The best newsletter platforms, weighed on what they will cost you at ten thousand subscribers

Choosing between the best newsletter platforms is not really a choice between editors. All six here let you write a paragraph, add an image and press send, and the differences in how that feels are a week's worth of habit. The choice you are actually making is about a meter — what it counts, how steeply it steps, and what it does to money your readers pay you.

That is hard to shop for, because none of it is on the landing page. Metered pricing is advertised at its cheapest rung — the thousand-subscriber tier — and the rungs above live inside a slider no comparison site can quote reliably. Revenue share is quieter still, and in the most expensive case here it is not a monthly fee at all but a standing percentage of everything your readers pay.

So this page is organised around the meter rather than the feature grid. Prices were read off each platform's own pricing page on 19 September 2026, and a figure sitting behind a slider is described by its shape rather than invented.

How these six were weighed

Four questions, applied identically to every platform.

1. What does the meter count? Every contact ever collected, or only those you still send to? That is the difference between a bill growing with your work and one growing with your archive.
2. Where does the price step? Metered plans are staircases, not slopes, and you cross a riser without deciding to.
3. What comes out of reader payments? A platform charging nothing monthly and ten per cent of subscription revenue is not free. It is priced by your success.
4. What can you carry out? Addresses, but also archives, paying-subscriber records and the URLs your posts live at.

Nothing here is a benchmark. No send speeds were timed and no open rates are quoted as fact — the reasons are in what a platform can and cannot promise about deliverability. Judgements are assessments of published terms, the only part of this market anyone can verify. Signing up through some links below pays this site a commission; it has moved nobody up or down the order.

The rate card

beehiiv — the one whose free tier is a real plan

beehiiv's Launch plan carries up to 2,500 active subscribers with unlimited sends, and that combination is unusual enough to be the headline. Most free tiers here are trials wearing a plan's clothing: a few hundred addresses, a send allowance exhausted in the third week. Launch could run a small publication for a year — newsletter, website, podcast hosting, campaign analytics and API access included. The Send API is the notable exclusion.

Above that line sit two metered tiers. Scale opens at $43 a month, or $517 for a year, at the 1,000-subscriber tier; Max opens at $96 a month, or $1,151 for a year, at the same tier. Both run to a ceiling of 100,000 active subscribers, above which you are into custom Enterprise billing. Scale is where the money-making machinery lives — ad network, digital products, paid subscriptions, automations and three team seats. Max adds branding removal, audio newsletters, RSS-to-send, ten publications, unlimited seats and the Send API.

The detail that matters most is buried in a support article rather than the pricing page. beehiiv defines an active subscriber as someone you are sending to who has not unsubscribed and has not been marked inactive, and bills on that number alone. Churned addresses stop costing money. Where a platform meters total contacts, an unsubscribe is a permanent line item; here it is a reduction, and over three years that definition outweighs most feature differences on this page.

What beehiiv will not tell you in advance is what the steps cost. The structure is genuinely stepped — the support documentation confirms breaks at 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 and upward — but only the 1,000-subscriber rung is published as a number, and third-party sources disagree by enough to make quoting them dishonest. Put your real list size into the slider first.

The full assessment is in the beehiiv review; the platform is at beehiiv.

Kit — the largest free tier, with the engine removed

Kit, which spent most of its life as ConvertKit, publishes the most generous free ceiling here: 10,000 subscribers at no cost, with unlimited broadcasts, unlimited landing pages and forms, basic tagging, and the ability to sell digital products. Nothing else here comes close on subscriber count.

The catch is precise rather than sneaky. What the free plan leaves out is automation: visual automations, sequences, A/B testing, polls, branding removal, SMS, integrations and RSS campaigns all sit behind Creator, at $33 a month or $390 for the year at the 1,000-subscriber tier. Pro, at $66 a month or $790 yearly on that tier, adds engagement scoring, deliverability reporting, unlimited users and the referral system.

So Kit's free plan is a broadcasting tool, not a marketing system. If your newsletter is a letter you write and send, you may never need to leave it. If it is the front end of a business with a welcome sequence behind it, you are on Creator from the first week and the 10,000-subscriber headline was never about you.

Kit's commerce fee deserves a straight reading, being the most commonly misreported number in this category. Selling a digital product or paid subscription costs 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction on every plan including free — and Kit states that figure is inclusive of credit-card processing, with its own share being 0.6%. Against a platform that takes its percentage and leaves you to pay Stripe separately, that is materially different, and the arithmetic is in who takes a cut of your reader payments.

The long version is in the Kit review; the platform itself is at Kit.

