The best newsletter platforms in 2026, ranked by what you keep

At 10,000 subscribers the same newsletter costs $79 a month on Buttondown, $80.10 on MailerLite, $88 on Ghost, $96 on beehiiv, and $115.83 on Kit. On Substack it costs nothing at all, until the day you sell one paid subscription and the platform starts keeping 10% of everything, forever. That is the actual choice in this category: a subscription that scales with your list, a revenue share that scales with your success, or a flat line that does neither. The rest is editor preference.

How we compared: seven platforms, four criteria, one dataset. The criteria are ownership and portability (whether you can leave with the list, the archive, and the reader relationship intact), monetization take (what the platform keeps when readers pay you), cost at 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 subscribers, and deliverability control (how much of SPF, DKIM, DMARC, throttling, and suppression you can actually see or touch). Every price comes from the normalized pricing dataset we maintain for this site, pulled from each vendor's own live pricing page or pricing script on August 7, 2026 and arithmetic-checked against the annual totals they publish. Figures are annual-billing effective except Buttondown, which advertises no annual discount, so its numbers are monthly. One of the seven products is ours, it is labeled where it appears, and this site carries no affiliate links; how we work and how we correct mistakes is on the editorial page. Last verified: August 7, 2026.

1. Ghost: the one you can take with you

Best for publishers who want the site, the archive, and the newsletter in one system, with no cut of paid subscriptions.

The price: Ghost(Pro) Starter is $15 a month on annual billing ($18 monthly) with a hard cap of 1,000 members. Publisher is $29 a month annual at 1,000 members, $63 at 5,000, and $88 at 10,000. Business is a flat $199 a month annual through 10,000 members. Ghost takes 0% of paid-subscription revenue on Publisher and above, so only Stripe's fees apply, and every plan includes unlimited email sends because the meter counts members rather than messages.

The reason it ranks first is the exit. Ghost is MIT-licensed open source, so leaving Ghost(Pro) for your own server keeps the content, the themes, the members, and the URLs. That is a different kind of portability from a CSV export. The genuine limitation is that Starter is a dead end by design: the July 2025 restructure raised it 67% (from $9 to $15 annual) and removed paid memberships and two of its three newsletters, so earning a single dollar from readers now requires Publisher at $29. Member tiers are steps, too, and free signups push you up them: at 5,001 members you pay the 7,500 tier, $79 a month on annual billing.

2. beehiiv: the growth machine

Best for newsletters whose bottleneck is subscriber acquisition rather than publishing.

The price: the free Launch plan covers up to 2,500 active subscribers with unlimited sends, a hosted site, and a podcast feed. Scale is $43 a month annual at 1,000 subscribers, $78 at 5,000, and $96 at 10,000. Max, which is what removing beehiiv branding requires, starts at $96 a month annual and reaches $193 at 10,000. Paid subscriptions carry a 0% platform take, and billing counts active subscribers only, so unsubscribes stop costing money (beehiiv support article, updated June 22, 2026).

Nothing else here has the recommendation network, the Boosts marketplace, or the ad network, and those are acquisition tools rather than sending tools. The genuine limitation is the shape of the ladder. There is nothing between the free plan and $49 a month on monthly billing, so a list crossing 2,500 active subscribers goes from $0 to roughly $1,000 a year in one step, and Scale's entry price rose from $39 to $49 during 2026 in a change several users reported finding on their billing statements rather than in an announcement. Our line-by-line take is on LetterDuck vs beehiiv.

3. Substack: free until it is expensive

Best for writers who want to publish this week with zero fixed cost and no infrastructure decisions.

The price: $0. Unlimited subscribers, unlimited posts, unlimited sends, hosted site, podcast and video hosting, no plan tiers at any list size. Turn on paid subscriptions and Substack takes 10%, plus Stripe's 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction and a 0.7% Stripe Billing recurring fee. On a $5 monthly subscription that is $0.98 of every $5, about 19.6%, leaving the writer $4.02. At $10 a month the all-in rate falls to 16.6%, and on a $50 annual plan to 14.2%, because the fixed 30 cents dilutes.

It ranks third rather than first because two of our four criteria are exactly where it is weakest. The 10% never tapers: at $5,000 a month of paid revenue the platform's share alone is $500, more than any other plan on this page. And the growth that Substack's network gives you is the part that does not travel; the list exports free, the recommendations do not. The other genuine limitation is tooling, not price. There are no automations or sequences, segmentation is thin, and a custom domain is a one-time $50 per publication. If the fee math is your whole question, we ran it in full on Substack alternatives.

4. Buttondown: the cheapest honest paid tier

Best for writers who want plain, fast, developer-shaped publishing without a platform layer.

The price, on monthly billing because Buttondown advertises no annual discount as of August 2026: $0 up to 100 subscribers with custom-domain sending, hosted archives, API, and SMTP included on the free plan. Then $9 to 1,000 subscribers, $29 to 5,000, $79 to 10,000, and $139 to 20,000. Only active subscribers bill, there is no cut of paid-subscription revenue, and individual higher-tier features can be bolted on a la carte for $9, $29, or $79 instead of forcing a full plan jump.

The genuine limitation is the cliff at each cap, which is steeper here than anywhere else on the page: subscriber 1,001 takes you from $9 to $29 a month, and 5,001 takes you from $29 to $79. There is a second constraint worth reading before you commit, buried in the pricing FAQ: every published price assumes at most one email per day to your full list, and sending more means negotiating usage-based pricing. A daily-plus publisher should ask first. We compared the two products directly on LetterDuck vs Buttondown.

5. Kit: automations for people selling something

Best for creators running sequences, launches, and digital products off the list.

