Email Platform Pricing 2026: What 11 Vendors Actually Publish
Email platform pricing follows one of four models — per stored contact, per email sent, per contact with feature tiers, or per send with published overage — and which one you are on matters more than the headline price. The harder problem is that many vendors do not publish their numbers in a readable form: when we fetched eleven pricing pages on 22 September 2026, AWeber published a full tier grid and Postmark published tiers plus overage rates, while ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact served no currency figures at all and Mailchimp and SendGrid served one. That is why you cannot compare this category from its own pricing pages, and why this one states its method.
Comparing email platforms on price sounds like a spreadsheet exercise. It is mostly an archaeology exercise.
Every buyer in this category hits the same wall: you open four pricing pages, three of them move a slider around and quote you one number, and you still cannot tell what you will pay in eighteen months. This page does two things about that. First it reports, with a stated method, which vendors actually publish their prices. Then it explains the four pricing models underneath, because the model determines your bill far more than the tier you pick on day one.
What each vendor publishes
Two conclusions follow, and only two. You can price AWeber and Postmark from their own pages today — which is why those are the only two competitors this site publishes a pricing breakdown for. And for the four vendors at the bottom of that table, any third-party page quoting their exact tier prices is quoting something it could not have read from the page; treat it accordingly, including when the third party is us.
The four pricing models, and who each one suits
Underneath the tier names there are only four shapes. Identify which one a vendor uses and you can predict what happens to your bill as you grow, which is the question that actually matters.
- 1. Per stored contact. You pay for how many people are on your list, whether or not you email them. Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact and AWeber all work this way. Suits you if your list is small and you email it very often. Punishes you if your list grows faster than your sending — which is the normal case, because lists only accumulate.
- 2. Per email sent. You pay for sends; storage is free or nearly so. Suits a large list emailed in bursts — seasonal retail, events, fundraising, a monthly newsletter. Punishes nobody in particular, but stops being an advantage if you email a small list daily.
- 3. Per contact with hard feature tiers. The list price is per contact and the capability you need sits two tiers up. The bill rises for two independent reasons, which is what makes these the hardest to forecast. Watch for automation counts, landing-page visitor caps, seats and segmentation depth.
- 4. Per send with published overage. Mostly transactional providers. The tier price is close to meaningless on its own; the overage rate is the number that decides a spiky month. Postmark publishes theirs. Several competitors disclose overage only inside the account, which means you cannot model a launch month before committing.
Bluey is model 2 with one qualification worth stating plainly: below 20,000 sends a month the contact list is capped at your send volume, and from 20,000 upwards contacts are unlimited. Higher plans also raise the number of separate automations — 3 on Spark, 25 on Grow, unlimited on Business — though no plan caps the steps or branches inside a flow. The full numbers are on our pricing page.
How to compare two platforms honestly
Five checks, in this order
Pricing explained, platform by platform
- MailerLite pricing explained — the four plans, Comfort’s 10× send cap, Power’s unlimited sends, and the price at 10,000 subscribers.
- Mailchimp pricing explained — the contact-tier ladder, the 10×/12×/15× send multiples, automatic overage billing and the charges that make the real bill higher than advertised.
- Brevo pricing explained — send-based tiers, the daily cap on the free plan and what each paid plan unlocks.
- ActiveCampaign pricing explained — per-contact tiers, the add-ons that stack on top, and where the automation limits sit.
- Constant Contact pricing explained — contact-based plans, what changes between tiers and the costs that are easy to miss.
- SendGrid pricing explained — Essentials versus Pro, overage exposure and when the dedicated IP matters.
- AWeber pricing explained — the full per-subscriber grid, what Lite’s three-automation cap means in practice, and where per-subscriber and per-send billing cross.
- Postmark pricing explained — tiers, the published overage rates, the exact break-even between Basic and Pro, and which tiers include inbound processing.
- Mailgun pricing explained — every volume tier from Basic to Scale 1M, overage per 1,000, dedicated IPs, and the cheapest plan at your volume (checked 3 November 2026).
- Resend pricing explained — the free tier’s daily cap, Pro and Scale volume tiers, overage and add-ons (checked 3 November 2026).
Each explainer states the date its figures were checked against the vendor’s own pricing page. More will follow as vendors become sourceable, or from dated screenshots of their own pricing pages. The comparison hub covers features and model for every competitor in the meantime, including the rows where the other tool wins.
The cost that is not on any pricing page
Two real costs never appear in a tier table. Migration is the first: the risk is not the export, it is the fortnight afterwards when a new sending domain has no reputation, and getting that wrong costs more than a year of the price difference. The migration guides cover the sequencing.
The second is deliverability, which is a cost the moment it fails. Gmail expects bulk senders to hold spam complaints under 0.3%, and mail that lands in spam is paid for and unread — the most expensive email there is. A platform that is 20% cheaper and puts 5% more of your mail in the promotions tab is not cheaper. The deliverability guide covers what actually moves it.
Frequently asked questions
Why is email marketing pricing so hard to compare?
Two reasons. The models differ — some vendors charge for contacts stored, others for emails sent — so two quotes for "the same thing" are measuring different things. And many vendors do not publish readable numbers: when we fetched eleven pricing pages on 22 September 2026, four served either no currency figures or one, because their tables are rendered client-side. You cannot build a comparison from pages that do not state their prices.
Which email platform is cheapest?
There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one is selling something. It depends on the ratio between how many contacts you store and how many emails you send. Large list, infrequent sends: send-based pricing wins comfortably. Small list, daily sends: per-contact pricing can be cheaper. Run your own two numbers before believing anyone's table, including ours.
Is per-send pricing always cheaper than per-contact?
No. It is cheaper when your list is large relative to your sending frequency, which describes most businesses but not all. If you email a small, highly engaged list every day, the per-contact model can come out ahead. The honest framing is that per-send pricing removes the penalty for list growth, not that it is universally lower.
What is an overage rate and why does it matter?
It is what you pay per thousand emails once you pass your plan's included volume. It matters because it, not the tier price, determines the cost of your busiest month — and because the tier gap between plans is often small while the overage gap is large. Postmark publishes its rates; several competitors disclose them only inside the account.
Can I trust a third-party blog's competitor pricing table?
Check whether it names a retrieval date and links the vendor's own page. If a table quotes exact tier prices for a vendor whose pricing page renders client-side, the author got those numbers from somewhere other than that page — an old screenshot, another blog, or an account they had. Prices in this category change often enough that an undated table is worth very little.
Why does the table above not include Mailchimp or Klaviyo prices?
The table counts what each vendor's pricing page states without running JavaScript, and theirs state almost nothing that way. The separate Mailchimp explainer quotes figures checked against Mailchimp's own rendered pricing page, with the date stated on the page. Klaviyo's figures will be added when they can be sourced the same way.
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