When is a free email marketing plan enough, and what ends it?

A free email marketing plan is enough while three things fit: your list, how often you send, and the features you need. The list is the first number to check, and the caps are far apart. Mailchimp’s free plan stops at 250 contacts, MailerLite’s at 250 contacts, AWeber’s at 500 contacts, Kit’s at 10,000 contacts, and Brevo’s at 100,000 contacts.

Then check your sending. Mailchimp’s free plan allows 500 emails a month, MailerLite’s 2,500 emails a month, and AWeber’s 3,000 emails a month. Brevo caps the day instead, at 300 emails a day, and Kit’s free plan lists unlimited email broadcasts. Every one of them puts its own branding on what you send.

Which free plans fit your list?

Start with your list, because it’s the cap you can count tonight. Count everyone you’d import, not everyone you’ve ever emailed: people who unsubscribed, bounced, or haven’t heard from you in years don’t need to come along, and on some tools they count toward the cap anyway. Keep your own record of who unsubscribed, though, so they’re never added back.

• Up to 250: all five fit: Mailchimp’s, MailerLite’s, Brevo’s, Kit’s, and AWeber’s.
• Up to 500: three fit. Mailchimp’s and MailerLite’s have ended; AWeber’s, Kit’s, and Brevo’s haven’t.
• Up to 10,000: two fit, Kit’s and Brevo’s.
• Beyond that: only Brevo’s, which stores up to 100,000 contacts.

Constant Contact, the sixth tool in this guide, has no free plan; it offers a trial and then a paid plan.

If more than one plan fits your list, your sending decides it.

Will your sending fit?

The second cap is how much you can send, and the free plans measure it three different ways. Here, “one email a week” is priced so a month with five sends fits (five sends to every contact), the same assumption our cost-by-list-size page uses.

• A monthly allowance. Mailchimp’s free plan gives you 500 emails a month, MailerLite’s 2,500 emails a month, and AWeber’s 3,000 emails a month. Each send to each person counts as one, so divide the allowance by your list to see how many newsletters a month you get. On Mailchimp’s, a full list of 250 contacts gets two a month; a weekly newsletter fits only if your list is half that size. On MailerLite’s and AWeber’s, a full list gets a weekly newsletter with room to spare.
• A daily cap. Brevo sets its free plan’s sending limit by the day, not the month: 300 emails a day, and sends you don’t use don’t carry over to the next day. That’s fine for a small list. With more than that, one newsletter can’t reach everyone on the same day: Brevo’s help center says the rest of the list gets it only when you resend it, up to the cap each day. For a business that announces a sale or an event, that’s a real limit.
• No stated cap. Kit’s free plan lists unlimited email broadcasts, so for most small businesses its list cap is the only number that matters.

Which features end a free plan?

Often it’s not a cap at all. It’s a feature you decide you want.

• Automation. A welcome email that goes out on its own, or a short series for new subscribers. Mailchimp’s free plan has no automation flows. Kit’s has no visual automations or email sequences, though it can deliver a freebie file automatically when someone signs up. AWeber’s allows 1 workflow automation, MailerLite’s 3 active automations, up to 5 steps each, and Brevo’s covers automations for up to 2,000 contacts.
• Your branding, not theirs. Every free plan here adds the vendor’s branding to your emails, and removing it is a paid feature or add-on.
• A second person. MailerLite’s free plan has 2 users; Mailchimp’s, Brevo’s, and Kit’s have 1 user each.
• Scheduling. Mailchimp’s free plan can’t schedule a send for later; you press send when you want it out.
• More than one list. AWeber’s free plan holds 1 list. If you keep customers and wholesale buyers apart, that ends it.

Say you run a two-person bakery with about 400 email addresses from your loyalty cards, and you’d like to send a weekly specials email and a monthly newsletter. In a month with five specials emails that’s six sends to 400 people: 2,400 sends. Before you import, check that those customers agreed to get emails from you; if the loyalty card only asked for an address, ask them at the counter or in a short note first, and import the ones who say yes.

