We priced 14 email providers so you do not have to

Four of the fourteen email providers we priced raised prices within the past twelve months, and not one of them let existing customers keep the old rate past their next renewal. That is the kind of thing you only notice when you read every pricing page in a category on the same day, which is what we did on August 7, 2026, to build the dataset behind our email pricing guide and every comparison table on this site.

The output is a single JSON file: 14 providers besides our own, 87 published plans, 73 named sources, and the cost of each product computed at 1, 5, and 10 seats and at 500, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 subscribers. Every price table you see on this site renders from it, stamped with the date it was checked. This post is what the exercise taught us.

What we actually did

For each provider we opened the live pricing page and transcribed every plan: name, monthly price, annual-billing effective price, unit, and the limits attached. Where the page was rendered in JavaScript we read the data the page itself loads, which is more reliable than the rendered text. Kit's price ladder came out of its pricing bundle, beehiiv's out of the widget behind its slider, MailerLite's out of the USD matrix in the page source, Brevo's out of the billing API its calculator queries, and Zoho's out of the JSON feed that renders its table.

Then we normalized. Prices are US list prices in USD, annual-billing effective where annual billing exists, and the plan we price is the cheapest one that can actually do the job rather than the cheapest one on the page. Introductory promotions are excluded, because month 13 is the price you live with. For each provider we also wrote down four things it genuinely does better than we do and four things that genuinely cost its customers money, from the provider's own documentation.

Two things we could not get, stated plainly. Enterprise pricing does not exist in public anywhere: Google Enterprise, beehiiv Enterprise, Brevo Enterprise, Ghost Custom, and SendGrid Premier are all quote-only. And Constant Contact's pricing page returns HTTP 403 to automated fetches, so its tiers are the one set in the file cross-checked against three independent sources rather than read from the source, all updated between June 16 and June 30, 2026.

Six things that surprised us

1. The two suites have converged on identical numbers

Google Workspace charges $7, $14, and $22 per user per month on annual billing for Business Starter, Standard, and Plus. Microsoft 365 Business charges $7, $14, and $22 for Basic, Standard, and Premium. Microsoft only arrived there on July 1, 2026, when Basic went from $6 to $7 (up 16%), Standard from $12.50 to $14 (up 12%), and Apps for business from $8.25 to $10 (up 21%). Premium was already $22.

Two companies competing this hard do not land on the same three numbers by coincidence. It reads as a price umbrella, and it means the suite decision is genuinely about the bundle rather than the bill. The tier-by-tier math is on our Google Workspace pricing page, and Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 referees the choice.

2. Flexibility has a published price, and it is 20%

Google's Flexible plan is exactly 20% above the annual rate: $8.40, $16.80, and $26.40 against $7, $14, and $22. Microsoft's month-to-month rates are the same $8.40, $16.80, and $26.40. Microsoft then adds a second lever most buyers never see: since April 1, 2025, paying an annual-term subscription in monthly installments carries a 5% surcharge. So there are three prices for the same seat, not two.

The rest of the field is all over the map. Zoho's Mail Lite and Premium have no monthly option at all, only 12 months prepaid per seat. Kit's annual plan is exactly ten times the monthly price, so a year of monthly billing costs 20% more. beehiiv's annual is 12% off, MailerLite's and Brevo's are 10% off, and Klaviyo, Buttondown, SendGrid, and Mailchimp publish no annual rate at all. When a comparison article quotes prices without saying which billing basis it used, the numbers are worth nothing.

3. Two providers bill you for people you cannot email

Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts toward your billable total and never archives anyone automatically. SendGrid's Marketing Campaigns bills stored contacts, unsubscribed ones included. Everyone else we checked excludes them: Kit bills unique active subscribers, beehiiv bills active subscribers only, Klaviyo drops suppressed profiles from the count, MailerLite excludes unsubscribed and bounced addresses, Constant Contact confirmed in its own community that unsubscribes are not billed, Buttondown bills active subscribers, and Ghost and Substack do not price on this axis at all.

