Choosing an Email Platform: How Contact and Send Pricing Work

Work out three numbers before you open a pricing page

Email platforms look cheap on the pricing page and expensive on the third invoice, and the gap nearly always comes from a number nobody checked. Before you compare tools, write down three figures.

The first is your contact count, and count everyone: active subscribers, people who unsubscribed, customers imported from your store, the trade-show list you never mailed. Some platforms bill for all of them. The second is monthly sends, which is contacts multiplied by campaigns, plus automations. A 3,000-person list that gets a weekly newsletter is about 12,000 sends a month before a single welcome email or abandoned-cart message goes out. The third is growth: where will both numbers be a year from now?

Add one practical number: how many people need a login. Plans often cap seats. Mailchimp, for example, includes one seat on its Free plan, three on Essentials and five on Standard, and that cap tends to bite right when you hire a second marketer.

Contact-based pricing and what counts as a contact

Most platforms charge by list size. The catch is that each one defines a contact differently, and the definition can move your bill more than the headline price does.

Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts toward your plan limit. Cleaned, pending and archived contacts don't count. If your account has been running for a few years, a real share of your billable audience may be people who asked to stop hearing from you, and archiving them is the quickest legitimate way to drop a pricing tier. Mailchimp's paid plans start at $13 a month for Essentials, $20 for Standard and $350 for Premium, which starts at 10,000 contacts. Each plan caps monthly sends at a multiple of its contact limit: 10 times on Essentials, 12 times on Standard and 15 times on Premium. Go over your contact limit on a paid plan and Mailchimp adds a charge to your bill; it doesn't stop your campaigns.

MailerLite takes the opposite view. It bills on active subscribers only, so people who unsubscribed or bounced don't count. Its Comfort plan, starting at $12 a month, allows 10 times the top of your subscriber tier in sends each month, and the Power plan, starting at $25, has unlimited sends under a fair use policy. Klaviyo also prices by active profiles, which it defines as contacts who may receive marketing emails.

The action here is simple. Ask every vendor on your shortlist the same written question: do unsubscribed, bounced or never-mailed contacts count toward my bill? The answer is usually in the help center, and it takes five minutes to find.

Send-based pricing and who it suits

Brevo sells its marketing plans by email volume. The free plan allows 300 emails a day, and the Starter plan begins at 5,000 emails a month. Our listing records Starter from $9 a month, and Brevo's pricing page shows yearly billing at 10% less.

Volume pricing is a good deal when your list is large and you mail it rarely. Picture a retailer with 20,000 past customers who sends one promotion a month. On a contact-based plan, they pay for a 20,000-contact tier every month, whether they send or not. On a volume plan, they pay for roughly 20,000 sends.

It works against you in the opposite case. A consultant with 2,000 subscribers who mails three times a week uses about 26,000 sends a month, and a volume plan sized for that traffic can cost more than a contact plan sized for 2,000 people.

Run the numbers from the first section through both models. If you send one or two emails per contact a month, look hard at volume pricing. If you send several a week, a contact-based plan with a generous send multiple is usually easier to predict.

What the free plans give you

Free plans differ more than any other line in the pricing table, so compare them on the limit that matters to you.

Mailchimp Free covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with no more than 250 a day and one seat. If you go over the contact limit, Mailchimp holds sending until you upgrade or trim the list. MailerLite Free covers 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month and two user seats, with campaigns, automations, a website, a landing page and signup forms included. Klaviyo's free plan covers 250 active profiles and 500 emails a month.

Two free plans are limited on a different axis. Brevo's free plan caps you at 300 emails a day and is built around volume. Kit's free plan goes up to 10,000 subscribers; check which features you'd need from its paid Creator plan, listed at $33 a month on annual billing.

The practical read: a 250-contact plan is for trying a tool. Brevo's and Kit's free plans can run a small newsletter for a while, each with its own ceiling.

Pick by the kind of email you send

Feature lists blur together after the third vendor. The type of email you send narrows the field faster.

For newsletters and creators, Kit, beehiiv and Substack are built around publishing. Substack's model differs from everything else here: publishing is free, and it takes 10% of paid subscription revenue. For ecommerce, Klaviyo combines email with SMS and cart recovery and prices by active profiles. For small business all-rounders, look at Mailchimp, Constant Contact, MailerLite and Brevo. Constant Contact's Lite plan is $12 a month, or $10.20 a month on annual billing, with Standard at $35 and Premium at $80. For automation-heavy B2B programs, ActiveCampaign adds lead scoring and a CRM, with a 14-day trial, and GetResponse bundles landing pages, funnels and webinars, with Starter from $19 a month.

Receipts, password resets and order confirmations are transactional email. They usually belong in a separate sending service, and our transactional email listings cover those.

Our email marketing category is ordered by our Overall Score, half Editor Rating and half Market Signal, the 0-100 score we build from Ahrefs and Semrush data. On the data through September 2026, Substack has the highest Market Signal in the category, followed by Mailchimp and HubSpot. That tells you which brands have the biggest footprint in search. It doesn't tell you which one fits your list, which is why your own numbers matter more.

Deliverability rules apply whichever tool you pick

Since February 1, 2024, Gmail has required every sender to authenticate with SPF or DKIM, send over TLS and keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. If you send more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts, the bar rises: SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your sending domain, one-click unsubscribe on marketing messages, and a visible unsubscribe link in the body. Google recommends keeping spam rates below 0.1% to leave yourself room.

No platform can do all of this for you, because the DNS records live on your domain. What you can judge during a trial is how much help the platform gives you. Does it walk you through adding DKIM for your own domain? Does it show whether authentication is passing? Does it add one-click unsubscribe to campaigns by default? If authenticating your domain feels like filing a support ticket, take that as a preview of the rest of the experience.

Run the trial like a real migration

A trial with a sample list and a template email tells you very little. Use it to rebuild one real piece of your program.

Import your actual list, unsubscribes included, and see how the platform counts them on its billing page. Rebuild your welcome sequence or your most important automation. Send a test campaign to a few personal Gmail and Outlook addresses and see which folder it lands in. Then export the list again to confirm you can leave with your data, tags and consent fields intact.

Finally, price the next tier up, not the plan you start on. Your list will grow and your tier will grow with it. A tool that costs a few dollars less today can cost more in a year if its tiers jump steeply or it bills for contacts you'd never mail.