Every newsletter platform runs a meter. Read it before you load the list.

What this counter is for

Newsletter platforms are unusually hard to compare, and it is not because the products are complicated. It is because the price is a function of a number that changes every week.

Everything else in software has a rate you can write down. Newsletter pricing has a staircase, advertised at its lowest rung, with the rest of it behind a slider. Add a revenue share that nobody puts on the landing page and a subscriber definition that decides whether your departures keep costing you money, and you have a category where the sticker price tells you almost nothing about the bill.

So this site is organised around four questions and asks them of everything.

• What does the meter count? Every contact ever collected, or only the people still receiving your mail.
• Where does the price step? Metered plans jump rather than climb, and the jump arrives without a warning.
• What comes out of reader payments? A percentage of subscription revenue is a second pricing model, and it is usually the expensive one.
• What can you carry out? Addresses, archives, paying subscribers and the URLs that earned your links.

How the figures here are produced

Every price, cap and percentage on this site was read from the vendor's own pricing or support pages and recorded with the date it was read and the address it came from. Where a figure could not be confirmed at source, it is described as unconfirmed rather than dressed up in a table cell.

That last rule costs this site several satisfying comparisons. Most metered platforms publish only their entry-tier rate and put everything above it in a calculator, and the third-party sites that claim to have transcribed those calculators contradict one another. Rather than pick a number and sound authoritative, the pages here describe the shape of each curve and tell you to take the reading yourself.

Nothing here is a benchmark. No send speeds were timed, no inbox-placement tests were run, and no open-rate figures are presented as fact — the reasoning is in what a platform can and cannot promise about deliverability.

Where to start

If you want the short answer, the rate card weighs six platforms and tells you which four things actually separate them. If you have already narrowed it down, the beehiiv review and the Kit review go further than a comparison table can.

And if what you actually want to know is what a paid newsletter costs to run, start with who takes a cut of your reader payments. It is the most expensive line on the invoice and the one most often left out of the comparison.