How much does email marketing cost, and what is the bill made of?

How much does email marketing cost?#

For a small list that mails once a month, close to nothing: a free tier covers it, and ours does. The number starts moving when the list grows past what a free plan holds, or when you need a feature the free tier does not include.

For a list of a few thousand going out weekly, expect a monthly subscription in the tens of dollars rather than the hundreds, priced by how many contacts you store or how many emails you send. That is the honest shape of the answer, and the useful work is figuring out which of those two your vendor bills on.

What are the ways a tool prices you?#

One detail worth noticing: billing by contacts punishes a list you keep for reference. If a tool counts every stored address, cleaning old records off your list is a saving rather than a chore, and the arithmetic changes entirely. Some vendors have moved to counting subscribed contacts whether or not they are mailed, and that decision is on their pricing page in their own words.

How much does email marketing cost per month for a small list?#

Take the two numbers you know: how many names you hold, and how often you mail. Multiply them and you have your monthly email volume, and every pricing page on earth is a function of that number plus the one about stored contacts.

• A 1,000-name list mailed once a month is 1,000 emails. Any free tier covers it.
• The same list mailed weekly is about 4,300 emails a month. Still free on several plans, including ours.
• A 5,000-name list mailed weekly is about 21,650 emails a month. That is the point where most senders start paying somebody.
• A 20,000-name list mailed weekly is about 86,600 emails. This is where the pricing model matters more than the price, because the two models diverge here.

Four and a third sends a month is the arithmetic for weekly, which is why a monthly budget based on twelve sends a year is always short. Two extra campaigns in a good month cost you eight sends, not one.

What do free plans include?#

Every figure in this table was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 25 October 2026. Prices and limits move, so treat it as a snapshot of that day and re-read the page you care about before you rely on it.

Read the last column as the real product. A free tier that brands your emails, keeps reports for a month, or locks your sending when the list grows past a number is a free tier with a decision in it, and the decision is yours to make on price rather than on hope.

What is the cheapest way to send a newsletter?#

Cheapest by the month is usually a free tier with a generous contact ceiling. Cheapest by the year is usually the tool whose limits you do not hit twice, because the migration out of a plan that locked your sending costs a weekend and a lost month of mail.

The cheapest configuration is a small number of sends to a list that wants them. How often you should send is where that decision is made, and sending less often is the only cost saving that also improves the thing.

What costs more than the software?#

• Your hours. A designed issue, an audience check and a report read take real time, and at any sensible value for an hour the software is the smaller line.
• A list you cannot mail. Addresses that bounce, stale names and imported spreadsheets cost you in deliverability rather than invoices, and the loss is invisible until it is not. Cleaning an email list is the work.
• A picture hosted somewhere that charges for traffic. Photographs in an email are fetched from a server, and the bill for that server can arrive independently of the mail tool.
• Getting filtered. The same message that costs you nothing to send is worth nothing if it lands in junk, which is why why email goes to spam has more effect on revenue than most pricing decisions.

What is email advertising cost, and is it the same question?#

No. Email advertising is paying a platform to place a promotion in front of people, and the price is set by an auction for that audience, so the only number that means anything is what your own campaigns return. Search the phrase and you will find a cost per lead that belongs to whoever wrote the page, not to your sector, your country or your offer.

It shows up in an email budget in one place: paying to grow the list. That is worth pricing against what a subscriber is worth to you rather than against a benchmark, because the second number you can find and the first one nobody else knows.

Why does email marketing cost different amounts in different countries?#

Because the pricing page reads your address. Our own test pulled Mailchimp from an Indian IP and the plans came back in rupees, which is normal practice for a company selling worldwide. The same page from London shows pounds and from Johannesburg shows rands, with local pricing decisions attached rather than a currency conversion.

So the honest answer to what it costs in the UK, India or South Africa is: read the page from where you are, in your own currency, and check whether the free tier is the same size there. It frequently is not, and a number quoted in dollars from a review site describes nobody's bill.

How many subscribers do I need to make money?#

Work it backwards from one sale. The number of emails you need is: one sale, divided by the share of your list you send to, multiplied by the share who open, multiplied by the share of those who click, multiplied by the share of clickers who buy.

Illustrative arithmetic, not a benchmark, and every one of those four numbers should be yours from the reports you already have. A 2,000-name list where 30 per cent open and 3 per cent of openers click gets you 180 people at the link per send. If 5 of every 100 clickers buy, that is nine sales, and the list is worth what nine sales are worth to you.

We will not publish an industry conversion rate here. Those figures get quoted between blog posts with no source and no year, and the one that decides whether this works is measured in your own reports after your third send.

What extra charges do pricing pages hide?#

1. Team seats, usually priced per person and often more than the plan itself.
2. A dedicated IP, sold as the fix for a reputation problem you may not have.
3. Contact growth, where passing a band mid-month reprices the whole plan rather than the difference.
4. Annual versus monthly, where the advertised number is the yearly one paid up front.
5. Templates, domains, landing pages and forms, which several tools count as separate limits.
6. Support, which on a cheap tier means a queue and on an expensive one means a name.

When does a free plan cost more than a paid one?#

When it caps the thing you needed. A free tier that stops you mailing after 250 names is worth less than the twenty dollars that removes the cap, because the cost of a free plan is the mail you did not send.

The second case is branding. A free plan that puts another company's name on your email is telling your customers that you are not yet a business with a postbox, and for a sender whose list is the product that is a real cost, not a cosmetic one.

Is paying per email cheaper?#

For an irregular sender, yes. A newsletter that goes out four times a year and a shop that mails only order confirmations both pay less on a usage basis, and neither is served by a monthly subscription for a list they never touch.

For a weekly issue, no, because a per-email rate multiplied by your real volume is a number you cannot predict, and unpredictability is what makes a sending budget unpleasant. A flat plan with a ceiling you stay under is worth paying a little more for.

What should I check on a pricing page before signing?#

• Whether stored contacts are billed, mailed contacts, or neither.
• What happens the moment you pass the cap: does the send fail, queue, or get charged?
• Whether automation and segmentation are on your tier rather than the next one.
• How long reports are kept, since a plan that forgets last quarter cannot tell you what worked.
• What the export gives you, and whether the list comes back with the names attached.
• Whether a domain, an IP or your own branding is a separate line.

How do I work out my own email cost?#

Three numbers and a multiplication. Names you will mail. Sends per month. Price per band at that size, from the vendor's page in your currency. Write the result down, then double it, because every sender adds a campaign they did not plan and a list that grew.

Then add the cost you control. If the tool takes an hour a month to fight and the newsletter takes four to write, the software is a rounding error next to the afternoon. How to write a newsletter is the part that saves the hours, and no plan changes it.

What does Campaign Kicker charge?#

Free does 5,000 emails a month with no cap on stored names. Starter is $19 a month for 30,000 emails and 100 campaigns, Growth is $39 for 150,000 emails and 200 campaigns, and Brand is $119 for 400,000 emails and 500 campaigns. Every plan is the same product with more room: no feature is held back for a higher tier, nobody is billed for the size of a list, and there is no overage line, because a send that would pass the ceiling stops rather than charging you.

Names cost us about 115 bytes each, which is not a reason to charge for them. A monthly allowance is the honest limit, since that is the thing that gets used up.

Common questions