Pricing models
Per contact vs per send
Five of the six vendors tracked here bill on the size of the list. Brevo bills on the number of emails sent. That single difference decides who is cheap for a big quiet list and who is cheap for a small busy one.
Who bills on what
- Per contact
- 5
- Mailchimp, MailerLite, Kit, beehiiv, ActiveCampaign
- Per send
- 1
- Brevo, with contact caps attached to each volume band
- Send assumption
- 4 a month
- one weekly campaign to the whole list, nothing else
Why the two models cannot be lined up without an assumption
A per contact vendor charges the same whether you send once a month or twenty times, up to the send allowance attached to the tier. A per send vendor charges by volume, so a 50,000 contact list that mails once a quarter costs almost nothing and a 2,000 contact list that mails daily costs a lot.
Placing Brevo at a contact breakpoint therefore requires a stated send frequency. SideBySend assumes 4 sends per contact per month, which is one weekly campaign and nothing else. Add a welcome sequence, a re engagement flow or transactional mail and the real band is higher than the table says.
This is the single largest assumption in the dataset, which is why it lives on its own page rather than in a footnote.
Brevo also caps contacts, which breaks the clean story
Since October 2025 the volume band you buy also sets how many contacts you may store.
| List size | Plan | Monthly | Confidence | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 contacts | Standard | $35 | Derived | Forced onto the 10,000 send band by the 1,500 contact cap, not by send volume. |
| 2,500 contacts | Standard | $49 | Estimate | 15,000 send band. Its price is not published on readable pages, so this sits between the 10,000 stop of 35 dollars and the 20,000 stop of 65. |
| 5,000 contacts | Standard | $65 | Verified | 20,000 send band. |
| 25,000 contacts | Standard | $129 | Verified | 100,000 send band. |
What that does to a comparison
At 500 contacts, Brevo Standard is $18 and Mailchimp Essentials is $13, so the contact billed vendor wins on price at the very bottom.
At 25,000 contacts it flips hard. Brevo Standard is $129 against Mailchimp Essentials at $270, because a weekly send to 25,000 contacts is only 100,000 emails a month and Brevo prices that band cheaply.
Send more often and that advantage disappears. Three sends a week to 25,000 contacts is 300,000 emails a month, which pushes Brevo above its published bands and into the interpolated part of the table.
Brevo in full
| Plan | 500 | 1k | 2.5k | 5k | 10k | 25k | 50k | 100k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $9Ver | $17Der | $25Est | $29Ver | $39Ver | $69Ver | n/aNot | n/aNot |
| Standardused in the cross vendor table | $18Ver | $35Der | $49Est | $65Ver | $75Ver | $129Ver | $209Est | $339Est |
Billing model tag: Per send, capped contacts. Source: Brevo pricing page, checked 8 September 2026.
What counts as a billable contact varies too
Even among the per contact vendors the definition moves. ActiveCampaign bills accounts opened on or after 3 November 2025 for unsubscribed, bounced and unconfirmed contacts. Mailchimp counts unsubscribed contacts until they are archived, and counts the same person twice across two audiences. MailerLite and beehiiv count inactive subscribers until they are deleted. Kit counts active unique subscribers only.
So two vendors quoting the same price for 10,000 contacts can produce different bills for the same list, because they disagree on what 10,000 means.