Kit review: ten thousand free subscribers, and the automation held just out of reach

This Kit review has to start with a name, because the rebrand still catches people out: the platform now called Kit is the one that spent most of its life as ConvertKit, and both names refer to the same accounts, the same interface and the same pricing. Anything you read about ConvertKit's subscriber-metered tiers applies here, allowing for the fact that the prices have moved since.

What Kit publishes is the most generous free ceiling on this site's best newsletter platforms comparison: up to 10,000 subscribers, at no cost, with unlimited email broadcasts, unlimited landing pages and forms, basic tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products. Four times beehiiv's free allowance, forty times MailerLite's. The question worth asking of any offer that large is what is being held back to make it work, and Kit's answer to that is unusually specific.

What Kit costs in 2026

Read from the pricing page on 19 September 2026, at the 1,000-subscriber tier.

• Free — $0. Up to 10,000 subscribers. Unlimited broadcasts, unlimited landing pages and forms, basic tagging and segmentation, sell digital products.
• Creator — $33 a month, or $390 billed yearly. Adds unlimited visual automations, unlimited email sequences, A/B testing, polls, branding removal, SMS, apps and integrations, RSS campaigns and priority support.
• Pro — $66 a month, or $790 billed yearly. Adds Subscriber Signals, engagement analytics, unlimited users, collaborative editing, Facebook custom audiences, the newsletter referral system and link editing inside broadcasts that have already been sent.

A note on the annual figures, because the advertised saving does not survive arithmetic. Creator at $33 a month is $396 across twelve months against a $390 annual price; Pro at $66 is $792 against $790. At the entry tier the yearly rate is a rounding difference rather than a discount, whatever the saving badge says. It may widen at higher tiers — but those tiers are not published, so this site will not tell you that it does.

Which brings us to the same limitation that applies to every metered platform here: $33 and $66 are the 1,000-subscriber rungs. What Kit charges at 5,000 or 10,000 subscribers is in a calculator, third-party transcriptions of it disagree, and no honest number can be put in a table. Take the reading yourself. Why this is an industry-wide habit rather than a Kit quirk is covered in why newsletter pricing is a staircase.

The free plan, and what it is actually for

Kit's free tier is not crippled so much as scoped, and the scope is coherent: it is a broadcasting tool.

You can collect addresses through unlimited forms and landing pages, tag them, segment them, write to all of them as often as you like, and sell them a digital product. That is a complete workflow for a newsletter that goes out when the writer has something to say.

What it does not include is anything automatic. No email sequences, so no welcome series that runs itself. No visual automations, so no behaviour-triggered messages. No A/B testing, no RSS campaigns, no integrations with the rest of your stack, and Kit's own branding stays on your emails.

That is a clean, legible line, and it makes the upgrade decision easy to reason about — which is more than most freemium ladders manage. If your newsletter is a letter, you may sit on the free plan at 8,000 subscribers indefinitely and never feel the constraint. If your newsletter is the top of a funnel, you will want Creator within a month and the 10,000-subscriber headline was marketing aimed at someone else. The broader comparison of what free plans withhold is in free newsletter plans and the caps that end them.

The commerce fee, read properly

Kit charges 3.5% plus 30 cents per transaction on digital products and paid subscriptions, on every plan including free. Set against Substack's 10%, that looks like a straightforward win, and it is — but the interesting part is a detail Kit states on its own pricing page and almost nobody repeats.

That 3.5% is inclusive of credit-card processing. Kit's own share of it is 0.6%.

This matters because the usual way to compare newsletter platforms on revenue share is to line up the percentages and assume processing is charged on top of all of them. On Substack it is: 10% to the platform, then roughly 3% to Stripe. On Kit the two are already combined. A platform advertising 3% that then adds processing is not cheaper than Kit's 3.5%; it is more expensive. The full comparison, including where flat-fee platforms overtake both, is in who takes a cut of your reader payments.

One fee that does deserve flagging separately: Kit's Paid Recommendations programme, where you earn by recommending other newsletters, carries a 23.5% fee on those earnings. That is a different arrangement from the commerce fee and a much larger number, and it is worth reading the terms before building a revenue line on it.

Subscriber Signals and the Pro tier

The jump from Creator to Pro doubles the bill, so it is worth being clear about what it buys.

Pro's headline additions are analytical rather than operational: Subscriber Signals and engagement scoring, which surface who is actually reading, and deliverability reporting. Alongside those sit unlimited users, collaborative editing, the newsletter referral system, and the ability to edit a link in a broadcast after it has gone out — a small feature that anyone who has ever sent a typo to 8,000 people will value more than it sounds.

Engagement data is genuinely useful on a metered platform, because knowing which subscribers are inert is the first step to deciding whether to remove them. Whether it is $33 a month more useful depends on how large the list is and whether anyone has time to act on what it says. For most newsletters under 10,000 subscribers, Creator is the right stop.

Where Kit is the wrong answer

If you want a website as well as a newsletter, Kit does not really do that. It does landing pages and forms exceptionally well, but a hosted publication with an archive is not what this tool is. Platforms that bundle a site are better placed for that.

If your monetisation plan is advertising rather than products, Kit has no equivalent of a built-in ad marketplace, and you will be arranging sponsorships yourself.

And if you need automation on day one with a list of 200 people, Kit's free tier is irrelevant to you and you are comparing $33 a month against MailerLite's $12. On that comparison, size of free ceiling does not enter into it.

The verdict

Kit's free plan is the most generous thing on this site's rate card measured by subscriber count, and the boundary around it is drawn honestly: the paid features are a coherent category rather than an arbitrary selection designed to make you cross the line early. The commerce fee is better than the headline number implies, and the fact that Kit says so on its own pricing page rather than burying it is to its credit.

The deductions are the two that apply to almost everything in this category — unpublished tier pricing above the first rung, and an annual "saving" that is not one at entry level. Neither is disqualifying. Both are reasons to check the calculator against your real list before you assume what this will cost you next year.

Kit is free to start at any list size below 10,000, which makes trying it a decision with no cost attached.