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. This article opens the pricing pages for the five platforms people most often start with and writes 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.

Correction, October 1, 2026: the September 10 version of this table listed Kit’s Creator plan at $29 and Beehiiv’s Scale plan at $49; the vendors’ pricing pages display $33 and $43 as monthly equivalents for annual commitments, not verified month-to-month prices. It said Beehiiv’s free plan withheld a custom domain (the current comparison table includes one) and that Buttondown sends without its own branding (Buttondown’s documentation says its name sits in the email footer unless you pay to remove it). It also quoted paid-tier prices at 2,500, 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers that the vendors’ pages render only through sliders and calculators; those figures have been removed rather than refilled from third-party price trackers.

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 dates below:

Platform	Free subscriber cap	What the free tier withholds	Entry paid quote and billing basis
Mailchimp	250 contacts	500 sends/mo (max 250/day), automation flows not included, Mailchimp branding, 1 audience, 1 seat	Essentials from $13/mo (up to 500 contacts)
Kit (ConvertKit)	10,000 subscribers	email sequences and visual automations (see the note below), Kit branding, paid App Store apps, paid recommendations and the sponsor network	Creator $390 billed yearly (displayed as $33/mo; 1,000 subscribers); month-to-month quote not verified
Buttondown	100 subscribers	tagging, segmentation, paid subscriptions, surveys and similar sold as +$9/mo add-ons; automations, multiple newsletters and custom archive domains each +$29/mo; whitelabeling (removing Buttondown’s name from your footer) +$79/mo	priced per active subscriber above 100; the page’s calculator did not expose a readable figure for ~1,000
MailerLite	250 subscribers	2,500 emails/mo, 3 automations, MailerLite logo (2 user seats are included)	Comfort from $12/mo (up to 500 subscribers)
Beehiiv	2,500 subscribers	ad network, paid subscriptions, referral program, beehiiv branding; a custom domain is included	Scale $517 billed annually (displayed as $43/mo); selected paid subscriber tier and month-to-month quote not verified in this retrieval

Originally checked 2026-09-10; every cell re-checked against the linked vendor pages on 2026-10-01. Follow-up billing and send-budget check: 2026-10-01. The paid column mixes billing models and is not a like-for-like monthly-price ranking. Kit and Beehiiv annual totals are the payable commitments; their displayed monthly equivalents are rounded.

A note on Kit, because its public documentation conflicts: the pricing page’s comparison table and the “Kit Free plan” help article both say email sequences and visual automations live on the Creator and Pro plans, while a separate “Newsletter Plan” article still lists one basic visual automation with one sequence on the free tier. The table follows the pricing page. If that single free automation is the thing you’re counting on, confirm it inside a fresh account before you build a welcome sequence around it.

Sources: Mailchimp pricing, Mailchimp plan details, Kit pricing, Kit Free plan, Kit Newsletter Plan (conflicting article), Buttondown pricing, Buttondown whitelabeling, MailerLite pricing, Beehiiv pricing, Beehiiv plan tiers.

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. Mailchimp spells out what happens next: exceed 250 contacts and a hold goes on live and test sends until you upgrade or trim the list. 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 the comparison table shows no sequences and no visual automations on it, plus 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 people and never plan to automate or sell anything, Buttondown’s model (pay only for the subscribers you actually have) is easy to reason about, but you’ll start paying almost immediately. If you’re building an audience with a welcome sequence, none of these free tiers is generous on that exact point any more: MailerLite’s three automations are the most you get without paying, Mailchimp’s free plan has no automation flows at all, and Kit’s free plan, which used to include one, now points you to Creator for sequences. 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 up to 500 contacts; Mailchimp’s own plan page says the price “increases with your contact total” all the way to the 50,000-contact ceiling of that plan, and monthly sends are capped at ten times your contact count. Kit’s displayed annual quote is for 1,000 subscribers. Beehiiv’s retrieved page did not expose the selected paid subscriber count, and Beehiiv’s support documentation says you move up a tier at 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 and so on as your list grows. The exact per-tier amounts are rendered by sliders on those pages, which is why this article no longer quotes them; the method still holds. 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 the same mistake people make with annual-discount pricing that hides the renewal jump.

The third hidden column is branding and your data. All five platforms put their name in your email footer on the free tier. Mailchimp, MailerLite and Kit remove it on their first paid plan; Beehiiv holds removal back for the much more expensive Max plan; Buttondown sells it as a +$79/month add-on, tied with Teams at the highest listed add-on price, and its documentation is explicit that whitelabeling means removing “our name in the footer of your emails.” The documentation still calls this the “Professional plan,” while the pricing page lists an add-on. Those pages do not establish how that plan name maps to the current quote; the earlier description of it as a documentation leftover was an inference, not a verified explanation. 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.