The price: the free Newsletter plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, forms, and landing pages, the highest free subscriber cap of any platform here that also sells tiers. Creator, the cheapest plan with sequences and integrations, is $32.50 a month annual at 1,000 subscribers, $74.17 at 5,000, and $115.83 at 10,000. Only unique, active subscribers count toward billing.

Kit is the strongest automation stack in this group and the Creator Network genuinely recruits subscribers. Two genuine limitations. The free plan withholds the thing people come to Kit for: one basic automation, no sequences, no integrations, and Kit branding stays on. And the October 2025 increase took Creator from $29 to $39 a month at 1,000 subscribers, a 34% rise applied to existing customers on their first bill after October 15, 2025 with no grandfathering. Many pricing roundups still print the old table, so check Kit's current pricing rather than a listicle.

6. MailerLite: the cheap end, with a caveat about history

Best for small lists that want automations and landing pages for the price of a sandwich.

The price: Comfort, the June 2026 rename of Growing Business, is $10.80 a month annual at 500 subscribers, $17.10 at 1,000, $44.10 at 5,000, and $80.10 at 10,000. Power adds unlimited seats and unlimited sends at $22.50, $35.10, $62.10, and $116.10 across the same tiers. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts do not count toward the billable total, and every paid plan includes 24/7 human email support.

The genuine limitation is the direction of travel. The free plan was cut from 1,000 subscribers to 500 in September 2025 and then to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month in 2026, and the June 16, 2026 reprice raised paid tiers roughly 10% to 30% with existing accounts force-migrated at their next renewal from August 13, 2026. There is also a counting rule worth knowing: any address active at any point in a billing cycle counts for that cycle, so pruning a list mid-month does not lower that month's bill. Full tier table on our MailerLite pricing page.

7. LetterDuck: the flat line (that's us)

Best for a domain that sends a newsletter and also has to answer its mail: media sites, agencies, and small teams where readers reply and someone has to see it.

The price: $50 a month per domain, flat, at 400 subscribers or 40,000. That covers the newsletter composer with a designed template, every address on the domain (an address is a routing rule here, not a paid seat), and one threaded inbox where anyone on the team can reply as any address. Deliverability is the part we actually built the company around: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC managed, a warm-up throttle that opens a new domain at about 150 sends on day one and climbs from there, capped by the relay ceiling of 95 a day on our current plan, automatic suppression of bounces and complaints, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe stamped on every campaign.

The genuine limitations, plainly. We do not host a website, an archive, or a podcast, so the post has to live in your CMS. We do not run paid-subscription billing, a recommendation network, or an ad marketplace, which means we are the wrong answer for a creator whose business model is the platform's growth surface. Below about 2,500 subscribers, beehiiv's free plan and Buttondown's $9 tier are both cheaper than we are, and we will not pretend otherwise. And onboarding is waitlisted today.

What the other six do better than we do

A roundup that only lists your own wins is an ad. Here is the reverse table, built from what each platform genuinely ships.

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Ghost(Pro): Ghost(Pro) on annual billing, cheapest plan that fits the member count. Starter caps at 1,000 members and cannot sell paid memberships. beehiiv: Scale plan on annual billing. On monthly billing the same list sizes cost $49, $49, $89 and $109. The free Launch plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers. Substack: Substack does not charge by subscriber. A free newsletter costs nothing at any size; the cost is 10 percent of paid subscription revenue plus payment processing. 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. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

Read the Substack column as an asterisk rather than a win: $0 is the fee for publishing, not the fee for earning. A Substack with 250 paid subscribers at $5 a month is handing over roughly $245 a month in combined platform and processing fees, which is more than the Ghost and beehiiv columns combined at 10,000 subscribers.

What we weighted, and how it changes by publisher

A ranking without its weights is a preference dressed as a finding, so here are ours.

The primary weighting on this page, for an independent publisher building something they intend to keep: ownership and portability 30%, cost at your list size 30%, monetization take 25%, deliverability control 15%. On those numbers Ghost wins, because it is the only platform in the group where leaving does not mean rebuilding, and because 0% of your subscription revenue is a permanent discount that compounds exactly as fast as you do.

A writer who plans to charge should push monetization take to 45% and cost to 20%. Then run the crossover: Substack's 10% equals Ghost's $29-a-month Publisher tier at $290 a month of gross paid revenue, and equals its $63 tier at $630. Under that line Substack is genuinely cheaper and enormously easier. Over it, every additional dollar you earn on Substack costs a dime that Ghost and beehiiv would not charge. Most writers cross the line quietly and never notice.

A free newsletter that will never sell subscriptions should weight cost at 55% and monetization take at 5%. That buyer should be on a free tier, full stop: Substack at any size, beehiiv Launch to 2,500 with unlimited sends, or Kit's Newsletter plan to 10,000 if branding and the missing sequences do not bother you. Paying $80 a month to send a free newsletter to 10,000 people is a decision, not a default.

A business whose newsletter is one email job among several should weight deliverability control at 35%, cost at 30%, ownership at 25%, and monetization take at 10%. That is the buyer we built for, and on those weights we think we win: none of the six platforms above gives you an inbox, and a newsletter that generates replies nobody reads is a newsletter losing the strongest engagement signal mailbox providers measure. The tradeoff is the whole limitation paragraph in section seven.

One number to carry away: 10% of gross paid revenue equals a $29-a-month Ghost bill at $290 a month of earnings. If you sell subscriptions and you are anywhere near that line, price the flat plans before your next launch. If you do not sell anything, stop paying for subscriber tiers and go use a free one.