The real cost of email marketing in 2026: 10 tools compared at every list size

Every “cheapest email marketing tool” list ranks by the number on the homepage: Mailchimp “from $13”, Brevo “from $9”, beehiiv “from $49”. None of those numbers is what you pay once your list is a real list. At 25,000 subscribers, Mailchimp’s cheap plan is $270 a month, not $13. At 100,000 it isn’t sold at all: Essentials stops accepting new contacts past 50,000, and the plan you’re pushed into instead is $875.

That gap, between the price a homepage advertises and the price a real list pays, is what this comparison tracks: nine hosted competitors and EmailFig, priced the same way, at five list sizes from 5,000 to 100,000 subscribers.

Key Takeaways

• The “starts at” price everyone quotes describes the smallest possible customer. By 25,000 subscribers, the ranking of “cheapest tool” changes completely.
• Mailchimp’s Essentials plan isn’t available above 50,000 contacts. Cross that line and the plan you’re moved to is $875 a month, not a gradual step up.
• Two structural choices move a bill more than list size does: billing by contacts stored versus emails sent, and whether an unsubscribed contact keeps counting against your plan. Mailchimp’s own help center says unsubscribed ones do.
• EmailFig’s BYOS price is the cheapest single number at every list size in this comparison, and our managed price beats every hosted competitor at every size. Free to 4,000 subscribers either way.
• Kit’s free tier is genuinely bigger than ours: 10,000 subscribers free against our 4,000. If your list fits under that and you don’t need automation, that’s a real reason to pick them instead.

The trick every “cheapest” list plays

Open any of the affiliate roundups or vendor blog posts that rank for “cheapest email marketing tool” and they all do the same thing: they quote the entry price. “Mailchimp from $13/month.” “Brevo from $9/month.” That number is real, and it’s also useless for anyone past a few thousand contacts, because every one of these tools prices by list size, and the entry price describes the smallest tier on the ladder, not the tool.

Nobody publishes what the same tool costs once you’re not the smallest customer, for two reasons that have nothing to do with honesty. The vendors won’t, because the number stops flattering them. The affiliate sites won’t, because pricing ten vendors at five list sizes and keeping it current is real, repeated work, and a listicle that ranks once doesn’t need it to rank again.

The entry price also isn’t always the price you’d pay this month. Both Mailchimp’s and Kit’s pricing pages default to showing the discounted rate for paying a full year upfront, in large type, with the true monthly-billed price sitting underneath in smaller text: Kit’s calculator loads with “pay yearly, save 17%” already switched on, and Mailchimp shows “$743.75 per month for 12 months” ahead of “then, starts at $875/month” for the same plan. Every figure in this comparison is the monthly-billed rate, the one you’d actually be charged month to month; the prepaid rate is one more way an entry price ends up smaller than what a real subscription costs.

We already track that grid, because it’s the same data our comparison pages run on. This is what it says.

The grid also moves, which is part of why nobody maintains it. BigMailer repriced in March 2026, raising its per-5,000 rate about 25% and cutting the sending multiple from twelve times the contact count to ten. A price checked a quarter ago is a price you are guessing at.

What ten tools cost at five list sizes

Every figure below is the vendor’s own listed price, billed monthly (not the discounted annual rate), in USD, checked in September 2026 unless noted. EmailFig’s rows are exact: they come straight from our pricing ladder, not an estimate. BigMailer and MailBluster don’t include sending, so their rows add an assumed Amazon SES bill at two campaigns a week, our assumption, not theirs; see the note under the table.

¹ Essentials tops out at 50,000 contacts. The 100,000 figure is the Standard plan, the next one up, because there is no cheaper Mailchimp plan that will take a list that size. ² Kit’s tiers jump straight from a 45,000 bracket to 55,000; there’s no 50,000 rung, so this is the 55,000 price. ³ Kit’s pricing slider has no stop at exactly 100,000. This is the price at 95,000, the nearest one below it. ⁴ Not verified at a primary source for this comparison. Left out rather than estimated.

