ConvertKit alternatives for 2026 (now called Kit)
Same product ConvertKit users remember, new name since October 2024, and a pricing ladder that climbed 34 percent in one step.
ConvertKit has been called Kit since October 2024, so if you searched for ConvertKit alternatives, you are looking at the current name for the same product: same automations, same Creator Network, new logo. What changed more than the name is the price. In October 2025, Kit raised its Creator plan from $29 to $39 a month at 1,000 subscribers, a 34 percent increase applied to existing customers with no grandfathering. Our pricing dataset tracks nine separate Kit price points below 10,000 subscribers, and the steps between them are where switchers break: crossing 1,000 subscribers alone raises the bill 51 percent.
Why people leave Kit
The subscriber-tier ramp. Nine price points before 10,000 subscribers: the free Newsletter plan, five Creator tiers, and three Creator Pro tiers in the table we maintain. On monthly billing, Creator moves $39 to $59 the moment you cross 1,000 subscribers (a 51 percent step), reaches $89 above 3,000, and lands at $139 by 10,000. Creator Pro runs $189 at that size. Annual billing is exactly 10x the monthly price per year, about 16.7 percent off, and it softens the slope without changing its shape. One practical warning from our research: many 2026 pricing roundups still print Kit's stale pre-hike table ($29 at 1,000 subscribers), so trust the live page or our Kit pricing breakdown, verified August 7, 2026.
Paying for automation you do not use. Kit's center of gravity is the funnel: visual automations, sequences, tagging logic. That is what the paid tiers sell, and it is why the free plan withholds sequences and integrations while allowing exactly one basic automation. If your reality is one broadcast a week to one list, you are renting a marketing machine to use its typewriter. The people happiest on Kit run courses, launches, and product funnels. The people who leave mostly wanted a newsletter on a domain they own and discovered the price of everything else.
The five alternatives
1. LetterDuck (that's us)
LetterDuck is built for the broadcast-first sender Kit overserves. A flat $50 per domain covers the newsletter side (structured composer, a designed template, per-recipient unsubscribe links) and the part no newsletter platform includes: a threaded team inbox for every address on your domain, with replies sent from any of them. Subscriber count never touches the price, so the 1,000-subscriber cliff that costs 51 percent on Kit costs nothing here. Deliverability rules are enforced in code: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on your domain, a throttle that warms new domains from about 150 sends on day one to about 1,100 a day by day seven, automatic suppression of bounces and complaints, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe on every send. We test our own inbound pipeline with a probe email through production every two hours, a watchdog we built after June 2026, when we found Gmail silently rejecting about 73 percent of the mail we forwarded to ourselves because forwarding broke DMARC alignment.
Skip us if you need automations or sequences at all (we have none, and Kit's are excellent), if you monetize through paid subscriptions, or if you need to start today, because we onboard from a waitlist. The direct comparison is LetterDuck vs Kit, and the creator-specific pitch lives on our newsletter-creators page.
2. MailerLite
MailerLite is the straight price cut: $17.10/mo at 1,000 subscribers on annual Comfort billing against Kit's $32.50 at the same size and billing basis, with automations, landing pages, and a website builder included on its cheapest paid plan. Its automation builder is shallower than Kit's, which is the honest trade. Know the caveats: a June 16, 2026 reprice raised tiers roughly 10 to 30 percent with no grandfathering, the free plan now stops at 250 subscribers, and Comfort caps sending at 10x your tier ceiling per month.
3. beehiiv
beehiiv is the growth play. Its free Launch plan covers 2,500 active subscribers with unlimited sends, and its recommendation network and paid Boosts acquire subscribers in a way Kit's Creator Network only approximates. Paid subscriptions carry a 0 percent platform take. The costs arrive in steps: the first paid rung is Scale at $49/mo, crossing 10,000 active subscribers moves the bill from $109 to $169 automatically, and branding removal requires Max at $109 and up. Tier-cliff character much like Kit's, with a steeper first step and better growth machinery.
4. Buttondown
Buttondown is the minimalist: $9/mo up to 1,000 active subscribers, $29 to 5,000, $79 to 10,000, all monthly billing (no annual discount exists as of August 2026). It is Markdown-first with API and SMTP access on every plan, and it takes no percentage of paid-subscription revenue. Its a-la-carte add-ons ($9, $29, or $79 a month per feature) let a small list buy one higher-tier capability instead of a whole plan jump, the exact inverse of Kit's bundling. Two limits: the tier cliffs are sharp (subscriber 1,001 takes the bill from $9 to $29), and pricing assumes at most one email a day to the full list.
5. Ghost
Ghost bundles the website with the newsletter and takes 0 percent of membership revenue. Publisher, the tier that supports paid memberships, is $29/mo effective annual at 1,000 members with unlimited email sends at every size; the software is open source, so you can eject to self-hosting and keep everything. Cautions: the July 2025 restructure cut paid memberships from the $15/mo Starter tier entirely, and member tiers count free signups, so an audience that grows without paying still pushes the bill up the ladder.
What each costs as the list grows
| Monthly cost at | Kit (formerly ConvertKit) | MailerLite | Buttondown | LetterDuck |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500 subscribers | $32.50 | $10.80 | $9 | $50 flat |
| 1,000 subscribers | $32.50 | $17.10 | $9 | $50 flat |
| 5,000 subscribers | $74.17 | $44.10 | $29 | $50 flat |
| 10,000 subscribers | $115.83 | $80.10 | $79 | $50 flat |
Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Kit (formerly ConvertKit): Creator plan on annual billing, which costs ten times the monthly price. On monthly billing the same list sizes cost $39, $39, $89 and $139. MailerLite: Comfort plan (renamed from Growing Business in June 2026) on annual billing. On monthly billing the same sizes cost $12, $19, $49 and $89. Buttondown: Priced in steps by active subscriber count. No annual discount is offered, so monthly is the effective price. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.
How to read it: Kit and MailerLite columns are annual-billing effective prices; Buttondown is monthly billing because that is the only billing it offers. The LetterDuck column holds at $50 because the per-domain flat rate covers unlimited subscribers and unlimited teammates, so list growth never generates an invoice line.
When Kit is the right call
Stay on Kit if the funnel is the business. Unlimited visual automations and sequences on paid tiers, A/B subject testing, a long-standing deliverability reputation, and a monetization stack (paid newsletters, digital products, tip jars, plus Creator Network cross-promotion) make it the strongest creator-commerce tool on this page. Billing counts only unique active subscribers, so cleaning your list genuinely lowers the bill. And if you send broadcasts only, the free Newsletter plan to 10,000 subscribers may carry you for years, Kit branding and all. Just do the tier math before each boundary instead of after it: at your next threshold, the price of staying is written in the table above.