Email Marketing for Creators: What 6 Tools Cost by List Size

Picking an email tool as a creator comes down to two questions: what it costs at the list size you will actually reach, and whether your emails land in the inbox once you send them. This guide answers both. It prices Kit, beehiiv, MailerLite, Mailchimp, Substack and Buttondown at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers from each vendor’s own pages, rechecked on October 12, 2026, then lays out the Gmail and Yahoo rules most roundups skip.

What changed since the first version: beehiiv dropped its Launch, Scale and Max plans for Free, Lite, Pro and Enterprise, Kit’s full price slider is now in the table, and MailerLite’s cheaper Comfort plan is priced next to Power.

One disclosure. I grew a YouTube channel past 130,000 subscribers as a one-person operation, but I do not run any of these six tools at scale today. Every tool claim below comes from the vendor’s pricing page or help center, never from “I tested”.

Why an owned list is the only asset that keeps working

Two things taught me this. The first was YouTube: growing a channel past 130,000 subscribers alone means watching an algorithm decide, week after week, who gets to see your work. Rented reach behaves like a treadmill. Step off and it stops.

The second was an ebook. I sold it with paid ads, and the sales were real for exactly as long as the ads ran. When the ads stopped, so did the sales, and I shut the product down. The full post-mortem is in how I’d sell an ebook without ads today. What stuck: I had buyers but no way to reach them again, so every sale was a first sale.

An email list fixes both problems because it is the one audience asset you can carry out the door. “Owned” is a technical claim here. You can export the subscriber file as a CSV and import it somewhere else, and every tool in this article allows that. Starting on a free plan is safe for the same reason. The decision is reversible.

What six tools cost at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers (as of October 2026)

Prices come from each vendor’s pricing page, pricing slider or help center, read on October 12, 2026. Kit and beehiiv were read by stepping each slider in both billing modes. Where a vendor shows a number only inside an interactive control that could not be read, the cell says “slider only” instead of borrowing a figure from another blog. The two right-hand columns matter more than the sticker price.

Prices as of October 2026, USD. MailerLite takes 10% off for annual billing. Kit’s yearly toggle says “save 17%”; beehiiv’s says yearly billing saves “up to 20%”.

How to read this. The cheapest column is not the point; the billing basis is. Mailchimp is the only tool here that keeps charging for people who already left, unless you archive them yourself. MailerLite counts anyone who was active at any point in the billing cycle, so deleting people mid-month does not lower that month’s bill. Kit and beehiiv bill on active subscribers and move you up a tier automatically; Kit’s billing help says upgrades are prorated, and on annual plans the difference is charged right away.

Two quirks of the sliders change the math at the edges. Kit has no 2,500 stop: it jumps from 1,000 to 3,000, where Creator costs $59 a month. beehiiv has a 2,500 stop, which is also where its free plan ends. If Kit and beehiiv are your two finalists, the full five-size breakdown, plan by plan and feature by feature, is in Kit vs beehiiv.

What you pay the month you outgrow each free plan

Free tiers get all the attention. The first bill after them is where these plans really differ. The next price step is the slider stop just above the free limit, because each tier price covers lists “up to” that number.

Prices as of October 2026.

Kit’s free plan lasts longest and ends with the biggest step: $0 one month, $169 the next, because 10,001 subscribers sits in the 15,000 tier. Upgrading a little earlier is cheaper than being pushed. At exactly 10,000, Creator is $139 a month or $1,390 a year. So if automations are worth paying for at all, decide around 9,000 rather than at the wall. Kit counts only unique, active subscribers, so removing people who have not opened in months also delays the step.

beehiiv’s step comes four times sooner. At 2,501 subscribers you are paying the 5,000-subscriber Lite price. MailerLite and Mailchimp end their free plans so early that the question is not whether you will pay but how soon. Substack never sends a bill, and takes its 10% from paid subscriptions instead.

Which one, if you are a…

This is a decision list, not a ranking. Each pick ties back to a cell in one of the two tables above.