The BigMailer and MailBluster rows do the same arithmetic you could redo yourself: two campaigns a week, eight a month, to 25,000 contacts is 200,000 emails, and Amazon SES at $0.10 per 1,000 puts that at $20, added to BigMailer’s $37.50 plan fee at that size for the $57.50 shown above. Send more or less often than that and both rows move; the plan fee alone, without any assumed sending, is $37.50 for BigMailer and $5 for MailBluster at 25,000 contacts.

The spread at 25,000 subscribers

At 25,000 subscribers the two EmailFig prices bracket the cheap end, with one exception: BigMailer’s combined bill, plan fee plus an assumed Amazon SES cost, comes in at $57.50, under our $63 managed price, though still above our $34 BYOS price. Every one of the seven hosted tools, the ones that send for you the way our managed plan does, costs more than that $63: from $19 more at Brevo to $207 more at Mailchimp.

That BigMailer exception isn’t limited to 25,000. Run the same comparison at 50,000 and 100,000 in the table above and BigMailer’s combined bill, $115 and $230, undercuts our managed price, $125 and $235, at both sizes too. It never undercuts our BYOS price, at $65 and $120, because BigMailer needs the same Amazon SES connection BYOS does; the fair fight is BYOS against BigMailer, and BYOS wins it by $23.50 at 25,000 widening to $110 at 100,000. Against our managed price specifically, though, BigMailer’s assumed AWS bill is genuinely competitive past about 20,000 contacts.

The spread widens rather than narrows as the list grows. Go back to the full table at 100,000 subscribers and the gap between our managed price, $235, and Mailchimp’s, $875, is $640 a month; at 25,000 it was $207. That’s the shape “cheap at signup” hides: a tool that looks close to us at the smallest tier can be several hundred dollars apart by the time a list is worth taking seriously, and the homepage number never tells you which kind of tool you’re looking at.

Two EmailFig prices, and which one a competitor is actually up against

EmailFig sells two ways to send. Managed sends through EmailFig’s own infrastructure. BYOS connects your own Amazon AWS account and sends through your own Amazon SES, which is why it’s cheaper on our ladder at every contact tier: you’re paying Amazon directly for the sending on top of a lower plan fee. Both are free up to 4,000 subscribers, no card required.

The two prices aren’t interchangeable in this comparison. Mailchimp, Kit, beehiiv, Brevo, EmailOctopus, Moosend and MailerLite all send for you, the same way our managed plan does, so their fair comparison is against our managed price. BigMailer and MailBluster don’t: both require you to bring your own Amazon SES connection on their cheaper plans, the same way our BYOS plan does, so their fair comparison is against BYOS. Pricing BigMailer against our managed plan would compare a tool that needs AWS against one that doesn’t, and hand BigMailer credit for infrastructure it doesn’t include.

The free tier’s send allowance differs by family, and it’s easy to misquote. Free managed accounts can send up to 10,000 emails a month. Free BYOS accounts have no send cap from us at all, because you’re paying Amazon directly for every email and there’s no volume on our side left to ration. Don’t read the 10,000 figure onto a BYOS account; it doesn’t apply.

None of these ten tools is the cheapest way to send email in an absolute sense. That’s Amazon SES on its own, with no list management, no signup forms and no reporting built in. BYOS is what buys those things back without giving up SES’s rate.

Why the bill jumps: four structural reasons

List size is the axis every comparison charts, but it isn’t the only thing moving these numbers. Four mechanics do more work than the size of your list.

