What email actually costs in 2026

Ten mailboxes on Zoho Mail Lite cost $10 a month. Ten thousand newsletter subscribers on Klaviyo cost $150 a month. Both figures are correct as of August 2026, both products are email, and the gap between them has very little to do with quality. It comes from what each company counts.

Email pricing runs on three meters. Office suites count seats, so the bill tracks headcount. Marketing platforms count contacts, so the bill tracks list growth. Sending APIs count messages, so the bill tracks volume. Sign up for the meter that runs on the number you are trying to increase and you have agreed to pay a tax on your own success, monthly, indefinitely.

This guide prices all three models from one dataset: 14 providers, 87 published plans, every figure checked against a live pricing page on August 7, 2026. The story of assembling it, and the six numbers that surprised us most, is in the data post. The whole thing is downloadable as CSV and JSON, free to use with attribution.

How we priced this

Fourteen providers besides our own, priced on the same basis. For each one we transcribed every published plan (87 rows in total), then computed the cost at 1, 5, and 10 seats and at 500, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 subscribers. We recorded four genuine strengths and four genuine weaknesses per provider, and kept 73 named sources with dates. Every price was checked on August 7, 2026.

Four rules govern the math. We price the cheapest plan that can actually do the job, not the cheapest plan on the page, because a plan that cannot do the job is not a price. We quote annual-billing effective monthly prices wherever annual billing exists, and say so explicitly when it does not (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Buttondown, and SendGrid publish no annual discount, so their monthly sticker is the real number). We exclude introductory promotions, since month 13 is the price you live with. And when a provider's own pricing page is JavaScript, we read the data the page itself loads.

The limits are worth stating before you rely on any of this. All prices are US list prices in USD; Google geo-serves a different structure in Europe, where the page shows monthly-only billing with a 10% introductory discount for the first 20 users. Constant Contact's pricing page returns HTTP 403 to automated fetches, so its tiers are cross-checked against three independent sources updated between June 16 and June 30, 2026. There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site, one of the products priced here is ours and is labeled every time it appears, and our correction policy lives on the editorial page.

The seat meter: what a mailbox costs per person

The suite model is the oldest and the easiest to forecast. You pick a plan, multiply by headcount, and that is the bill.

Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 per user per month on annual billing, so 1, 5, and 10 people cost $7, $35, and $70 a month. Business Standard is $14, which makes a ten-person team $140. Business Plus is $22. Microsoft 365 mirrors those numbers almost exactly after the July 1, 2026 increase: Business Basic went from $6 to $7 (up 16%), Business Standard from $12.50 to $14 (up 12%), and Business Premium held at $22. Both suites cap their Business editions at 300 users. The full tier-by-tier walk is in our Google Workspace pricing breakdown, and if you are deciding between the two, Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 referees it.

Zoho undercuts both by a factor of seven. Mail Lite is $1 per user per month, billed annually only, so ten seats cost $10 a month or $120 a year. There is even a Forever Free plan for up to five users on one domain, though it excludes IMAP, POP, and ActiveSync entirely, so it works only inside Zoho's own apps. The Zoho Mail pricing page has the storage variants, including the detail most roundups miss: Mail Lite comes in a 5 GB version at $1 and a 10 GB version at $1.25.

What the seat buys is real when you use it. Workspace bundles Docs, Drive, Meet, and (since January 2025) Gemini behind Gmail's inbound spam filtering, which is the best in the business. Microsoft bundles desktop Office on Standard and up, a 100 GB Exchange mailbox, and on Premium a security stack (Intune, Defender for Business, Entra ID P1) that costs far more assembled separately. Both let one paid seat answer at many addresses: Workspace allows up to 30 free aliases per user, and Microsoft supports aliases plus free shared mailboxes.

Two structural costs come with the model. The first is compounding: nothing about a seat gets cheaper at ten people than at one, and you cannot mix editions on a Workspace domain, so if three people need a Standard feature, all ten seats move to $14. The second is what the seat cannot do. Gmail caps outbound around 2,000 recipients a day and its terms prohibit mass marketing mail, so a newsletter needs a second product with a second bill, which is where the next meter starts. Our ranked shortlist of the seat category, ours included, is the best business email hosting.

Email marketing pricing: what a list costs per person on it

Marketing platforms and newsletter tools price by how many people you could email. This is where email marketing pricing gets expensive quietly: the entry prices look small and the curve does the damage.

Here is what the same list costs across the field, using each provider's cheapest sensible paid plan, at the two ends of the range we track. The last column is the one nobody puts on a pricing page: what a 20x increase in list size does to the bill.

Annual-billing effective prices where the provider offers annual billing; Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Buttondown, and SendGrid are monthly-billing only. Brevo is billed by sends, so its row assumes a weekly newsletter to the whole list. SendGrid's row is the plan price before the send overages described below. Checked August 7, 2026.

