Free Email Marketing Plans: Subscriber Caps and Send Limits
Ten marketing and email tools. Subscriber caps, send allowances, and which free plans still work past the first few hundred contacts.
Email marketing is priced by list size almost everywhere, which makes the free tiers unusually comparable. The differences that matter are the subscriber cap, the monthly send allowance, and whether the free tier carries the vendor's branding on every send.
Subscriber caps range from 100 to 10,000 within this same category. That is a hundredfold difference for tools that broadly do the same job, and it is the single most useful number on this page.
All 10 reports in this category
- beehiiv Sends Without Limit on Free, and Charges for Growth. A newsletter platform that never bills you for sending. Everything that helps you grow or earn sits behind the paid wall.
- Brevo's Free Plan Is Two Limits Wearing One Name. Three hundred sends a day and space for a hundred thousand contacts. The catch is not the volume, it is everything around it.
- Buffer's Free Plan: Three Channels, Ten Posts Each. Ten posts per channel per queue, refilling as they publish. The limit is not how much you can schedule, it is how far ahead you can look.
- Buttondown Is Free to 100 Subscribers, Then Priced by Feature. One hundred subscribers, no feature gates, no card. The bill arrives only when you want tagging, analytics or a second newsletter.
- Hootsuite Has No Free Plan, Only a 14-Day Trial. The most recognised name in social scheduling has no free tier at all. Fourteen days, no card, then a hundred dollars a month.
- HubSpot's Free Marketing Tools: 2,000 Sends With Branding. A free CRM with marketing attached. The email allowance is workable; the one automated action per account is what actually limits you.
- Kit's Free Plan: 10,000 Subscribers and Unlimited Sends. A free tier for a hundred thousand dollars of list growth. Kit rations the automation engine instead of the audience.
- Mailchimp's Free Plan Shrank to 250 Contacts in 2026. The free plan that built a million mailing lists now caps at 250 contacts and 500 sends. What changed, and whether it still fits your list.
- MailerLite's Free Plan: 250 Subscribers, Two Seats, Real Automations. The smallest subscriber allowance here, paired with the most complete feature set at zero. MailerLite charges for volume, not for capability.
- Metricool's Free Plan Leaves Out LinkedIn and X. A social analytics tool first and a scheduler second. The free tier reflects that order, and two major networks are simply absent.
How these were measured
Every report records the same fields: what the free plan includes, what it withholds, what the first paid tier costs, and the point at which paying starts to make sense. Figures are taken from the vendor's own pricing and documentation pages and carry the date they were checked. Plan terms change without notice, so treat each number as a dated snapshot.