1. YouTuber or video-first creator, list as a backstop. Start on Kit’s free plan. Ten thousand subscribers with unlimited sends and landing pages costs nothing, and a channel converting one viewer in a hundred takes a long time to fill that. The trade-off is a single basic automation, which is enough for a welcome sequence. When you do pay, plan the move before the 15,000-tier jump described above.
2. Newsletter-first writer whose emails are the product. beehiiv if you plan to sell sponsorships or paid tiers and want 0% taken from subscription revenue; Substack if you want zero setup and accept 10% plus Stripe on whatever readers pay. The break-even depends on your total list, not just paying readers. At $10 a month per paid reader, Substack’s 10% is $1 a reader. With up to 1,000 total subscribers, beehiiv Lite costs $49 a month on yearly billing, so Substack is cheaper below 49 paying readers. At 5,000 total subscribers Lite is $95, and the line moves to 95 paying readers. The longer version is in Substack vs beehiiv.
3. Seller of digital products or courses. Kit or MailerLite, and the choice is a fee question. Kit charges 3.5% + $0.30 per sale, of which it says it keeps 0.6%. MailerLite takes 0% commission, with Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30 on top. On a $20 product that is $1.00 against $0.88. Kit gives more automation depth on its cheapest paid plan; MailerLite’s Comfort plan caps you at 50 active automations and a send limit of ten times your tier ceiling, which a launch week can burn through. Kit vs MailerLite works through both at four list sizes. Selling ebooks, I would want the send cap gone before the launch, not during it.
4. App or software maker. Buttondown or MailerLite. App makers usually already have a website and a way to take payment, so the email tool’s job is a launch list, release notes and a waitlist. Buttondown is $9 a month at 1,000 subscribers and $29 at 5,000, bills active subscribers only, and sells tagging, analytics and automations as add-ons. MailerLite Comfort is $19 a month at 1,000 with visual automations and forms included. Skip Substack here; it is built around a publication, not a product.
5. Anyone who refuses to pay before revenue exists. Kit’s free plan to 10,000 or beehiiv’s to 2,500. Both let you export the CSV later. Do not start on Mailchimp’s free plan: 250 contacts and 500 sends a month is a week of growth for an active channel, and once you pay, you pay for unsubscribes too.

The six tools, one honest paragraph each

None of this is from hands-on testing. It is what the pricing pages and help centers say, read closely.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

The free Newsletter plan is the most generous starting point here: up to 10,000 active, unique subscribers, unlimited sends, unlimited forms and landing pages, and unlimited digital products and paid subscriptions. Kit’s help center says it includes one basic visual automation with one email sequence and keeps rules, integrations and RSS campaigns for paid plans. One wrinkle: the compare-plans table on the pricing page shows dashes for automations on Free, so check inside your account before you build around that one automation. Creator removes those limits at $39 a month for 1,000 subscribers, or $390 billed yearly. Pro is $79 a month at 1,000, or $66 a month on yearly billing, and adds deliverability reporting and subscriber scoring. Selling works on every plan, Free included, at 3.5% + $0.30 per sale.

beehiiv

beehiiv’s plans are now Free, Lite, Pro and Enterprise; the Launch and Scale names are gone from its pricing page and help center. Free runs to 2,500 subscribers with a website builder and landing pages, but no paid subscriptions, no automations and no custom domain. Lite adds paid subscriptions, the ad network, a referral program and up to 10 live automations for $59 a month at 1,000 subscribers, or $49 a month billed yearly. Pro, at $109 a month or $95 on yearly billing at the same size, removes beehiiv branding and lifts the automation cap. The headline that holds up on the pricing page is 0% of paid subscription and digital product revenue, with only Stripe’s fee coming off. The help center counts active subscribers across every publication in your account, not per publication.

MailerLite

MailerLite renamed its paid plans on June 16, 2026: Growing Business became Comfort and Advanced became Power. Free covers 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with three automations and one landing page. Comfort starts at $12 a month at the 500-subscriber tier and costs $19 at 1,000, $49 at 5,000 and $89 at 10,000. It comes with a send cap of ten times your tier ceiling, 50 active automations, 10 signup forms and 5 digital products. Power removes the caps for $39 at 1,000, $69 at 5,000 and $129 at 10,000. Annual billing takes 10% off. Paid newsletters and recurring subscriptions need Comfort or Power. The creator-relevant catch is the tiny free tier, so this is a tool you pay for early and cheaply rather than ride for free.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is here because people search for it, not because it fits creators. The free plan is 250 contacts and 500 sends a month with a 250-a-day cap. Essentials shows $13 a month and Standard $20 a month for the first 12 months at the 0–500 contact tier. Monthly send limits are 10 times your contact limit on Essentials and 12 times on Standard, and going over your contact limit adds a charge to your bill. The line that should decide it for a creator is in the help center: unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward your total, and only archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not. Every other tool in this table stops charging when someone leaves.

Substack

Substack is free to publish at any list size. Turn on paid subscriptions and, per its help center, Substack keeps 10% of each subscription payment, Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30 per US card payment, and Stripe Billing adds 0.7% on recurring payments. A custom domain is an optional one-time $50. Your posts, subscriber list and statistics can be exported from the publication settings as a zip file, so the lock-in argument is weaker than it sounds. What you give up is the toolset: no tags-and-automation model, and a fee that grows with your revenue instead of your list. For a writer with 300 free readers and nothing else to sell, that trade is the right one.