Mailchimp’s and MailerLite’s free plans are out on import, because your list is over 250 contacts. Brevo’s holds your list easily, but its cap of 300 emails a day means every specials email would reach part of your list today and the rest only when you resend it the next day, which is awkward when the special is today’s bread. AWeber’s fits both numbers: 500 contacts and 3,000 emails a month, with room for one automated welcome email. Kit’s fits too, with no send cap, but no welcome series: email sequences are a paid feature there.

Only one of you needs to log in to send. If the welcome email matters to you, AWeber’s free plan is the one that lasts; if it doesn’t, Kit’s gives you far more room to grow your list before you pay.

Who should stay on a free plan, and for how long?

Stay free while three things hold:

1. Your list sits well under the cap, with room for the signups you expect over the next few months. At three quarters of a cap, one event or one busy season takes you past it.
2. Your sending fits the allowance at the rhythm you actually keep, not the rhythm you plan to keep.
3. Nothing you need sits behind the paywall. Usually that’s an automated welcome series, or removing the vendor’s branding for a business that sells on its look.

How long: as long as those three hold. These are free plans, not trials; AWeber calls its free plan lifetime access and Brevo calls its free forever, and on all five what ends the plan is a cap or a feature, not a date. Our view is that you look again each time your list grows by a quarter, and whenever you add a new kind of email to your routine.

What the first paid step costs

The bill that matters is the one at the size that ended your free plan. Here are the first paid plans side by side, then what each one means for you. Each figure is the whole monthly bill, billed monthly.

• Mailchimp, at a list just past its free cap: Essentials is $13 a month up to 500 contacts. The Mailchimp pricing page shows every band. When Mailchimp’s free plan stops being enough weighs paying against moving.
• MailerLite, at the same point: Comfort is $12 a month up to 500 subscribers and $19 a month up to 1,000.
• AWeber, past 500 contacts: Lite is $25 a month up to 1,000 subscribers. If a second automation or list is what ended it while your list is still within the free cap, Lite is $15 a month up to 500 subscribers.
• Kit, usually for automations rather than list size: Creator is $39 a month up to 1,000 subscribers.
• Brevo, usually for the daily cap: Starter has no daily sending limit and is priced by the emails you send each month, but each tier also caps how many contacts you can store: 500 at 5,000 emails; 1,500 at 10,000; 2,500 at 15,000; up to 500,000 from 20,000. A list of 1,000 sent one email a week needs the 10,000-email tier, at $17 a month.

Constant Contact has no free plan to outgrow; its Lite plan is $12 a month up to 500 contacts. What email marketing costs at 500, 1,000, 2,500, and 5,000 contacts puts every tool side by side once you’re paying.

What not to pay for yet

• A paid plan before a cap stops you. Paying “to be ready” buys months of a bill for a limit you haven’t reached.
• A bigger list than you email. On most of these tools you pay for every contact you store. Leave the people you’ll never email out of the import.
• Automation you haven’t written yet. If you don’t have the welcome series drafted, you don’t need the plan that sends it.
• Yearly billing on your first paid plan. Pay monthly until you’ve sent from the tool for a few months and know your list’s real growth.

Every free plan, cap by cap

What each free plan includes and exactly what ends it, as each vendor states it.

Mailchimp

MailerLite

Brevo

Kit

AWeber

Your next step

Pick the free plan whose caps you’ll hit last. This week, write down three numbers: the contacts you’d import (after taking out the people you’d never email), the emails you send to each of them in a typical month, and whether you need anything to go out on its own. Match them against the caps above and start the plan with the most room on all three: Mailchimp’s, MailerLite’s, Brevo’s, Kit’s, or AWeber’s free plan. If you’re still deciding whether you need an email tool at all, can you send a customer newsletter from Gmail or Outlook? answers that first.