MailerLite Review (2026): Cheap, Capable, and Half the Free Plan It Was

Any MailerLite review written before the middle of 2026 is describing a different product, so the date on this one matters. On 16 June 2026 MailerLite reduced its free plan from 500 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails to 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails. That is half the list allowance and four fifths of the send allowance removed in a single change, and it takes the platform's best-known feature off the table for almost everyone who used to rely on it.

What survives the change is still worth having. MailerLite's paid tiers remain the cheapest serious plans in this category, its automation builder is better than the price suggests, and the way it behaves when you hit a limit is more considerate than most. But it is now a paid product with a trial attached, and it should be evaluated as one.

What MailerLite costs in 2026

Read from the pricing page on 19 September 2026.

• Free — 250 active subscribers, 2,500 emails a month. Two user seats, three automations, three forms, one landing page, one website of up to five pages, one digital product, the HTML editor and pop-ups.
• Comfort — from $12 a month, or $10.80 a month billed annually, a 10% reduction. Monthly send allowance of ten times the ceiling of your subscriber tier.
• Power — from $25 a month, or $22.50 a month billed annually. Unlimited monthly emails, subject to a fair use policy.
• Enterprise — quoted individually, aimed at lists above 200,000 subscribers.

Both paid tiers are subscriber-metered, so those figures are entry rungs rather than flat rates. The same caveat applies here as everywhere on this site's best newsletter platforms comparison: what you will pay at your list size lives in a calculator, and no comparison table should pretend otherwise.

The free plan, before and after

It is worth laying the change out precisely, because the shape of it tells you what MailerLite now wants the free tier to do.

• Subscribers — 500 before the change, 250 after.
• Monthly emails — 12,000 before the change, 2,500 after.

Notice that the send allowance fell much harder than the subscriber allowance. At 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails you could write to your whole list twice a week and have room left over. At 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails you can write to your whole list ten times a month, which sounds generous until you realise the subscriber cap is what binds first for anyone actually growing.

The compensation, according to MailerLite's own explanation of the change, is access to more of the professional tooling at the free tier. That is a real trade rather than a pure reduction. But a plan you outgrow in the second month is a trial, and the honest way to read the new free tier is as a fourteen-day evaluation that happens to have no expiry date.

What happens when you cross a line

This is where MailerLite behaves considerably better than the category average, and it deserves saying clearly.

Exceed the subscriber cap and campaigns pause, automations pause, and subscriber intake pauses — manual additions, API calls and integrations alike. Exceed the monthly send allowance and campaign and automation sending pauses until you upgrade or the allowance resets next month.

What does not happen is as important. Nothing is deleted. Your subscriber data stays where it is. And you are not charged automatically for crossing a line: an upgrade is something you choose, not something that arrives on your card because your list grew while you were asleep.

Compare that with the alternative model, where exceeding a cap silently moves you up a tier and you find out on the invoice. MailerLite's approach costs you sends in the short term and costs you nothing you did not agree to, which is the right way round. The wider pattern of what free plans do at their ceiling is examined in free newsletter plans and the caps that end them.

The send allowance, which is the real constraint on Comfort

Comfort's monthly email allowance is ten times the ceiling of your subscriber tier. On the up-to-1,000-subscriber tier, that is 10,000 sends a month.

Work that out against a real schedule. A weekly newsletter to 1,000 people is roughly 4,300 sends a month and sits comfortably inside the allowance. A twice-weekly letter is around 8,600 and is still fine. A daily brief is about 30,000 and is nowhere near — you need Power, at $25 a month or $22.50 annually, where sends are unlimited subject to fair use.

That multiplier is the single most useful number for deciding which MailerLite tier you need, and it is more informative than any feature list, because features can be worked around and a hard send ceiling cannot. Divide your intended monthly sends by your subscriber count: if the answer is above ten, Comfort is the wrong plan regardless of what else it includes.

Automation at this price

The reason to consider MailerLite at all, once the free plan has stopped being a reason, is that Comfort includes automation that competitors reserve for tiers two or three times the price.

Kit withholds visual automations and email sequences from its free plan entirely and charges $33 a month at the entry tier to unlock them. MailerLite includes automation workflows on Comfort at $12. For a small business sending a welcome series, an abandoned-signup nudge and a monthly letter, that is the same job at a third of the cost.

What you give up for the saving is ecosystem. MailerLite's integration catalogue is smaller, its audience-segmentation model is less expressive than Kit's tagging, and there is no built-in advertising marketplace of the kind beehiiv runs. For a straightforward list this is invisible. For a complex stack it is not.

What is included beyond the email

MailerLite has quietly become more than a sending tool, and the free tier is where that is easiest to see: even at 250 subscribers it includes one website of up to five pages, one landing page, three forms, three automations and one digital product. That is a complete small operation — a signup page, a list, a welcome sequence and something to sell — squeezed into a plan that costs nothing.

Whether you want those pieces from your email platform is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one. A five-page website inside your list tool is convenient while it is small and awkward once it is not, because moving a site is harder than moving a list and you will have made the platform stickier than you intended. If you already have a website, ignore the builder and treat Comfort as what it is: an automation and sending plan at a price nobody else matches.

Who should actually use it

MailerLite suits three situations well. A small business with a list under a few thousand that needs automation and does not need a monetisation platform. A newsletter that sends weekly or fortnightly and wants the lowest possible standing cost. And anyone who has outgrown a genuinely free tier elsewhere and is choosing the cheapest place to land.

It suits two situations badly. Daily senders, for the reason set out above — Comfort's multiplier simply does not accommodate them. And anyone whose plan depends on staying free, because the plan that would have supported that ended in June.

The rest of this site's rankings, including where MailerLite sits against platforms that still give away thousands of subscribers, are on the best newsletter platforms rate card. If the price is what brought you here, MailerLite remains the cheapest way to run a real automation workflow in this category, and that has not changed.