Newsletter Platforms: What "Free" Actually Gets You Before You Pay

Every newsletter platform advertises a free plan, and almost none of them mean the same thing by it. One of them is free until your list hits 100 people. Another is free until it hits 10,000. The word is identical; the number behind it varies by a factor of a hundred, which tells you the label “free” is doing almost none of the work in this decision. I opened the pricing pages for the five platforms people most often start with and wrote down what each free tier actually contains, because for a tool you might keep for years, the free plan is the moment the platform is trying to convert you, and the conversion is where the fine print lives.

The headline split is between platforms that cap subscribers and platforms that cap features. Mailchimp, MailerLite and Buttondown draw the line at how many people you’re allowed to email. Kit and Beehiiv barely cap subscribers at all and instead draw the line at what you’re allowed to do — automations, integrations, removing their branding, running ads. Those two philosophies produce wildly different experiences of the same word “free,” and which one fits you depends on whether your problem is “my list is small but I need the tools” or “my list is big but I can live with a logo in the footer.”

Here is the comparison, checked against each vendor’s pricing page on the date below:

Platform	Free subscriber cap	What the free tier withholds	Entry paid plan (billed monthly)
Mailchimp	250 contacts	500 sends/mo, no multi-step automations, Mailchimp footer ad, 1 audience, 1 seat	Essentials from $13/mo (500 contacts)
Kit (ConvertKit)	10,000 subscribers	1 automation + 1 sequence, Kit branding, no third-party integrations	Creator from $29/mo (1,000 subs)
Buttondown	100 subscribers	features sold à la carte (tagging, segmentation)	$9/mo at ~1,000 subs
MailerLite	250 subscribers	2,500 sends/mo, 3 automations, MailerLite logo	Comfort from $12/mo (500 subs)
Beehiiv	2,500 subscribers	no ads/paid subs, beehiiv branding, no custom domain	Scale from $49/mo (1,000 subs)

Checked 2026-09-10. Prices and subscriber caps shift; several of these platforms changed their free plans in the last year, and annual billing is cheaper than the monthly column above.

Sources: Mailchimp pricing, Mailchimp plan details, Kit pricing, Buttondown pricing, MailerLite pricing, Beehiiv pricing.

The pattern worth noticing isn’t the prices, it’s where each vendor puts the wall. Mailchimp and MailerLite both stop being free at 250 subscribers — a number a genuinely growing newsletter clears in a few months — which means their free plan is really a trial wearing a different name. Buttondown is the extreme opposite: free for your first 100 subscribers, and after that you pay continuously by active-subscriber count. Kit sits at the other extreme with a 10,000-subscriber free plan that sounds enormous until you notice it gives you one automation, one sequence, and their logo on every email, so the thing that’s free is the mailing, not the marketing.

That subscriber-cap framing quietly rewards a specific kind of user. If you write a weekly note to a few hundred friends and never plan to automate or sell anything, Buttondown’s honesty (pay only for what you use) is hard to beat, but you’ll start paying almost immediately. If you’re building an audience with a welcome sequence and a referral loop, Kit’s free tier is the only one here that will let you do the growth work for free, and the catch is that everything beyond the first automation is where they charge. The “best free plan” does not exist in the abstract; it depends on which single feature you’d actually use first.

The second thing the table hides is how fast the paid tier climbs. Mailchimp’s Essentials looks gentle at $13, but that’s for 500 contacts; by 2,500 contacts you’re at $45, and the send limits, automations and support are all still restricted compared to its Standard plan. Kit’s Creator at $29 jumps to $89 at 5,000 subscribers and $139 at 10,000. Beehiiv’s Scale climbs from $49 to $99 once you pass 10,000 subscribers. If you only compare entry prices, you’re pricing the wrong moment — the number that matters is the tier you’ll be in a year from now, which is exactly the same mistake I keep seeing people make with annual-discount pricing that hides the renewal jump.

The third hidden column is branding and your data. Mailchimp, MailerLite, Kit and Beehiiv all put their logo in your email footer on the free tier; removing it is a paid-tier feature (or, for Beehiiv, requires the much more expensive Max plan). Buttondown does not stamp its branding on your email, which is part of what you’re quietly paying for with that per-subscriber fee. The branding question sounds cosmetic and is actually the whole economics: a free email tool that advertises itself in your footer is not a gift, it’s a distribution deal where the currency is your readers.

Getting your list back out is the part almost nobody checks before the first send. Every one of these platforms exports subscribers, but the formats and completeness differ — some export your subscriber list as CSV but leave your sequences, tags and templates behind, so “export” does not mean “you can leave without losing your setup.” This is the same gap I’ve written about when a tool’s export looks complete until you actually open the file and the export doesn’t contain your work. Test the export on day one, while your list is still small and cheap to move, because the cost of migration scales with your subscriber count, not with how long you’ve waited.

There’s also a quieter trap in the send-limit column. Mailchimp’s free plan gives 500 emails a month with a 250-a-day cap, and MailerLite’s gives 2,500 a month. If you email weekly to 250 people you’re fine on either. If you email daily to a big list, you’ll hit the ceiling mid-month and the platform will pause you or push an upgrade — which is the point. A send limit is a subscription conversion mechanism wearing the clothes of a feature, and reading it that way changes how you compare the “generous” free plans against the “stingy” ones.

So how do you actually choose? The decision collapses to three questions. First, how fast is your list growing — if you’ll pass 250 subscribers within a quarter, Mailchimp and MailerLite’s free plans are a way to try the product, not a home. Second, what’s the one feature you’d pay to keep — if it’s automations, Kit or MailerLite’s paid tiers matter more than the free caps; if it’s a clean, unbranded send to a modest list, Buttondown is the honest option. Third, do you ever want to run ads or paid subscriptions — if yes, only Beehiiv’s Scale and Kit’s paid tiers even have that on the menu, and it’s absent from every free plan in this table.

The honest summary is that “which newsletter platform has the best free plan” is a badly-formed question, because free means something different at each of these five vendors and the number you actually need is the one you’ll hit in twelve months, not today. My standing advice for any recurring tool is the same: write down your subscriber count and the single feature you’d refuse to give up, then read only the rows that match. If you’re not sure where the rest of your paid tools are leaking, a quarterly stack audit catches what a pricing page won’t show you.