MailerLite — cheap, capable, and much smaller than it was

MailerLite is the best-value paid entry here and the most changed. Comfort opens at $12 a month, or $10.80 paid yearly, and brings automations, forms and landing pages at a price the American platforms do not attempt. Power, at $25 a month or $22.50 annually, removes the send ceiling subject to fair use.

The change is at the bottom. On 16 June 2026 MailerLite cut its free plan from 500 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails to 250 and 2,500 — half the list allowance and four fifths of the sends, turning a credible starter plan into a trial. What happens at either line is better handled than most: campaigns, automations and intake pause, nothing is deleted, and you are not charged automatically. But a 250-address ceiling reached in month two is a ceiling, however politely enforced.

Comfort's send allowance is ten times the ceiling of your subscriber tier each month, which suits a weekly letter and a daily one much less. The full workings are in the MailerLite review, and the platform is at MailerLite.

Ghost — priced by the head, not by the send

Ghost earns a place here because its meter is shaped unlike anything else on this page. Sending is unmetered, and the counter attaches instead to people holding an account on your site, paying or not.

That makes cost per head the only sensible way to read Ghost's rates. Filled to its 1,000-account ceiling, the $29-a-month tier works out at just under three cents a head. Cross that ceiling and the next plan costs $199 a month, so arriving with 1,001 accounts means paying close to twenty cents a head — a sevenfold jump in unit cost bought by one signup. Fill that larger plan to its 10,000 allowance and you are back to roughly two cents.

Ghost is therefore cheap at the top of a tier and punishing at the bottom of the next, with a $170-a-month gap and nothing to break the fall. The entry plan at $18 a month on annual billing cannot handle paid subscriptions at all.

Where the arithmetic turns decisively in its favour is the cut: from the $29 tier upward, Ghost takes none of your reader revenue. Nine hundred committed members paying real money cost a flat $29 a month. Six thousand mostly-free readers cost $199 for the privilege of being stored. One platform, opposite verdicts, separated by a ratio most publishers never calculate.

Buttondown — priced like a tool, not a platform

Buttondown charges nothing for the first 100 subscribers, bills only on active ones, and publishes its prices as a calculator rather than a table, making it impossible to quote a tier here honestly. What it does publish is more useful than most pricing pages manage: its rates assume you send at most one email a day to your whole list. Three sends a week fits comfortably. A daily brief plus a Sunday essay does not.

Features are add-ons at $9, $29 and $79 a month rather than named tiers, so the bill is modular: tagging, paid subscriptions and analytics at the bottom rung, custom domain archives and automations in the middle, whitelabeling and teams at the top. Registered 501(c)(3) non-profits get 50% off. Buttondown publishes no revenue-share figure for paid subscriptions, and this site will not guess at one. The full assessment is in the Buttondown review.

Substack — the one with no monthly bill and the largest cut

Running a free newsletter on Substack costs nothing at all. No subscriber cap, no send allowance, no plan to choose. For a writer who wants to start this afternoon and has no interest in owning infrastructure, that is a strong offer and the reason Substack is on this page at all.

Charging for that newsletter is where the arrangement changes shape. Substack takes 10% of gross subscription revenue, and Stripe's processing sits on top at roughly 3%, leaving a publisher with close to 87% of what readers pay. No tier lowers it and the percentage never tapers.

Ten per cent of nothing is nothing, which makes this the cheapest option here for a newsletter that does not charge. Ten per cent of $430 a month in gross subscription revenue is $43 — beehiiv's entry Scale rate, where the take on those payments is zero. Past that crossing point every additional paying reader costs more on Substack than on a flat fee, permanently. Where the line falls at other list sizes is the subject of who takes a cut of your reader payments.

Substack's other cost is not financial. Your archive lives on their domain unless you attach your own, your readers are also their readers through the app, and the export hands you addresses rather than a running publication. What that migration involves is in moving a newsletter list without losing half of it.

What actually decides this

Under 2,500 subscribers with room to grow into, start on beehiiv's free tier and spend nothing. Already large and mostly free, Kit's 10,000-subscriber ceiling buys the most runway here, provided you can live without automation. Paying either way and wanting real features cheaply, MailerLite at $10.80 a month billed annually is the lowest serious rate on this page.

If you charge readers, the decision is arithmetic rather than taste: take 10% of your monthly gross subscription revenue and compare it against the flat rate of any platform here that takes 0%. Below the crossing point Substack is cheaper. Above it, permanently, it is not. And whichever you choose, export your list before you need to — the platforms that make it awkward make it awkward at exactly the moment you are in a hurry.