LetterDuck vs MailerLite: the value ESP against a flat rate (2026)

MailerLite Comfort costs $17.10 a month at 1,000 subscribers on annual billing, verified August 7, 2026 from the pricing matrix embedded in MailerLite's own page source. Among contact-priced ESPs only Brevo goes lower at that size, and only because it meters emails sent rather than contacts stored ($8.08 a month for a weekly send to a 1,000-person list). MailerLite's number is about a third of LetterDuck's $50 flat rate. We build LetterDuck, and we are telling you their best number first, because a comparison that hides the other side's strongest argument is an ad.

What each one is

MailerLite is a full email marketing platform: campaigns, a drag-and-drop editor, landing pages, hosted websites, forms, digital products, and a visual automation builder, with a free plan at 250 subscribers. In June 2026 it renamed its paid plans, Growing Business becoming Comfort and Advanced becoming Power. Its reputation as the value pick of the classics is earned: it undercuts Mailchimp at every list size we track, unsubscribed and bounced contacts are not billed, and every paid plan gets 24/7 human email support. If your shortlist is the two old names, our MailerLite vs Mailchimp page referees that fight directly.

LetterDuck is an email workspace on your own domain. Every address you invent (hello@, editors@, press@) lands in one threaded team inbox, anyone on the team can reply as any of those addresses, and the same workspace sends the newsletter from a designed template. Deliverability is operated for you rather than left as homework: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured, a warm-up throttle, automatic suppression, and RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe on every campaign send. One price: $50 per domain per month, flat, covering unlimited addresses, seats, and subscribers. It is in waitlist mode; you join the list and we onboard your domain.

What the numbers say in 2026

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. 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. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

Run the curve. At 1,000 subscribers Comfort is $17.10 a month on annual billing; LetterDuck is $50. MailerLite saves you $394.80 a year. At 5,000 it is $44.10 against $50, still ahead, now by $70.80 a year. Cross 5,000 and the tier steps to $69 on monthly billing ($62.10 annual-effective); the flat rate is now cheaper. At 10,000 subscribers Comfort is $80.10 and Power, the tier that adds unlimited seats, is $116.10; LetterDuck is still $50, a $361.20 yearly gap against Comfort alone. The self-serve slider keeps climbing to 200,000 subscribers at $819 a month on Comfort, monthly billing.

That is the send-only math. MailerLite cannot receive mail, so a team that answers email on the same domain buys mailboxes somewhere else. Three seats of Google Workspace Business Starter cost $21 a month on annual billing (verified August 2026). Stack the two: at 5,000 subscribers the combination runs $65.10 a month against LetterDuck's $50, and at 10,000 it is $101.10. The whole market's version of this arithmetic lives in our email pricing guide.

Price the trendline too, because you will hold this subscription for years. On June 16, 2026 MailerLite repriced its paid plans upward by roughly 10 to 30 percent; Advanced at 1,000 subscribers went from $30 to $39 a month, and existing accounts move to the new Comfort and Power prices at their next renewal starting August 13, 2026, with no grandfathering. The free plan shrank twice in under a year: from 1,000 subscribers to 500 in September 2025, then to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month in the 2026 update. None of this is scandalous. It is simply what subscriber-tier pricing does over time. A flat rate can rise too, but it cannot creep upward on its own as your list grows.

Feature by feature

Choose MailerLite if

• Your list is under about 5,000 subscribers and sending a newsletter is the whole job. The price is fair and the tool is complete.
• You need landing pages, a website, or signup forms from the same product. Comfort includes 10 landing pages or websites; we include zero.
• You want a visual automation builder. Welcome sequences, tagging flows, and 50 automations ship on the cheapest paid plan.
• You want to start free. 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month costs nothing.
• You want 24/7 human support at a $12-a-month price point (monthly billing, 500 subscribers).

Choose LetterDuck if

• People reply to your emails and someone has to answer. Our inbox threads every conversation on the domain and lets anyone reply as any address; MailerLite has no receiving side at all.
• You run many addresses. A catch-all routes every address on the domain into the workspace; creating one is a routing rule, not a purchase.
• Your list has crossed, or will cross, 5,000 subscribers. The flat $50 beats Comfort from the 8,000 tier up, and beats Comfort plus three Google Workspace seats from about 5,000.
• You are a small team doing both halves of email. That two-to-five-person shape is exactly who we built for; see LetterDuck for small teams.
• You want the deliverability work done and shown: the ramp, the suppression list, the complaint thresholds that pause sending automatically.

Migrating from MailerLite to LetterDuck

1. Export your subscribers from MailerLite as CSV. Export unsubscribed and bounced contacts separately; you need both files.
2. Import active subscribers into LetterDuck contacts. Import the unsubscribed and bounced file into the suppression list first, before anything sends. Skipping this step is how a clean migration turns into a complaint spike.
3. Add our SPF include and DKIM records in your DNS panel and keep your existing DMARC record. About 15 minutes, plus propagation.
4. Rebuild your newsletter in the composer. The structured editor plus a designed template replaces a drag-and-drop layout in an afternoon for most newsletters.
5. Send. The throttle computes a ramp from about 150 sends on day 1 toward about 1,100 a day by day 7, then enforces whichever is lower, that curve or the relay ceiling. Today the ceiling is 95 a day and it always wins, so a 1,000-subscriber list takes about eleven days to reach everyone.

Realistic total: under an hour of export and import, 15 minutes of DNS, an afternoon on the template, and a week of ramp. Plan it for a quiet week, not the day before a send.

Common questions

If you left this page with one number, make it the crossover: MailerLite wins below 5,000 subscribers for send-only work, and the flat rate wins after that or the moment receiving mail matters. The full list of MailerLite alternatives is there if neither of us fits.