Contacts stored, or emails sent

Most of this set bills by how many contacts you have. Two don’t. Brevo’s Starter plan is priced by monthly email volume, not contact count: the $32/month row above is really “up to 20,000 emails a month,” which is roughly what 5,000 contacts costs at four sends a month, our assumption for lining the rows up. Send that list eight times instead of four, and the bill moves even though your contact count didn’t. MailBluster is more direct about it: $0.60 per 1,000 emails sent, on top of a $5/month subscription and whatever your own SMTP provider (Amazon SES included) charges. MailBluster’s contact storage is unlimited on every plan, including the free one, so a large list you rarely mail can sit there for nothing until the month you actually send to it.

EmailFig prices the other way: by contacts, with sending included. A campaign that goes out four times a week costs the same as one that goes out once a quarter, on either plan family. That’s an advantage for a frequent sender and a real disadvantage for someone storing far more contacts than they ever email; MailBluster’s own numbers put the crossover at roughly 1.5 campaigns a month for a 5,000-contact list, below which they’re cheaper than we are. Run the same list through Brevo weekly instead of MailBluster and the direction reverses fast: four sends a month to 25,000 contacts is roughly 100,000 emails, which is most of what pushes Brevo’s Starter plan to $82 in the table above; double the send frequency and Brevo’s bill moves again while ours, priced on the same 25,000 contacts, does not.

Whether an unsubscribed contact still counts

This is the one worth checking on any tool you’re pricing, because the answer isn’t obvious from the plan name. Mailchimp’s own help center is direct about it: “subscribed, non-subscribed, and unsubscribed contacts all count toward your contact limit.” Someone who unsubscribed six months ago is still occupying a seat on your Mailchimp plan and still part of what decides your tier.

EmailFig counts differently: your plan is priced on how many subscribed contacts you have. Unsubscribe someone and they stop counting toward your tier immediately, no separate archiving step. If your list has a lot of churn, the gap between “contacts you can still mail” and “contacts you’re being billed for” is a real number worth checking on whatever you use today, not just on us.

The tier boundary you don’t see coming

A few of these ladders don’t step smoothly. Mailchimp’s Essentials plan simply stops selling past 50,000 contacts: add one more contact over that line and the plan you’re offered isn’t a bigger Essentials tier, it’s Standard, and the jump from $385 to $875 happens in one step. Kit’s Creator ladder has a gap of its own: the bracket below 45,000 subscribers is followed directly by a 55,000 bracket, so a list of 46,000 pays the 55,000 rate. BigMailer’s advertised rate, $7.50 per 5,000 contacts, doesn’t actually apply until you’re past roughly 20,000 contacts; below that, a $30-a-month floor sets the price regardless of whether you have 1,000 contacts or 19,000, a number that’s easy to miss because it’s rendered by a CSS style rule rather than written into the page text. BigMailer also raised Business Lite 25% in March 2026 and cut its sending allowance from twelve times your contact count a month to ten times, according to their own change log, which is the risk of a ladder you don’t control: the rungs move under you even between our checks.

EmailFig’s ladder has boundaries too, at the sizes in the table above, but none of them removes a plan from sale the way Mailchimp’s does past 50,000. Growth past your tier is handled automatically rather than as a wall: with Auto-upgrade on, a send or an import that pushes you over your cap moves you to the next tier and lets the send through in the same step. Turn it off and a send that would put you over the cap is blocked with an explicit upgrade prompt instead, rather than silently charging you or silently failing. Either way, the tier you’re moved to is the next rung on the same ladder priced above, not a different, more expensive plan you didn’t know existed.

Those rungs still jump: crossing from 5,000 to 7,500 subscribers on our own ladder moves the bill 40% for one additional contact.

What the cheapest tier leaves out

The lowest tier on most of these ladders isn’t the full product with a smaller number attached. Mailchimp’s Essentials caps marketing automation at four flow steps; the unlimited automation builder needs Standard. Brevo’s Starter plan has no automation at all, and removing Brevo’s own branding from your emails is a further $12 a month on top of the plan price. beehiiv’s cheap tier, Scale, keeps its own branding on your emails through the entire plan; removing it needs Max, a materially more expensive plan, not an add-on. Kit’s free tier is generous on subscriber count and thin on features: one basic automation, full stop.

