Cheap email marketing at 10,000 subscribers in 2026

At 10,000 subscribers, EmailFig’s own two plans are the cheapest options on this list: $16 a month if you connect your own Amazon SES (BYOS), $27 if you’d rather we handle sending (managed). The next cheapest is BigMailer at $38 once you add the Amazon SES bill its cheap plan requires. From there it climbs to $139 at the expensive end, and the ranking isn’t fixed: it shifts depending on how often you actually send.

Key Takeaways

• EmailFig BYOS is $16/month at 10,000 subscribers, EmailFig managed is $27. Both are free up to 4,000 subscribers.
• BigMailer and MailBluster look cheaper on their own pricing page than they are, because both require your own Amazon SES account. Add the AWS bill and BigMailer runs about $38, MailBluster about $61.
• Two of these tools price by emails sent, not by contacts stored. Send weekly instead of monthly and their bill roughly triples; EmailFig’s price at 10,000 subscribers doesn’t move either way.
• Kit’s free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends. If your list fits under that line and one basic automation is enough, that’s genuinely free where ours is $16 to $27.

What ten tools cost at 10,000 subscribers

Every figure below is the vendor’s own listed price for its cheapest self-serve plan, billed monthly (not the discounted annual rate), in USD, checked in September 2026. Two rows, BigMailer and MailBluster, don’t include sending: both require your own Amazon SES connection on their cheap plans, so each row adds an assumed AWS bill at eight sends a month, our assumption, explained below the table.

The BigMailer row is arithmetic you can redo: Business Lite’s advertised rate is $7.50 per 5,000 contacts, but the plan has a $30/month floor that applies below roughly 20,000 contacts (it’s set by a CSS rule on BigMailer’s own pricing page rather than written into the page text, so it’s easy to miss). At 10,000 contacts you’re still on that $30 floor. Add eight sends a month to 10,000 contacts, 80,000 emails, at Amazon’s $0.10 per 1,000 rate, and that’s $8 of AWS on top, for $38 total.

MailBluster’s Pro plan is $60 a year, $5 a month, plus $0.60 per 1,000 emails MailBluster charges itself, plus whatever Amazon SES charges separately for the same emails. At eight sends a month to 10,000 contacts (80,000 emails), that’s $5 subscription, $48 of MailBluster’s own per-email fee, and $8 of Amazon SES, for $61.

Two of these bill by what you send, not what you store

Every tool in that table except Brevo and MailBluster prices by contacts, the same way EmailFig does: a 10,000-subscriber list costs the same whether you email it once a quarter or twice a week. Brevo and MailBluster don’t. Both meter emails sent, and at 10,000 subscribers, how often you actually mail that list changes their price several times over.

Brevo’s Starter plan is priced in email-volume brackets: 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, and up. A 10,000-contact list mailed once a month is 10,000 emails, which lands in Brevo’s cheapest bracket at $17/month, billed monthly. Mail the same list twice a week instead, eight times a month, and you’re pushing 80,000 emails, which lands in the 80,000 bracket at $74, more than four times the monthly-sender price. That’s the sending cadence the table above assumes for MailBluster’s row; run the same cadence through Brevo and its number moves from $46 in that table’s four-sends-a-month assumption up to $74 at twice a week.

MailBluster’s math moves the same way, and you can run it yourself from the rates above. A monthly sender pushing 10,000 emails pays $5 subscription, $6 of MailBluster’s own fee (10 thousand-lots at $0.60), and $1 of Amazon SES, for $12 total. Sending twice a week (80,000 emails) is the $61 figure already in the table: $5 subscription, $48 of MailBluster’s fee, and $8 of Amazon SES.

Neither of EmailFig’s prices in the table above moves with send frequency. A 10,000-subscriber list costs $16 on BYOS or $27 on managed whether it gets one campaign a month or one a day. That’s an advantage for a frequent sender and irrelevant to someone who barely mails their list at all, where Brevo’s $17 monthly-sender price and MailBluster’s $12 both undercut us plainly. If you send rarely and don’t need much beyond basic campaigns, that’s worth knowing before you compare against our $16.

What the cheap end leaves out

BigMailer and MailBluster are cheap in the table above because bringing your own Amazon SES account is the whole premise, not an add-on. That buys the lower price and also hands you the setup: an AWS account, SES production access before your first real campaign, and a suppression list you’re responsible for keeping in sync. Neither tool’s cheap plan does that work for you, the same trade EmailFig’s own BYOS plan makes.

