Newsletter Platform Cost Calculator

Email service providers charge under two structurally different models, and which one is cheaper depends almost entirely on the ratio of paid revenue to list size. Subscriber-tier pricing, used by Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and beehiiv, is a fixed monthly fee that steps up as the list crosses thresholds such as 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, and 25,000 contacts; the cost is unrelated to earnings, so it is punishing for a large unmonetized list and negligible for a small list with strong revenue. Revenue-share pricing, used by Substack, charges nothing up front and takes 10 percent of paid subscription income, which is free for a hobby publication but becomes the most expensive option once paid revenue is substantial. Payment processing sits on top of either model at roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, the long-standing card-not-present rate. The crossover point is worth computing rather than assuming. Ten percent of paid revenue equals a 49 dollar flat plan at about 490 dollars of monthly paid income, so a publication above that level generally pays less on a tiered plan. The fixed 30 cent component also matters more than operators expect at low price points: on a 5 dollar monthly subscription it is 6 percent of the transaction, which is why annual billing at a 15 to 20 percent discount often nets more than monthly billing despite the headline discount. Two caveats apply to any comparison of this kind. Published pricing tiers change frequently and should be verified against current rate cards, and the cheapest platform is not always the best choice once deliverability, automation depth, and migration cost are accounted for.

The commercial email service provider category began with Mailchimp, founded in Atlanta in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius as a side project of their web design agency. Its 2009 shift to a freemium model, offering a free tier for small lists, made list-size-based pricing the default convention across the industry and pulled millions of small businesses into email marketing. Intuit acquired the company in 2021. ConvertKit, launched in 2013 by Nathan Barry, targeted independent authors and creators specifically and kept the same subscriber-count pricing ladder while adding creator-oriented automation; it later rebranded as Kit. Substack, founded in 2017, broke from that convention by charging nothing for the software and taking a 10 percent cut of paid subscriptions instead, aligning the platform with writers who had no revenue yet while capturing upside from those who succeeded. That trade became contentious as large publications realized the percentage never stops scaling, and it created an opening for competitors. beehiiv, launched in 2021 by former Morning Brew engineers including Tyler Denk, returned to flat subscriber-tier pricing while adding the ad network and referral tooling that newsletter operators had been building by hand. The result is the present market, where the same publication can face wildly different bills depending on which pricing philosophy it signs up for.