EmailFig includes unlimited automations and branding removal on every paid tier, at any size. The free tier is the one place our branding stays, the same trade every one of these tools makes somewhere on its ladder.

Free, before any of this applies

Every tool here has some kind of free starting point, and they’re not measuring the same thing: comparing them by subscriber count alone misses which axis, contacts or sends, each one actually caps.

Two of these don’t cap by subscriber count at all. Brevo’s free plan will hold any number of contacts and caps you on daily sends instead, which suits someone with a large list they mail rarely far better than it suits a frequent sender. MailBluster’s free plan is a flat 3,000-email allowance that never resets, closer to a trial than a tier you settle into.

Kit is the one genuinely bigger free tier by the metric most people compare on: 10,000 free subscribers against our 4,000. If your list is under 10,000, you don’t need more than one basic automation, and Kit’s other paid features don’t matter to you, free Kit is the cheaper choice, plainly.

Two tools in this set don’t have a free plan at all. Moosend’s 30-day trial ends whether or not you’ve decided, and BigMailer’s free Startup plan still requires you to open and connect your own Amazon SES account before it will send anything, so “free” there buys you the tool, not an easier path to your first send. Neither of EmailFig’s free tiers needs a credit card. Free managed needs no AWS account either; free BYOS does, the same as it does on every paid BYOS tier, since bringing your own Amazon SES is the entire premise of that family.

Where the ten tools actually beat us

Four real cases, not manufactured ones. Kit’s free tier holds more subscribers than ours. MailBluster’s send-based, storage-unlimited pricing beats contact-based pricing for anyone who mails rarely and stores a lot; their own numbers put that crossover under two campaigns a month. Brevo’s uncapped-contacts free plan suits a large list mailed occasionally in a way a subscriber-capped free plan, ours included, doesn’t. And BigMailer’s combined plan-plus-AWS bill undercuts our managed price, specifically, from roughly 20,000 contacts up, the exception already shown in the spread above.

Outside those four, at every list size we could verify a primary source for, our BYOS price is the single cheapest number on the page, and our managed price beats every hosted competitor.

One more thing before you commit

Every number above was true when we checked it, days before this went up, and the repricing this piece already caught (BigMailer in March) are evidence that “true when checked” has a shelf life. A price grid across ten vendors is a snapshot, not a guarantee, no matter who publishes it, us included. Before you commit a real list to any of these tools, load its current pricing page yourself and confirm the number at your own contact count, not the entry number on the homepage. It takes a few minutes, and it’s the same exercise this whole comparison is built from.

What to do with this

Find your actual list size in the table, not the size you have today if you’re growing fast, since the number that matters is where you’ll be when the plan you pick stops being the cheap one. If you’re near 45,000 or 50,000 subscribers on Kit or Mailchimp, check what’s on the other side of that line before you’re pushed there mid-campaign. Leaving Mailchimp specifically is its own project once you decide to: an export carries your contacts and their status, not your automation flows, tags, or engagement history, so the real cost of switching is the migration work on top of whatever the new plan charges, not just the smaller number on its homepage. If you send less than roughly twice a month to a list you mostly just want to keep, a contact-unlimited or send-based tool will likely beat anything priced by list size, EmailFig included. And whatever you’re on today, check whether it still counts a contact who unsubscribed a year ago: that’s a number worth knowing before your next renewal, not after it. If yours does and you’d rather it didn’t, how contact statuses work here explains what “subscribed” actually excludes.

If you’re deciding between our two plan families, platform sending or your own Amazon SES walks through which one fits, and how EmailFig’s pricing works has the full ladder past 100,000 contacts. The pricing page has both sets of numbers side by side, and our full writeups on BigMailer and MailBluster go deeper on the two BYOS-only tools in this set.