Read the growth column first. Constant Contact multiplies your bill by ten for a 20x list, which is the steepest curve in the dataset; its Lite plan jumps from $12 to $30 a month the moment you add contact number 501, a 2.5x step for one address. Mailchimp Essentials runs $13, $26.50, $45, $75, and $110 at 500, 1,500, 2,500, 5,000, and 10,000 contacts. Klaviyo runs $20, $30, $100, and $150 with no annual discount available at any size. The gentler curves belong to the newsletter platforms: Kit charges $32.50 to enter and only $115.83 at 10,000, while beehiiv goes $43 to $96. Full teardowns live on our Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Klaviyo, and MailerLite pricing pages, and the category shortlist is the best newsletter platforms.

Now the question that decides your actual bill: what counts as a contact? Mailchimp counts subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts alike, and archives nobody automatically, so you pay indefinitely for people you may not legally email. SendGrid's Marketing Campaigns does the same with stored contacts. Most of the field does not: Kit bills unique active subscribers, beehiiv bills active subscribers only (per its support article updated June 22, 2026), Klaviyo excludes suppressed profiles, Constant Contact excludes unsubscribes, and MailerLite excludes unsubscribed and bounced addresses while counting cumulatively within a billing cycle. That single policy difference is worth hundreds of dollars a year on a list with normal churn.

Frequency is the second hidden variable. Mailchimp Essentials allows sends of 10 times your contact count per month and Standard 12 times; Constant Contact allows 10x, 12x, and 24x by plan, then bills $0.002 per extra email; MailerLite's Comfort plan caps sending at 10x the tier ceiling; Klaviyo caps at roughly 10x active profiles and auto-upgrades your tier when you cross it. A 1,000-contact list mailed three times a week is about 13,000 sends a month, past the Essentials allowance, so that sender pays Standard prices for a small list. Enthusiasm is a billable event.

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. Google Workspace: Business Starter at $7 per user per month on annual billing. Business Standard is $14 and Business Plus $22. Month-to-month billing costs 20 percent more. Mailchimp: Essentials on monthly billing, the cheapest paid tier. Standard runs $20 to $135 across the same contact counts. First-year promotional discounts are excluded. LetterDuck is $50 per domain, flat, unlimited addresses and subscribers.

Those are the two meters side by side: seat rows from Workspace, subscriber rows from Mailchimp, and a flat line through both.

The newsletter platforms, priced against each other

The creator tools deserve their own look because they price the same thing differently. beehiiv is free to 2,500 active subscribers and then steps to $43 a month effective annual, while Kit is free all the way to 10,000 subscribers but withholds automations, sequences, integrations, and branding removal until you pay $32.50. One is a generous free tier with a cliff; the other is a generous free tier with a feature wall.

Public list prices, August 2026, annual billing where offered. 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. 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.

Kit's October 2025 increase moved Creator from $29 to $39 a month at 1,000 subscribers with no grandfathering, and existing customers moved on their first bill after October 15, 2025. beehiiv's Scale entry rose from $39 to $49 during 2026, and multiple users reported finding out from a billing statement. Both facts belong in your forecast more than either sticker price does.

The volume meter: what a send costs

The third model ignores your list entirely and charges for messages that leave the building.

Brevo is the clearest example. Its free plan stores 100,000 contacts and sends 300 emails a day; paid plans meter monthly send volume, so a big quiet list is nearly free and a small loud one is not. Starter is $8.08 a month effective annual for 5,000 emails. Run a weekly newsletter to 10,000 subscribers, which is 40,000 emails a month, and the same plan costs $41.42 effective annual. The catch that does not show in the ladder: Starter puts Brevo's logo on your mail unless you pay $12 a month to remove it, and marketing automation starts at Standard. Our Brevo pricing page has the full volume ladder.

SendGrid shows the model at its harshest. There has been no free tier since July 26, 2025; new accounts get a 60-day trial, then pay. The transactional Email API starts at $19.95 a month for 50,000 emails, and Marketing Campaigns is a separate product with a separate bill starting at $15 for 5,000 stored contacts. There is no 500-contact or 1,000-contact tier at all, so a 300-subscriber newsletter pays the same $15 as a 5,000-subscriber one. Then the allowances bite: Basic 5K includes 15,000 emails a month, a weekly send to 5,000 subscribers is about 21,700, and the difference bills at $0.0040 each, so the real cost is around $42. At 10,000 subscribers it is around $65. The SendGrid pricing page shows that arithmetic in full.

Volume pricing is the fairest model for large lists mailed rarely and the worst for small lists mailed often. If you send a monthly letter to 20,000 people, it is unbeatable. If you send four times a week to 800 people, it is a trap wearing a low sticker price.

The fourth meter, the one that pretends to be free

Substack has no plan ladder. A free publication costs $0 at 500 subscribers or 50,000, with hosting, podcast, video, and the recommendations network included. The meter starts the day you turn on paid subscriptions, and then it never stops: 10% of gross revenue to Substack, plus Stripe's 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction, plus a 0.7% Stripe Billing fee that rose from 0.5% for creators who monetized after July 10, 2024.