The money is not theoretical. On Mailchimp Essentials the difference between the 2,500-contact tier and the 5,000-contact tier is $45 against $75 a month, so a few hundred dead contacts can cost $360 a year for nothing. Our Mailchimp pricing teardown walks that example. If you take one action from this post, go archive your unsubscribes.

4. Substack's cut outgrows every flat plan in the set

Substack has no plan ladder to transcribe, which made it the strangest row to build. A free publication costs $0 at any list size. The bill starts when the revenue does: 10% to Substack, plus Stripe's 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction, plus a 0.7% Stripe Billing fee.

On a $5-a-month subscription, the minimum Substack allows, that stack takes $0.98, an all-in rate of 19.6%. Two hundred and fifty paying readers gross $1,250 a month and hand back about $245 of it. At $5,000 a month of paid revenue, the platform cut alone is $500 a month, more than the priciest published beehiiv plan ($459 at 100,000 subscribers) or Ghost plan ($399 a month at 100,000 members on annual billing), both of which take 0% of subscription revenue. The 10% has not moved since 2017. Full arithmetic on our Substack pricing page.

5. Deliverability is an upsell nearly everywhere

This is the finding that hit closest to home. Across the set, the things that actually keep mail out of spam are sold as line items. Brevo charges $251 a year for a dedicated IP and $12 a month to remove its logo from your emails on the Starter plan. SendGrid gates email validation to its Pro tier and charges $30 a month per additional IP. Constant Contact sells inbox preview as a $10-a-month add-on. Buttondown puts dedicated IPs on the $79 Professional plan, and beehiiv reserves them for quote-only Enterprise.

There is a whole product category selling the ramp itself, which we priced separately in the best email warm-up tools. Our position is that a warm-up schedule is not a product, it is a throttle: ours computes roughly 150 sends on day one, multiplying by about 1.4 a day to around 1,100 by day seven, enforces whichever is lower of that curve and the relay ceiling (95 a day on our current plan), and pauses the send path entirely at a 0.3% complaint rate or 2% bounce rate. If you want the mechanics rather than the pricing, we wrote up how email warm-up actually works.

6. The free tier you remember probably shrank or died

Three of the best-known free plans in email changed inside seven months. SendGrid's forever-free 100 emails a day was retired on July 26, 2025, and new accounts now get a 60-day trial and then a bill. MailerLite's free plan went from 1,000 subscribers to 500 in September 2025 and then to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month. Mailchimp cut its free plan from 500 contacts and 1,000 sends to 250 contacts and 500 sends, effective February 17, 2026.

Generous free tiers do still exist, with a catch attached to each. Kit is free to 10,000 subscribers but withholds automations, sequences, and integrations. beehiiv is free to 2,500 active subscribers, and then the next stop is $89 a month on monthly billing, which is roughly a $0 to $1,000-a-year step for one subscriber. Brevo's free plan stores 100,000 contacts but caps sending at 300 a day, so a single blast to 1,000 people cannot go out. Zoho hosts five users free but blocks IMAP and POP, so no desktop mail client can connect.

The whole field: an email pricing comparison in one table

Annual-billing effective prices where offered. Checked August 7, 2026.

Tell us when a number drifts

Every one of these numbers has a shelf life, and the past year suggests that shelf life is short. Four providers raised prices in twelve months. Three cut free tiers. Two renamed their entire plan lineup, which is why third-party pricing articles written before June 2026 quote MailerLite plans that no longer exist and Kit prices from before the October 2025 increase.

So the tables on this site carry the date they were checked, our sources are listed on each pricing page, and one of the products in the dataset is ours and is labeled every time it appears. There are no affiliate links anywhere here, which is the only reason we can put Zoho at $1 a seat next to our $50 and let you draw the obvious conclusion for a five-person team.

If a price on this site is stale, wrong, or missing a fee we did not spot, tell us. Our editorial page has the correction policy and the address to send it to, and corrections get made in the dataset, which means every table on every page updates at once. That is the whole reason we built it as data instead of prose.