Buttondown

Buttondown is the minimal option, and its pricing is legible: free for 100 subscribers, then $9 a month at 1,000, $29 at 5,000, $79 at 10,000 and $139 at 20,000, billed on active subscribers only. Tagging, paid subscriptions, analytics and RSS-to-email are $9 add-ons each; automations, multiple newsletters and archives on a custom domain are $29 each. Its pricing page also notes that list prices assume at most one email a day to your whole list. The add-on model is the trade-off. A creator who needs tags, automations and paid subscriptions adds $47 a month before the subscriber tier. A developer who needs one list and an API does not.

What Gmail and Yahoo require before your emails land

This is the section most roundups shrink to “authenticate your domain”. The actual rules are public, short, and decide more about your results than the tool you pick.

Google publishes two tiers. Everyone sending to Gmail must authenticate with SPF or DKIM, have valid forward and reverse DNS (PTR) records for the sending domain or IP, send over TLS, format messages to RFC 5322, and keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Senders of roughly 5,000 or more messages a day to personal Gmail accounts face more. Both SPF and DKIM. A DMARC record, where a policy of none is allowed. The visible From domain aligned with the SPF or DKIM domain. And one-click unsubscribe on marketing and subscribed messages.

Google’s FAQ adds the parts with teeth. Bulk-sender status does not expire once earned. Unsubscribes should be honored within 48 hours. Above a 0.3% spam rate, Google offers no mitigation until you stay under it for seven straight days. And starting November 2025, Gmail says it is ramping up enforcement on non-compliant mail, including temporary and permanent rejections.

Yahoo’s list is nearly identical. SPF or DKIM for everyone. Both, plus a DMARC policy of at least p=none, for bulk senders. A working List-Unsubscribe header with one-click support, with the RFC 8058 POST method recommended, and a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the body. Unsubscribes honored within two days, and a spam rate under 0.3%.

In practice the work splits in two. The platform handles what lives on its servers: TLS, PTR records for its sending IPs, the List-Unsubscribe headers, and processing unsubscribes. The moment you put your own domain in the From line, the DNS side becomes yours: SPF and DKIM records for that domain, plus a DMARC record. If you send from a free Gmail or Yahoo address as the From, you fail the alignment rule the day you become a bulk sender. The fix is a custom sending domain, so check that your plan includes one; beehiiv, for example, lists custom domains only from Lite up. Set it up before the first send, not at 4,999 subscribers.

The one-click unsubscribe rule also settles a design argument. Burying the unsubscribe link no longer protects your list; it raises the spam rate that Google and Yahoo actually measure.

What actually moves when you switch tools

Every tool here moves a list as a CSV. Kit imports CSV files, lets you map columns to custom fields and a comma-separated tags column, and has dedicated importers for beehiiv and Mailchimp. Its export covers first name, email, created date, status, tags, location and custom fields. beehiiv exports a quick CSV or a full one with custom fields and statistics. MailerLite imports CSV or TXT files, pasted Excel columns, or a direct Mailchimp migration, and says everyone you add must have consented to marketing email from you. Mailchimp exports a zip with a separate CSV per status, tags included. Substack exports posts, subscriber list and statistics as a zip from the publication settings.

What does not move: your automations, which you rebuild, and your sending reputation on the old provider’s shared domain, which you earn again with smaller sends. Archive URLs stay behind too, unless they were on a domain you own. That last one is why the custom domain from the previous section pays twice.

Migration cost, then, is mostly your time plus the risk of a deliverability dip while the new setup earns trust. Budget an afternoon for the export and import, then a couple of weeks of smaller, steadier sends.

How I’d choose, and the one thing to do this week

If I were starting a list beside a YouTube channel today, I would take Kit’s free plan for the 10,000-subscriber runway and put it on a domain I own. Then I would price the Creator plan at around 9,000 subscribers instead of at the 10,001 wall. If the emails themselves were the product, I would compare Substack and beehiiv on my total list size, not just my paying readers. If I were selling an ebook again, I would want the send cap gone before launch week, because the last time sales depended on a channel I did not own, they stopped the day I stopped paying for it.

Whichever you pick, do this before anything else: register or reuse a domain you own, add its SPF, DKIM and DMARC records in the tool’s domain settings, and send your first email from that address. Everything else in this article is reversible. A list that lands in spam is not. Once it is sending, the list slots into the rest of a one-person stack the same way the tools in my AI tool short list do: one job each, and the rest of the tool-stack stays small.