Cheap email marketing at 100,000 subscribers

At 5,000 subscribers, a hosted plan and a bring-your-own-SES plan look like variations on the same bill. At 100,000, they don’t. EmailFig’s BYOS plan is $120 a month here, plus whatever Amazon charges you directly for sending. The cheapest fully hosted competitor we could verify, beehiiv’s Scale plan, is $329. Mailchimp, once your list forces you off its cheapest plan, is $875, the kind of one-contact jump the pricing cliff is about. And Sendy, a $69 one-time license running on a small server, undercuts all of them once you’re willing to own that server yourself.

This is the size where “cheap email marketing” stops meaning the same thing to every reader. Below a few thousand contacts, a free tier settles most of the question. At 100,000, the AWS bill behind a BYOS plan is real money, not a rounding error, and it’s worth doing that arithmetic before comparing anything else.

Key Takeaways

• EmailFig’s BYOS plan is $120/month at 100,000 subscribers. Add your own Amazon SES bill, about $40/month at four sends a month, and the full cost is around $160.
• The cheapest fully hosted competitor here is beehiiv Scale at $329/month, more than double EmailFig BYOS with sending included.
• Sendy’s $69 one-time license, plus a roughly $12/month server and your own SES bill, is the cheapest total cost of anyone on this page for someone willing to run that server.
• BigMailer’s combined bill (its plan fee plus an assumed Amazon SES cost) comes to $230 at this size, five dollars less than EmailFig’s own managed price. Against EmailFig BYOS plus the same assumed SES cost, the fairer comparison since BigMailer needs AWS too, it still loses by $30.
• Two vendors here don’t have a verified self-serve monthly price at 100,000 subscribers at all: Brevo’s pricing page won’t confirm a USD figure, and MailerLite’s calculator didn’t give us one we could stand behind.

What it costs at 100,000 subscribers

Every figure is monthly, billed monthly (not the discounted annual rate), in USD, checked in September 2026. Sendy is the one exception: it’s a one-time license, shown for comparison rather than as a monthly number.

¹ BigMailer and MailBluster don’t include sending, so these rows add an assumed Amazon SES cost at two campaigns a week, the same assumption our full price comparison uses, not either vendor’s own. Send more or less often and both rows move. ² Kit’s tiers have no rung at exactly 100,000; this is the price at 95,000, the nearest bracket below it. ³ Mailchimp’s Essentials plan stops accepting new contacts past 50,000. The plan you’re moved into instead is Standard, priced separately by contact count. ⁴ Left out rather than estimated. Brevo’s pricing page renders in Canadian dollars from where we checked it, not USD, and doesn’t cleanly convert to a per-contact number since it prices by email volume. MailerLite’s pricing calculator didn’t return a figure at 100,000 we could confirm at the primary source.

Read those Brevo and MailerLite blanks as a finding, not a gap in our research. A vendor that can’t show you a clean number at this size, whether because it prices by something other than contacts or because its self-serve calculator quietly stops being clean, is telling you something about how it wants to sell to a list this big.

The AWS bill you can no longer treat as a rounding error

At 5,000 contacts, four sends a month is 20,000 emails, about $2 at Amazon’s à la carte SES rate of $0.10 per 1,000. Nobody notices $2. At 100,000 contacts, the same four sends a month is 400,000 emails, and the math stops being trivial: 400 lots of a thousand at $0.10 is $40.

That $40 belongs on top of any BYOS platform fee before you compare it against a plan that bundles sending. EmailFig’s BYOS plan is $120 on its own; with a typical month of sending added, the honest total is closer to $160. We cover the full mechanics of that bill, including the SES plan your account defaults to and what happens if it isn’t the cheap one, in what Amazon SES actually costs. New SES accounts since July 2026 don’t start on à la carte by default, so check which plan yours is on before you budget around $40.

Even at $160, that’s still under half of beehiiv’s $329, the cheapest hosted plan we could verify at this size.

