Across the dataset

Free plan limits across six email platforms

Every free tier has two ceilings and the pricing pages tend to advertise only one of them. How many contacts it holds is the number in the marketing. How much it will send is the number that decides whether the free plan is a product or a trial. On one vendor here those two answers are 100,000 contacts and under one send to the whole list a month.

Snapshot 3, 14 September 2026. Six vendors, read from their own pricing and quota pages.

The two ceilings, side by side

Prices are compiled from public vendor pages and can lag behind a change. Cells marked Der are calculated from published rules and cells marked Est are rough figures. Neither is an invoice or a quote, so confirm with the vendor before you spend.

Vendor	Free plan	Contacts held	Emails allowed	Sends to the whole list	What else it limits
BrevoPer send, capped contacts	FreeVer	100,000	300 a day	under 1	Storage is the generous part and sending is not. Brevo holds 100,000 contacts for nothing, which is more than any paid plan below the 20,000 send band allows, and removing the daily send cap is the main thing Starter buys.source checked 9 September 2026
KitPer contact	NewsletterVer	10,000	unlimited	unlimited	No visual automations or email sequences. Sends, forms and landing pages are unlimited, so what usually forces a Kit user onto a paid plan is the first automation or sequence rather than the subscriber ceiling.source checked 26 September 2026
beehiivPer contact	LaunchVer	2,500	unlimited	unlimited	No ad network, paid subscriptions or automations. Sends are unlimited, so the free plan is limited by the feature set and the 2,500 subscriber ceiling and by nothing else.source checked 8 September 2026
MailchimpPer contact	FreeVer	250	500 a month, 250 a day	2	The send allowance is the tighter of the two limits. 500 emails a month, and no more than 250 in a day, is two campaigns to a full 250 contact list.source checked 8 September 2026
MailerLitePer contact	FreeVer	250	2,500 a month	10	The cut landed with the paid reprice on the same day. Passing 250 active subscribers locks campaigns and automations on a free account until the list comes back down or the account goes paid.source checked 4 October 2026
ActiveCampaignPer contact	NoneVer	n/a	no free plan	n/a	There is no free plan to limit. ActiveCampaign publishes no free tier, so the entry price is the floor.source checked 8 September 2026

Two ceilings decide whether a free plan is usable: how many contacts it holds and how much it will send. The last column divides the send allowance by the contact ceiling and rounds down, so it reads as whole sends to the full list in a month, with a daily cap converted at 30 days. No vendor publishes that figure. It is arithmetic on the two columns before it, so it is derived by definition.

The biggest free list is not the most useful one

Largest free list: 100,000; Brevo, allowing 300 a day, which is under one send to a full list that size in a month
Largest weekly capable: 10,000; Kit Newsletter, allowing unlimited sends, with no automations or email sequences
Cheapest step out of free: $9; Brevo Starter at the 500 contact breakpoint

Brevo will hold 100,000 contacts for nothing, which is ten times the next largest free plan here. It will also send 300 a day, which comes to 9,000 emails a month. One campaign to a full list that size needs 100,000 emails, so the free plan cannot deliver a single campaign a month, let alone a weekly newsletter. The storage number is real and it is not the number that matters.

Run the same arithmetic on the others and the ranking inverts. Mailchimp holds 250 contacts and allows 500 emails a month, which is two sends to the full list. MailerLite holds the same 250 and allows 2,500 emails, which is ten. Kit and beehiiv do not meter sends at all, so their contact ceilings are the only limit and a daily newsletter costs the same as a quarterly one, namely nothing.

That is why the table above carries a third column that no vendor publishes. It is the send allowance divided by the contact ceiling, rounded down, and it is the closest thing to a single honest measure of a free tier.

What the step out of free costs

The cheapest paid cell each vendor sells at the point where its free plan runs out, read straight from the price table.

Vendor and plan	Monthly	Confidence	Note
Brevo Starter	$9	Derived	Starter on the 5,000 send band, which is the cheapest way to remove the daily cap and also drops stored contacts to 500.
Kit Creator	$139	Verified	Creator at the same 10,000 subscribers the free plan reaches, so this is the price of automations and sequences rather than the price of the list.
beehiiv Scale	$69	Verified	Scale at the same 2,500 subscribers the free plan reaches, so this is what the monetisation features cost rather than what the capacity costs.
Mailchimp Essentials	$13	Verified	Essentials at the 500 contact stop, which is the first Mailchimp cell recorded.
MailerLite Comfort	$12	Verified	Comfort at the 500 subscriber stop, which is the cheapest paid entry of the contact billed vendors here. Brevo Starter is cheaper at 9 dollars, but that is a send volume band rather than a subscriber tier.
ActiveCampaign Starter	$19	Derived	Starter at the 1,000 contact tier, which is the lowest stop the ladder sells and is what a 500 contact list pays.

These are not the same list size, because free plans stop in different places. Mailchimp, MailerLite, Brevo and ActiveCampaign are priced at the 500 contact breakpoint because their free ceiling sits below it. Kit and beehiiv are priced at the breakpoint their free plan reaches, so those two rows are the cost of the features rather than the cost of the capacity.

Two of these free plans are in the price table and four are not

SideBySend records prices at eight fixed list sizes starting at 500 contacts. A free plan only appears as cells when its ceiling reaches that first breakpoint, which is true of Kit and beehiiv. Their free rows read as free up to the ceiling and then as not sold, so the shape of the free plan is visible in the table itself.

The other four are described here rather than priced there. Mailchimp and MailerLite both cut their free plans to 250 contacts, Mailchimp by December 2025 and MailerLite in 2026, which is below the smallest breakpoint. Brevo caps by the day, and a daily cap cannot be placed at a monthly breakpoint. ActiveCampaign publishes no free tier at all. Leaving those out of the price cells rather than inventing a row for them is the reason this page exists.

The largest free ceiling recorded as cells is 10,000 subscribers on Kit Newsletter, and the next is 2,500 on beehiiv Launch.

Both 250 contact ceilings arrived about six months apart

Mailchimp and MailerLite ran free plans at 500 contacts until recently. Mailchimp halved its to 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends by December 2025, as its own pricing page archived on 22 December 2025 shows. MailerLite halved its to 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails in June 2026, on the same day it repriced and renamed both paid plans. Neither change was loud, and a guide written in 2025 describes free plans that are twice the size of the ones on sale now.

The MailerLite cut hit the send allowance harder than the contact ceiling. A 250 subscriber list went from 48 possible campaigns a month to 10, which turned a free plan that could run a weekly newsletter into a place to try the product. That change has its own page, as does the Mailchimp sequence.