Free and cheapest email marketing platforms compared: what each free tier actually allows before it stops you sending
A free tier is a business model, not a gift. Three models dominate, and the limit that ends the free ride is different at every vendor, so read the cap rather than the price.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 21 October 2026
Every free email tier is paid for by something, and the thing it is paid for by is the limit that stops you. Three models run this market: a free tier capped on contacts, a free tier capped on sending, and a free tier that carries the vendor's own branding on your email. Find which model a vendor uses and you know in advance how the free plan will end, which is the only useful thing to know about it.
The three free models, and how each one ends
| Model | How it ends | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Capped on contacts | Your list grows past the ceiling and sending stops | A short list mailed often |
| Capped on sending | A big campaign uses the month's allowance in one send | A longer list mailed rarely |
| Branding in the footer | It does not end. You pay to remove the vendor's name | Anyone who does not mind the footer |
A fourth model exists at the cheap end rather than the free end: pay per thousand emails with no monthly fee. It is the cheapest route at volume and the least friendly to set up, because it is sold as sending infrastructure rather than as marketing software.
What each free and cheap option publishes, read on 21 October 2026
- Klaviyo publishes the most precisely bounded free plan in the category: up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, plus five dollars of mobile messages, with full email support for the first 60 days only and sending restricted once either limit is passed. It states openly that you may stay on it indefinitely below those limits.
- Brevo publishes a free forever plan with no credit card needed, then a first paid tier set at from 5,000 emails a month. It also publishes removal of its own footer branding as a tier feature, which tells you exactly what the free plan is paid for by.
- beehiiv publishes unlimited email sends on its free plan, capped instead at 2,500 subscribers with one team seat, one guest author and one publication. For a newsletter sending often to a modest list, that is the most generous published sending allowance here.
- MailerLite publishes a free trial route into paid plans where every paid plan carries the full feature set, with unlimited monthly emails and unlimited user seats, so the cheap plan is not a feature stripped one.
- Mailchimp publishes a basic free plan you can downgrade to at any time, and states that overages apply if the contact or email send limit is exceeded, which is the sentence to model before you rely on the cheap end of its ladder.
- Amazon SES prices per account per region per month rather than by plan and is the cheapest route at genuine volume. Its deliverability add on publishes its own limits by tier, one domain, one dedicated address and five seed list tests at the lower level against five domains, twelve addresses and twenty five tests above it, which is the fairest way to compare it with a marketing platform.
Where one beats the rest on a published fact: beehiiv on sending allowance, Klaviyo on the clarity of the cap, Brevo on getting started with no card at all, MailerLite on not gating features by tier, and Amazon SES on cost per thousand once you are past a few hundred thousand emails a month.
What a free plan should never cost you
- Your own sending domain authentication. If a free tier cannot authenticate your domain, your mail arrives worse, and that is more expensive than a subscription.
- Your export. Check you can get contacts out with subscribed status, source and consent date before you put a list in.
- The suppression list. Unsubscribes and complaints must be stored and honoured, and exportable, or a future migration will mail somebody who left.
- A working unsubscribe. The legal floor in the United States is the CAN SPAM Act, which requires a working unsubscribe and accurate header and subject information whatever you paid for the tool.
Where a free tier is for a reader paid newsletter rather than a business list, the three business models behind the free offer are set out in free newsletter platforms and what each free tier is paid for by. For the inbox placement work that decides whether any of this arrives, read email marketing deliverability, list health and the flows that earn.
What people ask about free email tools
Is a free plan enough to start properly?
Yes, for the first few hundred contacts, as long as you can authenticate your own domain on it. At that size the switching cost is low, so choose quickly and spend the saved time on the welcome sequence.
What is genuinely the cheapest at ten thousand contacts?
It depends entirely on sending frequency, which is why the models matter more than the headline. Price your own numbers at today, double and five times against a contact capped vendor and a volume capped one, and one of the two will be obviously cheaper for your pattern.
Do free tiers hurt deliverability?
The tier does not, your list hygiene does. Authenticate the domain, use a subdomain for marketing mail, send to your most engaged contacts first, and keep the unsubscribe obvious.
Can I import a list I bought?
No. Bought lists produce complaints and spam trap hits that follow your domain, and most providers close accounts for it. The first thousand contacts you collect yourself will outperform ten thousand bought ones.
The free check that is not an email tool
Since this page is about what you can get without paying, here is one more free thing worth doing in the same hour, and it is deliberately not an email product. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews the question your buyer would ask, which is who to use for what you sell, and write down the names that come back. That answer is built from reviews, directories, roundups and forum threads, so no email platform affects it and no email report contains it.
We do not sell email software, and nothing on this page suggests buying us instead of one. The adjacent category we are in is measuring that assistant answer, and on the criterion used above, the published cap that ends a free offer, AI Knows Us publishes a scan on your own domain that needs no account at all, asking five real buyer questions on two AI apps, with the paid lanes starting at a United States price rendered on the pricing page. Where a rival's free offer is larger, say it plainly: Profound publishes fifty prompts run daily for seven days on tryprofound.com/pricing, read 21 October 2026, which is a bigger free run than ours, and it publishes tracking across up to nine answer engines against our five.
Do the free email tier and the free assistant check in the same afternoon. One tells you whether you can afford to mail your list; the other tells you whether anybody is being pointed at you in the first place.
Free tiers behave the same way right across marketing software, and the lesson transfers: the cap is the product decision. Where a free tier stops across the wider toolset is mapped in the free marketing and SEO tools compared, and where a free tier stops.