Why the gap keeps widening

The gap that widens here is the one in dollars, not the ratio. A hosted vendor buys sending and everything else on one bill, so the dollars it adds per rung are larger, even though both curves climb.

EmailFig’s BYOS fee moves from $10 at 5,000 subscribers to $120 at 100,000, and EmailOctopus over the same stretch moves from $31.50 to $345. Both climb by about the same multiple; what separates them is that EmailOctopus is $225 further away at the top than it was at the bottom. Mailchimp, whose forced-upgrade plan runs $875 at 100,000, opens the same distance faster still. The AWS bill sitting under a BYOS plan grows in a straight line with volume, at a rate ($0.10 per 1,000) small enough that it never catches up to what a hosted vendor charges to do the same sending plus everything else on the plan.

That’s also why the comparison looks different lower on the list ladder. At 10,000 subscribers, our own numbers put EmailFig BYOS at $16 and beehiiv Scale at $109; the gap is real but survivable inside a small budget either way. The comparison at 10,000 subscribers works through that size on its own. At 100,000, $120 against $329 is the difference between a line item and a decision.

Sendy: the option with no monthly number at all

Sendy isn’t priced like anything else on this page. It’s a $69 one-time license for self-hosted software, run on your own server, sending through your own Amazon SES account. No subscription, no per-contact tier, no per-email fee from Sendy itself.

At 100,000 contacts, that structure stops looking like a curiosity and starts looking like the cheapest option on the table. A small VPS large enough to run Sendy at that volume runs around $12 a month, since SES does the actual sending and Sendy’s own job is queuing and rendering. Add the same $40-a-month SES bill from above and Sendy’s ongoing cost is roughly $52 a month, plus the $69 you already paid once. We work through that math size by size, including how fast the license pays for itself, in Sendy in 2026: still worth it?; at 100,000 contacts the license pays back in under a month against EmailFig’s own BYOS price.

The catch is the same one it’s always been. That $52 a month doesn’t include patching PHP, watching disk space, or being the person who gets paged if the server falls over mid-campaign. For someone who already treats “run a small VPS” as solved, that’s not a cost. For someone who doesn’t, it’s the actual price of the license, just paid in hours instead of dollars.

Where a competitor genuinely wins here

BigMailer’s combined bill at 100,000 subscribers, its own $150 plan fee plus an assumed $80 of Amazon SES at two campaigns a week, comes to $230, five dollars less than EmailFig’s managed price of $235. If you’re comparing against our managed plan specifically, and you’re comfortable running your own AWS connection, BigMailer’s total bill at this size is the cheaper one.

It doesn’t hold up against the fairer comparison, though. BigMailer needs an Amazon SES account, the same as EmailFig BYOS does, so the honest matchup adds the same SES bill to both sides. At two campaigns a week, that’s the same $80 added to EmailFig’s $120, for $200 against BigMailer’s $230. EmailFig still wins, by $30: a platform fee that doesn’t carry the sending cost pulls further ahead the bigger your list gets.

What to do with this

If you’re at or near 100,000 subscribers, don’t compare against the entry price on anyone’s homepage. Find the row in the table above, or price your own AWS SES bill at your real send frequency, four sends a month is $40 here, twice a week is closer to $80, and add it to whichever BYOS plan fee you’re weighing.

If you’re comfortable owning a server and your list is stable or growing, run the Sendy numbers for yourself before ruling it out on reputation alone; a decade-old tool is still the cheapest option here for the reader it fits. If you’d rather have the server, backups and updates handled for you, connecting your own AWS account gets you the same lower BYOS pricing without owning the infrastructure underneath it, and platform sending or your own Amazon SES walks through which family fits your situation. The full ladder past 100,000 contacts, on both plan families, is on the pricing page, and our writeups on BigMailer and MailBluster go deeper on the two hosted BYOS tools in this comparison.