On a $5-a-month subscription, the minimum Substack allows, that stack takes $0.98 of every $5. The writer nets $4.02, an all-in rate of 19.6%. Two hundred and fifty paying readers at $5 gross $1,250 a month and hand over about $245 of it. At $5,000 a month of paid revenue, Substack's cut alone is $500 a month, more than any flat-rate plan in this dataset, and it keeps scaling with you forever. The 10% has not changed since 2017 (verified August 2026 on substack.com/going-paid), and the Substack pricing page works the numbers at three revenue levels. Ghost, beehiiv, and Buttondown all take 0% of subscription revenue, which is the comparison to run before your publication gets good.

The billing traps, catalogued

These are the mechanisms that separate the price you were quoted from the price you pay. Every row was found in a provider's own pricing page or documentation during the August 2026 pass.

Two of those deserve a sentence more. The month-to-month surcharge is not a rounding error: on ten Workspace seats it is $168 a year for the right to cancel, and Google's annual plan is a 12-month commitment even when billed monthly, so cancelling in month four still owes the year. The price-rise ratchet is the trap buyers consistently underweight, and the history is unambiguous: Google raised prices in 2019, 2023, and January 2025 (about 17% when Gemini was bundled in), Microsoft in July 2026, Kit in October 2025, MailerLite in June 2026, beehiiv during 2026. Free tiers eroded on the same schedule, with MailerLite's falling from 1,000 subscribers to 500 in September 2025 and then to 250.

The flat-rate case, and exactly where it breaks

Our position, plainly: if your bill is metered on something you are trying to grow, you eventually pay more for the same job. A flat rate removes the meter. LetterDuck is $50 a month per domain, and the things it does not count are addresses, seats, subscribers, and sends.

The crossovers are arithmetic, so here they are. Against the $7-a-seat suites, $50 passes at eight seats. Against Mailchimp Essentials, we cost more until about 2,500 contacts and less from 5,000 ($75) upward. Kit crosses at 3,001 subscribers ($74.17 effective annual). beehiiv crosses at 5,000 ($78). Klaviyo crosses at 5,000 ($100). Constant Contact crosses at 5,000 ($68). MailerLite stays cheaper than us all the way to 5,000 subscribers ($44.10) and only passes $50 in its 8,000 tier. Brevo, priced on sends, is cheaper than us at every size in our table for a weekly sender. Zoho at ten seats is $10 a month against our $50. We publish those last three because they are true.

The limits of our own model, stated as plainly as the crossovers. LetterDuck is email only, so there are no documents, no drive, no video. It is $50 per domain, which means two domains are $100; the flat rate is flat within a domain, not across your portfolio. It runs no automations, sells no paid subscriptions, and has no discovery network. It is a shared workspace rather than a set of private personal mailboxes, which some teams will rightly reject. And it is in waitlist, so the honest comparison today is against what you would sign up for tomorrow.

What the $50 does include is the work the metered tools charge extra for or leave to you. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are managed. A warm-up throttle codifies our relay's documented ramp, roughly 150 sends on day one multiplying by about 1.4 a day to reach around 1,100 by day seven, then 10 to 20% daily growth. What it enforces is the lower of that curve and the relay ceiling, which is 95 a day on the plan we run today. The send path pauses itself at a 0.3% complaint rate or a 2% bounce rate with no human in the loop, a suppression list is checked before every send, and every campaign carries RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe headers. Elsewhere that ramp is a product you buy: the warm-up category has its own subscriptions, which we priced in the best email warm-up tools, and a dedicated IP is a line item at $251 a year on Brevo or $30 a month per extra IP on SendGrid.

We also watch the part nobody sells. In June 2026 we measured Gmail rejecting about 73% of the mail we mirrored through a forwarding rule, silently, because forwarding breaks DMARC alignment. A canary email now travels our real inbound path every two hours so that class of failure cannot hide again. That is why we think deliverability belongs inside the flat rate rather than beside it.

Before you buy, do these six things

1. Count your billable contacts the way your provider counts them, including unsubscribes. On Mailchimp or SendGrid Marketing Campaigns, archive the dead ones first and reprice after.
2. Multiply your real sending frequency by your list size and check it against the plan's send allowance. Divide by the allowance multiplier (10x or 12x on most plans) to find the list size your cadence actually supports.
3. Price month 13, never month one. Introductory discounts run 50% for twelve months at Mailchimp and expire on schedule.
4. Check the billing basis before you compare anything to anything. Month-to-month costs 20% more than annual at Google, Microsoft, Kit, and Ghost, about 14% more at beehiiv, and about 11% more at MailerLite and Brevo. At Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Buttondown, and SendGrid there is no annual rate to compare against at all.
5. Add the second bill. A suite does not send newsletters and a marketing platform does not receive mail, so most teams are buying both. Price the pair, then compare.
6. Look up the provider's last price rise and assume the next one. Four of the fourteen providers we priced raised prices within the past twelve months, and not one of the four let existing customers keep the old rate permanently. Ghost, which grandfathered after its July 2025 increase, is the only provider in the dataset that did.

If you do nothing else, do step one and step five. Between them they explain almost every email bill that surprised somebody this year.