Brevo’s Starter plan, at any send volume, has no marketing automation at all: that’s a Business-tier feature. Removing Brevo’s own branding from your emails is a further $12/month on top of whatever the volume bracket costs. EmailOctopus’s Pro plan at $44.50 includes full design control and unlimited landing pages, but list management stays basic next to a platform built around automation and segmentation.

At the expensive end, Mailchimp’s Essentials plan caps marketing automation at four flow steps (a welcome email with one delay and one follow-up already reaches that ceiling), and beehiiv’s Scale plan keeps beehiiv’s own branding on your emails through the entire tier: removing it needs Max, at $219/month at this size. Kit’s Creator plan, $139 here, includes unlimited automations and unlimited sequences with no per-flow cap.

EmailFig includes unlimited automations and branding removal on every paid tier at both sizes shown here, no separate add-on. The free tier is the one place our branding stays, the same trade every tool on this list makes somewhere on its own ladder.

What counts as a “contact” isn’t the same everywhere

The price in the table above assumes 10,000 people you’re actually mailing, but not every tool defines “10,000 contacts” the same way. Mailchimp’s own help center is explicit: “subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts all count toward your contact limit.” Someone who unsubscribed a year ago is still occupying a seat on your Mailchimp tier, and if your list has meaningful churn, the gap between contacts you can still mail and contacts you’re being billed for is worth checking before you compare Mailchimp’s $110 against anything else here.

EmailFig counts differently: your plan is priced on subscribed contacts, and someone who unsubscribes stops counting toward your tier immediately, no archiving step required. It’s not something the table above can show, since the table assumes a clean list of 10,000 active subscribers for every tool. A real list rarely is one.

Where a competitor is genuinely cheaper here

Kit’s free plan holds up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends and no card required, the exact size this comparison is about. If your list fits under that ceiling and one basic automation is enough for what you’re doing, Kit is free where EmailFig is $16 to $27. That’s a real reason to pick it, not a technicality: you’d be trading our unlimited automations and branding removal for a genuinely larger free allowance at this specific size. Free tiers compared covers where the rest of the field lands on the same axis.

Brevo’s uncapped-contacts, send-metered pricing beats ours too, but only for someone who mails 10,000 contacts rarely: the crossover in the numbers above sits somewhere around one to two sends a month, below which Brevo’s bracket pricing costs less than our flat $16. Send more often than that and the direction reverses.

Outside those two cases, EmailFig’s BYOS price is the single cheapest number in the table, and our managed price beats every hosted competitor shown, including BigMailer’s combined plan-plus-AWS bill.

If your list is about to cross 10,000

A list sitting at 9,000 subscribers today is a different question from one holding steady at 10,000, because one of the numbers above changes hardest right at this line. Kit’s free plan stops covering you the instant you pass 10,000 subscribers, moving straight to $139/month with nothing in between. BigMailer’s $30 floor is more forgiving: it holds until roughly 20,000 contacts, so its plan fee doesn’t move at 10,000, and only the Amazon SES bill underneath it grows as your list does. That’s the same mechanic as the pricing cliff: a single contact crossing an invisible line, not a gradual climb.

EmailFig doesn’t have a cliff at 10,000 specifically: your account moves up a tier automatically as your list grows, with Auto-upgrade letting an import or a send that crosses your cap go through instead of getting blocked. Turn it off and you get an upgrade prompt instead.

What to do with this

Check how often you actually send before comparing against Brevo or MailBluster: their advertised numbers assume a volume neither one states plainly on their pricing page, and the real bill depends entirely on your own cadence. If your list is close to 10,000 and growing, price it at 25,000 too before you commit, since Kit’s free ceiling and several of these brackets don’t scale the way a flat per-contact price does; the full comparison at every list size covers 5,000 through 100,000 for all ten tools.

If BigMailer or MailBluster’s send-based pricing is the appeal, our full writeups on BigMailer and MailBluster go deeper on what each one requires from your AWS account. For deciding between our own two plan families, platform sending or your own Amazon SES walks through the tradeoff, and how EmailFig’s pricing works has the full ladder past 10,000 contacts. The pricing page has both sets of numbers side by side.