For a list under 1,000 people, stay on a free tier. The subscription is the smallest cost in this decision, and the free plans of Mailchimp, MailerLite, Brevo and Kit all carry enough headroom for one plain monthly note to a few hundred addresses. The choice is between the contact and send caps, what each free tier strips out, and the sender rules that apply to every firm whether the plan costs $0 or $33. Pay the entry tier when you want the welcome sequence, when you sell to the list, or when the badge in your footer bothers you more than the invoice does. Prices checked October 2026.
The order of the questions matters. First, how many addresses you hold and how often you send. Second, what you want the tool to do while you sleep. Third, price. Most firms buy in the reverse order and end up paying for automation they never configure.
The free tiers, on the numbers their vendors print
Mailchimp's Free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with a daily send limit of 250. One email to each of 500 contacts is 500 sends, and test sends count too. At 250 contacts, those 500 sends cover about two full-list emails a month. Mailchimp also counts subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts in your total, so an old list of former customers eats the same quota as live subscribers. Pass the limit and Mailchimp holds your sending, live and test, until you trim the list or pay.
MailerLite's Free plan covers 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with two seats. That send allowance stretches to roughly ten sends a month at 250 subscribers, which is a weekly note with room for a campaign. Sending locks when you pass 250 active subscribers.
Brevo's Free plan allows 300 email sends a day and stores up to 100,000 contacts. It prints no monthly cap, only the daily one, so a 900 person list takes about three days to work through. Brevo's shape suits a weekly note to a few hundred people, not a single blast to a list of 900.
Kit's Free plan takes up to 10,000 subscribers, with unlimited forms, landing pages and broadcasts. For a list under a thousand, it is the roomiest free tier of these four on subscriber count, and broadcasts on that plan are not capped.
The caps sort the tools before price does.
Exhibit 1
The free tiers split on contact cap and monthly sends long before their prices come into the conversation
What each free tier takes out of the box
Mailchimp Free has no marketing automation, no email scheduling, no removing the Mailchimp badge, and support by email only for the first 30 days. Automation flows start on Essentials, limited to four flow steps. MailerLite keeps its logo in your footer on Free, gives free accounts no email support, and starts logo removal on the Comfort plan. Brevo's Free automation runs for up to 2,000 contacts, which is more than a list under a thousand needs. On Kit Free you can open the automation builder and see it, but creating a visual automation or an email sequence needs a paid plan.
Every free tier in this list keeps the vendor's logo in your email footer. That is a branding trade, not a deliverability trade. Mailchimp takes its branding off from Essentials up, MailerLite takes its logo off from Comfort up, and Brevo charges $9 a month extra to remove its logo on the Starter plan and drops it at no charge from Standard up.
The support line is the one owners under-weight. On a free tier, a bounce problem, a broken unsubscribe link or a spam-folder week is your problem, on your own time, in front of your customers.
The entry paid tiers, priced
Mailchimp's entry paid plan, Essentials, starts at $13 a month for up to 500 contacts, and the price rises with your contact tier. On Essentials your monthly send limit is 10 times your contact limit. MailerLite's entry paid price is $12 a month for up to 500 subscribers, with annual billing at $10.80 a month, and at 1,000 subscribers Comfort costs $19 a month, or $17.10 a month on annual billing. At that tier you get 10,000 emails a month, so a 900 person list can send about ten times a month. Brevo's entry paid plan, Starter, starts at $9 a month, with yearly billing taking 10% off; Brevo prices by monthly email volume, and each volume tier also sets how many contacts you can store, so 5,000 sends covers up to 500 contacts and 10,000 sends up to 1,500. Kit's first paid plan, Creator, is $33 a month, or $390 billed yearly, which works out to $32.50 a month.
Two cautions on the small print. Mailchimp's advertised 15% offer applies to Standard and to Essentials plans at 10,000+ contacts, not to the $13 tier, and that $13 is a monthly charge. Brevo's Standard plan, which adds unlimited-contact automation and A/B testing, starts at $18 a month, so the logo-free Brevo you may have seen advertised sits above the $9 entry price.
Sending from your own mailbox
The free option that never appears in pricing tables is the mailbox you already pay for. A Google Workspace user can send 2,000 messages a day, 1,500 by mail merge, over a rolling 24 hours, and Workspace also caps you at 3,000 external recipients a day per user, which is the number a newsletter list runs into. Hit the limit and that user cannot send for up to 24 hours, including the email your supplier is waiting on. Microsoft's Exchange Online caps a mailbox at 10,000 recipients a day on a sliding 24-hour window and 30 messages a minute, and Microsoft says Exchange Online is not designed for bulk mailing and points high-volume senders to a dedicated email service.