Buttondown: which kind of branding do you need?

Buttondown scope check, October 10, 2026: the pricing page, sending-domain guide, archive-domain guide and whitelabeling guide describe three separate features. Other vendors in the comparison retain their earlier check dates.

Reader’s requirement	Published pricing treatment	What to check before paying
Send email from your own domain	Included, including free accounts	This changes the sending address; it does not remove the footer credit.
Put web archives on your own domain	+$29/month add-on	The archive guide instead uses the label Standard and requires a paid plan; verify the account quote.
Remove Buttondown’s name	+$79/month whitelabeling add-on	The help guide uses Professional; confirm eligibility and the total charge in your account.

A custom sender address alone therefore does not require buying either branding add-on. If you need both archive hosting and footer removal, do not assume one includes the other: the pricing page lists them separately. Record the subscriber charge and each selected feature before comparing the total with another platform. These are published add-on figures, not a verified checkout quote or a newly verified subscriber-price calculator result.

What can you take with you when you leave?

Export documentation checked October 10, 2026. All five vendors document subscriber exports, but a contact file does not establish that another service can recreate your newsletter. These are documented capabilities, not hands-on migration results or a new check of free-plan pricing.

Platform and official source	Documented subscriber export	Detail that changes the migration checklist
Mailchimp	CSV files with audience fields, tags and contact data; exports can separate contacts by subscription status	Email opens and clicks are excluded from the contact export. Archived contacts require a separate export.
Kit	CSV includes status, tags, custom fields and attribution data	Selecting the current page is not selecting the whole list. Download links expire after five days.
Buttondown	CSV includes subscriber type, subscription/unsubscription dates, tags and metadata	The documented subscriber file describes people and their attributes; it does not establish that a destination can restore your automation setup.
MailerLite	CSV or CSV for Excel; export fields depend on visible columns	Enable the Groups column to retain group names. Account administrators can export; selecting a page differs from selecting the entire list.
Beehiiv	Quick export includes email, status and tier; Full adds custom fields and statistics	Posts have a separate CSV export, including drafts and archived posts. Download links expire after 24 hours; the guide covers admins on all plans.

Tags are therefore not something to assume you lose: Mailchimp, Kit and Buttondown explicitly list them, while MailerLite documents how to include group names. The remaining question is how the destination maps those fields. A subscriber export alone does not verify portability of templates, sequence timing or automation rules; this check does not establish a complete backup path for those assets across all five services.

Before committing to a platform, download a small export and inspect its headers. Compare its row count with the selected audience, preserving the distinction between active subscribers and people who unsubscribed. In a destination preview or test list, check that one tagged contact, one custom field and an unsubscribed record retain their intended meaning before enabling sends. Keep a separate inventory of the newsletter assets and automation rules you would need to rebuild. This is a suggested acceptance check, not a claim that these migrations have been tested.

Migration effort depends on fields, workflows and archived content as well as list size. Checking early helps expose what an export misses before those dependencies accumulate.

Can the free plan cover your actual sending schedule?

Calculation correction, October 1, 2026: a weekly newsletter to 250 people does not fit Mailchimp’s 500-send monthly allowance. The earlier version incorrectly said it did. Mailchimp defines one email to one contact as one send; its help page also counts test and transactional emails toward the monthly limit. Subscriber capacity and sending capacity therefore need separate checks.

The following is a hypothetical planning calculation, not a measured campaign result. It assumes the same 250 recipients receive every edition and excludes tests, welcome messages and resends:

Editions in the billing month	Calculation	Sends needed	Within Mailchimp’s 500 monthly sends?
Two	250 × 2	500	Exactly, with no spare allowance
Four weekly editions	250 × 4	1,000	No
Five weekly editions	250 × 5	1,250	No

A 250-recipient edition also uses the entire 250-send daily allowance. Splitting a campaign across days does not reduce its monthly total. At four editions, 500 ÷ 4 leaves room for at most 125 recipients per edition before other messages; at five, that falls to 100. Those are arithmetic ceilings, not recommended operating margins.

Before choosing a plan, record the intended recipient count, editions in the next billing month and any additional messages. Then check the provider’s contact-counting rules separately: Mailchimp includes unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts in its stored contact count. A list of 250 people you can email is not necessarily an account containing only 250 billable contacts. Use the linked plan documentation and your account counters to check both limits before importing a list.

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, MailerLite’s three free ones are the only ones in this table, and beyond that it’s the Kit or MailerLite paid tiers; if it’s an unbranded send, nobody here gives that away, so compare the price of removal rather than the price of entry. Third, do you ever want to run ads or paid subscriptions — Beehiiv keeps both off its free plan, Buttondown sells paid subscriptions as a $9 add-on, and Kit reserves its sponsor network and paid recommendations for paid tiers.

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. The 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.