on whether unsubscribed records, hard bounces, and suppressed addresses count toward the total you're billed on. Some exclude all of them. Some count anything sitting in your account. On a list of any size that difference is a real share of the bill, and it's invisible until you're already paying it.

Read the vendor's own billing documentation on this rather than the pricing page, which usually says contacts and leaves it there. If a sales conversation is happening anyway, ask for the answer in writing.

What happens when you go over

Pricing pages describe what your plan includes and stay quiet about the more useful question, which is what the platform does the moment you exceed it. There are two behaviours and they fail in opposite directions.

Volume-metered platforms tend to stop. Run out of send allowance mid-campaign and the remaining messages queue or fail, which is survivable for a newsletter and genuinely damaging for a transactional flow. An order confirmation that doesn't send because a marketing campaign consumed the month's allowance is a support problem, not a billing one.

Contact-metered platforms tend to bill. Cross the threshold and you're moved up a tier, often automatically, and you find out on the invoice. Nothing breaks, which is the point, and nothing warns you either.

Neither behaviour is wrong and you want to know which one you've bought. Ask two questions before signing. Does exceeding the plan block sends or raise the bill, and do transactional messages draw from the same allowance as marketing ones. If they share an allowance, separating transactional email onto its own service is worth considering regardless of platform.

The channels billed separately

Multi-channel pricing is where the headline number stops describing your bill. SMS, WhatsApp and push are almost never included in the plan fee, and they're usually metered in currency rather than in volume.

Klaviyo makes this visible on its free tier, which includes 250 profiles, 500 email sends and $5 of mobile messages a month. That third figure is quoted in dollars because message cost varies by destination country and carrier, which is the honest way to present it and also a warning. A campaign to a domestic list and the same campaign to an international one can differ severalfold at identical volume.

Treat every non-email channel as a separate budget line with its own forecast. Teams that fold SMS into the platform subscription in their planning are the ones surprised by it, and the surprise scales with how well the channel works.

The free tiers have converged

One thing worth noting for anyone testing several platforms at once. Mailchimp, Klaviyo and MailerLite all cap their free plans at 250 contacts or profiles. The send limits differ, at 500 a month for Mailchimp and Klaviyo and 2,500 for MailerLite, but the audience ceiling is identical across all three.

That convergence tells you what free tiers are for now. They're evaluation environments, sized so you can build a real automation and send a real campaign to a real segment, and not sized to run anything on. Use them properly. Building your actual welcome sequence during a trial is the only way to find out whether the automation builder suits how you think, and that matters more over three years than $8 a month.

Where the real money goes

Platform fees are usually not the largest line in an email programme, which is easy to forget while comparing plans.

Deliverability work costs more than the platform on any list of size. Dedicated IPs, authentication, warming a new sending domain, and the specialist time to diagnose why one mailbox provider started filtering you are all real costs and none of them appear on a pricing page.

Migration is the other one. Moving platforms means rebuilding automations, re-authenticating a sending domain, and accepting a period of degraded deliverability while reputation rebuilds at the new provider. That cost is why teams stay on platforms they've outgrown, and it's why the model you choose at 2,000 contacts still matters at 200,000.

How to decide in an afternoon

Work out your ratio first. Take monthly sends and divide by contacts. A number under two says you have a big quiet list and should look hard at per-send pricing. A number above eight says frequency is your programme and per-contact pricing will serve you better.

Then price your realistic list eighteen months out rather than today's, because that's the bill you'll actually live with. Check the billable contact definition. Check what happens at the tier boundary you'll cross first.

Only then look at features, and be honest about which ones you'll use. Teams routinely pay for a tier they chose for behavioural segmentation and predictive analytics that nobody has opened since onboarding, which is the same pattern that shows up across usage-priced software. The plan you need is usually one below the plan you want, and the difference compounds.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is it cheaper to be billed per contact or per send?

A: It depends on the shape of your list, not on the vendor. Per-send billing suits a large list you email occasionally, because you're not paying rent on people you rarely contact. Per-contact billing suits a smaller list you email constantly, because frequency costs you nothing once the contact is paid for.

Q: Why did my email bill jump without me doing anything?

A: You almost certainly crossed a contact tier. Per-contact pricing moves in steps rather than smoothly, so a slow month of signups can push you over a threshold and raise the price for a whole band. The bill doesn't come back down when the list shrinks slightly, because you stay in the higher band until you're properly clear of it.

Q: Do unsubscribed contacts still cost me money?

A: Sometimes, and it's the single most valuable thing to check before signing. Vendors differ on whether unsubscribed, bounced and suppressed records count toward your billable total. Read that definition on the vendor's own billing documentation rather than assuming, because on a large list the difference is a meaningful share of the bill.

Q: Are the free tiers useful for a real business?

A: They're useful for testing and for a genuinely tiny list. Mailchimp, Klaviyo and MailerLite all cap their free plans at 250 contacts or profiles, with monthly send limits of 500, 500 and 2,500 respectively. That's enough to evaluate the product properly and not enough to run a growing business on.

Q: How much does list cleaning actually save?

A: On a per-contact plan it's the most direct saving available, because every unengaged address is rent you pay monthly for nothing. The secondary benefit usually matters more. Removing people who never open lifts your engagement rates, and engagement is what mailbox providers use to decide whether your mail reaches the inbox at all.