3 free findings
- MailerLite has the lowest list price at 6 of 7 list sizes we priced: Comfort is $19/mo at 1,000 subscribers and $439/mo at 100,000. beehiiv Lite wins at 50,000 ($299 vs $319). Sources: MailerLite pricing.md, beehiiv pricing, 14 Oct 2026.
- Kit's free plan can run a paid newsletter at $0/month under 10,000 subscribers. You pay only Kit's 3.5% + 30¢ checkout fee and give up automations. Sources: Kit Free plan, kit.com/pricing.
- Substack's 10% gets expensive. On an 8,000-subscriber list it costs more than MailerLite once paid revenue passes about $645/month. At $25,000 MRR it costs about $4,150/mo, vs about $1,900–2,500 elsewhere. Calculated from Substack's fee article and vendor pricing.
Free preview: 10,000 subscribers
| Platform | Cheapest plan with automations (10k subs, monthly) | Paid-subscription take |
|---|---|---|
| MailerLite | Comfort $89/mo | 0% (Stripe fees only) |
| Kit | Creator $139/mo (Free plan $0, no automations) | 3.5% + 30¢ incl. processing |
| beehiiv | Lite $139/mo | 0% (Stripe fees only) |
| Substack | $0 | 10% + Stripe |
Monthly billing, list prices as of 14 Oct 2026. The full report covers every tier, annual pricing and four paid-newsletter scenarios.
What's inside (12 sections)
- Executive summary and quick picks by persona
- Full price ladders: Kit 44 tiers, beehiiv 11, MailerLite 29 (USD & EUR)
- Paid-newsletter scenarios at 8k, 25k and 100k subscribers, all-in cost and % of MRR
- Monetization economics: take rates, ad network, paid recommendations
- Feature-fit matrix, deliverability and support tiers
- EU/GDPR lens: data location, DPAs, sub-processors, Data Privacy Framework status
- AI/agent readiness: MCP servers, llms.txt, APIs
- Migration and lock-in, price-change log, full source register
Formats & pricing
Personal
PDF + web/Markdown version. Single-user licence.
Buy Personal [CHECKOUT LINK: Lemon Squeezy product URL]Data / Team
PDF + full structured dataset (report.json) + internal-use team licence.
Pricing Watch
or $129/yr. Every report update, a monthly change digest and a JSON feed.
Subscribe [CHECKOUT LINK: Lemon Squeezy subscription URL]Prices in USD. VAT/sales tax is calculated at checkout by Lemon Squeezy, our Merchant of Record. 14-day money-back guarantee: see refund policy.
Free price cheat-sheet
Get the 10k-subscriber cheat-sheet (CSV + JSON) and a note when prices change. One email a month at most; unsubscribe anytime.
Get the free cheat-sheet [SIGNUP FORM: embed or link Kit/beehiiv form]
See our privacy policy.
For AI agents & developers
A machine-readable summary is at /report-summary.json. Every record carries source_url, as_of and confidence. Site guide: /llms.txt. A Markdown version of this page is at /index.md.
Method & independence
Prices come from official vendor sources: pricing pages, machine-readable pricing files, help centres and legal pages. Kit's tier table was taken from kit.com's own pricing code and checked against two independent captures. Rankings are pure cost formulas, fixed before data collection.
Disclosure: we may earn affiliate commissions from Kit, beehiiv and MailerLite. That never changes a calculation. Full disclosure.