Free tiers compared: contacts, sends, and what each one really caps

“Most generous free tier” doesn’t have one answer, because free plans don’t cap the same thing. Some cap how many contacts you can store. Some cap how many emails you can send. A few cap neither and hand you a 30-day clock instead. EmailFig’s free tier holds 4,000 contacts and 10,000 emails a month; Kit’s holds 10,000 contacts and no send limit at all; Brevo caps sends at around 9,000 a month and barely limits contacts. Which one is “more generous” depends entirely on whether your problem is list size or send volume.

Contact-capped versus send-capped

Most email tools cap contacts, because that’s the number that maps to their own infrastructure cost and it’s the number people search for. EmailFig, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Kit, beehiiv and EmailOctopus all work this way: cross the contact line and you need a paid plan, however rarely you actually mail.

A smaller group caps sends instead. Brevo’s free plan will store up to 100,000 contacts, but it throttles you to 300 emails a day, so a list of any real size only fits if you rarely mail all of it. Tools built around bring-your-own-SES go further and drop the send cap entirely, since Amazon bills you directly for whatever goes out: EmailOctopus Connect and BigMailer’s free plans store a smaller number of contacts but place no ceiling on how often you mail them, because the sending cost isn’t theirs to ration.

That split decides who each free plan actually suits. A sender with 6,000 contacts who mails once a month wants contact room and doesn’t care about a send ceiling. A sender with 1,500 contacts who mails every day wants the opposite: a send allowance that scales with how often they hit send, not a contact count they’re already under. Read a “biggest free tier” claim without asking which axis it means, and you’ll pick the wrong tool for your list.

The free tiers, side by side

Every figure below is read from the vendor’s own pricing page today. Rates and caps move; check the source before you commit to one.

Where each one actually wins

A big list mailed rarely has exactly one real home on this list: Brevo, up to the point where 300 emails a day stops being workable. A single campaign to 10,000 contacts takes over 33 days to clear at that rate, so Brevo’s free tier fits a list that’s genuinely large but mailed in small batches or occasional segments, not a full monthly blast to everyone on it.

A list under 10,000 that just needs to send is the case Kit’s free plan wins outright. Ten thousand contacts, no send ceiling, still $0. The real cost is one basic automation and Kit’s branding on everything until you pay; if your list fits and a single welcome sequence is all the automation you need, Kit is a better free plan than ours, and we’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.

A small list mailed constantly is the case send caps punish hardest, and it’s where bringing your own Amazon SES stops being an engineering nicety and starts being the actual answer. Fifteen hundred contacts mailed daily is 45,000 emails a month, blown past EmailFig’s own 10,000-email managed cap inside the first week. On EmailFig’s BYOS free tier, the contact cap is unchanged at 4,000, but sending isn’t ours to cap: Amazon bills those 45,000 emails at its own à la carte rate, about $4.50 a month, and nothing is owed to us. BigMailer and EmailOctopus Connect solve the same problem the same way, at a lower contact ceiling.

None of the uncapped-sending free tiers are free of setup, though. BYOS, BigMailer’s Startup plan and EmailOctopus Connect all put you through Amazon’s own approval process before the first real campaign goes out: a new SES account starts in a sandbox that only delivers to addresses you’ve verified yourself, and getting past that means asking AWS for production access. The cap disappearing doesn’t mean the setup does.

A list you’re not sure you’ll ever mail doesn’t want a plan with a clock on it, and two of these aren’t plans. MailBluster’s Starter allowance is 3,000 emails, once, not a month, not renewing. Their own FAQ says the plan stops the moment you cross it. Moosend has no free plan at all: 1,000 contacts for 30 days, then a card or a credit purchase. Both are trials wearing a pricing-page row that looks like a tier.

What “free” hides besides the caps

The cap you can put in a table is rarely the whole story.

Branding is universal, not a differentiator. Every free plan we checked, ours included, puts a line or logo on recipient-facing pages. What varies is the price of losing it: EmailFig lets you switch off its footer line on any paid plan, starting at $6 a month, whatever your contact count. Brevo makes you buy a separate monthly add-on, on top of a paid plan, just for that line. beehiiv reserves branding removal for its second paid tier, Max, not its first. Kit and Mailchimp both tie it to their entry paid plan.

Feature gates hide inside a generous-looking cap. Kit’s 10,000-contact free plan allows exactly one basic automation. EmailOctopus’s free plan keeps only 30 days of report history and caps you at one landing page, one signup form and one user. A wide contact cap is only as useful as what you’re allowed to do with it.

A trial dressed as a plan is the hardest trap to spot, because the pricing page doesn’t distinguish it from a real tier. MailBluster’s Starter and Moosend’s 30-day evaluation both read like rows in the same table as everyone else’s ongoing free plan; neither one is.

User seats often cap at one. Mailchimp’s free plan includes a single seat; beehiiv and EmailOctopus’s free plans do too. EmailFig doesn’t gate team members by plan; a free account can invite teammates the same as a paid one.

“Unlimited” on a bring-your-own-SES plan means unlimited billing from the vendor, not an infinite pipe. Amazon still enforces its own send rate and a rolling 24-hour quota on the SES account itself, raised over time as your sending history builds trust. Kit and beehiiv’s “unlimited” is a genuinely different claim, since they own the sending infrastructure and absorb that ramp-up themselves.

Where EmailFig sits, honestly

Free up to 4,000 contacts, on both plan families, no credit card. Managed sending is capped at 10,000 emails a month; connect your own AWS account instead and the cap disappears, because Amazon bills you for those sends, not us. Automations, segments, forms and report history are the same on the free tier as on any paid one; nothing above a $6-a-month plan unlocks a feature the free tier didn’t already have. Beyond the contact limit and email allowance, a paid plan lets you switch off the EmailFig line on your emails and hosted pages. Full details are on how EmailFig pricing works.

That beats most of the field on contacts: more than Mailchimp, MailerLite, BigMailer, beehiiv and EmailOctopus, all of which cap lower. It loses to two, plainly. Kit’s free plan holds more than twice as many contacts and drops the send cap entirely, at the cost of one automation and permanent branding. Brevo’s free plan will store a list twenty-five times the size of ours, at the cost of a send rate that only works for infrequent mail. Neither is a close call, and dressing either one up as a narrow loss wouldn’t be honest. Past the free tier entirely, the full comparison across every list size picks up where this page stops.

If sending often to a small list is the actual problem, BYOS is where EmailFig gets unambiguous: the contact cap stays the same as managed, but the send cap doesn’t exist, at whatever Amazon charges for the sends themselves. See the BYOS pricing ladder once you outgrow free, and the full plan comparison either way.