Consumer Gmail is the option people reach for and the one that fails first: a free account tops out at 500 recipients in one email and 500 emails a day. A personal Gmail address cannot send a newsletter to a list of 800 people, and it is no help when you need a paid sending plan.
The real ceiling on your own mailbox arrives well before the message count. You need a working unsubscribe link, and you need SPF and DKIM set up on your domain. Mailchimp's per-contact pricing pushes you out at 250 free contacts; your own mailbox pushes you out the moment the firm needs a welcome sequence, a list cleaned automatically, and an opt-out that behaves itself.
The sender rules apply at every price
Google's rules say every sender to Gmail must set up SPF or DKIM, keep a valid PTR record, use TLS, and stay under a 0.3% spam rate. Google recommends staying below a 0.10% spam rate and never reaching 0.30%. The extra rules for bulk senders, including DMARC and one-click unsubscribe, kick in above 5,000 messages a day, and a small firm sending to 800 contacts is not a bulk sender by Gmail's count. Authentication is not optional at that size.
Yahoo requires SPF or DKIM for all senders, a spam rate under 0.3%, and valid forward and reverse DNS. Its bulk sender rules add SPF and DKIM together, a DMARC policy of at least p=none, and one-click unsubscribe, and Yahoo asks that unsubscribes be honored within 2 days, which is faster than the law requires.
CAN-SPAM covers commercial email, including business-to-business email, and the FTC prints a maximum penalty of $53,088 for each email in violation. The FTC froze its civil penalty amounts for 2026, so $53,088 per email is the figure in force this year; expect it to move again when the annual inflation adjustment resumes. A compliant newsletter has honest header information, an honest subject line, a clear statement that it is advertising, your physical postal address, and a working opt-out. You must honor an opt-out within 10 business days, and the opt-out must keep working for at least 30 days after you send. Hiring an email tool does not move the legal responsibility off your firm.
A free tier from a mainstream vendor gives you the unsubscribe mechanism, the address block and the authenticated sending path. That is most of what compliance needs mechanically. Sending from a personal mailbox gives you none of it, and the penalty figure is per email.
Exhibit 2
The tool fixes the mechanics of a compliant send and does nothing about the size and quality of your list
What paying buys, and what it does not
A paid entry tier buys three real things: automation, the removal of the vendor badge, and support you can ask questions of. The welcome sequence is the one that pays for itself in attention. Someone joins from your site, and a short note arrives the same day saying what you send and how often. The follow-up after a quote is the other obvious one, and it belongs next to quotes that get answered rather than in the tool.
What paying does not buy is a better list. No plan in this register improves deliverability; the vendor pages describe rules and caps, not outcomes. A paid account pointed at 900 addresses collected in a spreadsheet from three trade shows sends to the spam folder faster than a free account does, and with more confidence behind it.
The habits that decide the outcome cost nothing. One send a month you can keep up beats four in June and none in September. A signup form that says what the reader gets collects addresses that stay. Cleaning out addresses that never open protects the spam-rate figure Google measures you against, which is the number that keeps you in the inbox. On the site side, the signup box is a homepage decision more than a marketing automation decision, and what a small-business homepage actually needs to say covers where it earns its place.
Exit terms before entry
Mailchimp and MailerLite both let you export your whole list as a CSV file, including unsubscribed and bounced contacts. The export carries addresses and fields, not your open and click history, so keep your own copy if engagement reporting matters to you. On Mailchimp, exported files stay downloadable in the account for 30 days.
This is the part of the decision that gets skipped, and it is cheap insurance. A tool you can leave is a tool you can try. Check the export works in your first week, not in the week you are annoyed.
Which firm buys what
A firm sending one plain monthly note to a few hundred people should stay free, and can stay free for years. Kit Free has the room on subscriber count, MailerLite Free has the room on sends, and Brevo Free suits a weekly note to a few hundred. Pick on which interface you will actually open.
A firm that wants the welcome sequence, or that sells to its list, pays the entry tier and should pick on deliverability support and export terms, not on features. MailerLite Comfort at $12 for up to 500 subscribers and Brevo Starter at $9 are the cheapest ways in; Mailchimp Essentials at $13 buys the automation flows four steps deep; Kit Creator at $33 is the one to pay when the list is the product.
A firm whose list lives in a spreadsheet and whose sends go from the owner's Gmail should buy nothing yet, and fix the list first. That is the same order of work we follow on a website that has to produce enquiries: the asset comes before the automation.