Your newsletter just crossed 2,500 subscribers, and the congratulations email from your platform comes with a second message: your free plan ends here. What cost you nothing last month now costs $49 a month — or $139, depending on which logo sits at the top of your login screen. Every newsletter platform is priced to feel free until your list works, then to grow with it. The question is never the starting price. It is what each platform charges when you succeed, what it gives you for that money, and which billing model punishes the way your list actually grows.
Three names dominate the small-business shortlist in 2026: Kit, beehiiv, and Mailchimp. All three send email to a list, but they are built for different businesses. Kit is email for creators who sell things — courses, digital products, paid subscriptions — with automations doing the selling while you sleep. Beehiiv treats the newsletter itself as the business, with growth tools and a built-in ad network that turn readers into revenue. Mailchimp is the familiar generalist: templates, integrations, and an audience model designed for shops and service businesses rather than publishers. This post compares them on the four things that decide the purchase: what each one really costs at your size, how each helps you grow, how each helps you earn, and what the bookkeeping looks like once money flows both ways.
What each platform actually is
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) starts from the creator economy. Its core objects are subscribers, tags, segments, visual automations, and email sequences — the machinery of a welcome series that pitches your course on day five and your paid tier on day twelve. Commerce is native: you can sell digital products and paid newsletters on every plan, including the free one, with Kit taking a 3.5% plus 30-cent cut of each sale. The free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers, the most generous of the three by far. The catch is that the free plan has no automations or sequences, which is most of what makes Kit Kit. To send a welcome email automatically, you need the Creator plan at $39 a month (or $33 billed yearly) for up to 1,000 subscribers.
Beehiiv starts from the newsletter as a media business. You get a website builder with custom pages, referral programs, and recommendation networks that grow one publication off another's audience. Monetization is the differentiator: native paid subscriptions at a 0% platform take rate (Stripe's processing fee still applies), a built-in ad network that matches sponsors to newsletters, and a paid-recommendations marketplace where you earn per subscriber you send to partner publications. The free plan covers 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. But the ad network, paid subscriptions, and automations all require a paid plan — Lite at $59 a month, or $49 billed yearly — so a free beehiiv account is a publishing tool, not yet a business.
Mailchimp starts from the small business that needs email done, not a publishing career. It has the largest template library of the three, the deepest integration catalog (e-commerce platforms, CRMs, ad platforms), and an automation builder on its Standard plan and above, plus Intuit Assist AI features for drafting and segmentation. Its free plan is the smallest: 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, cut down from the 2,000 contacts it offered a few years ago. Essentials starts at $13 a month for 500 contacts and Standard at $20. Mailchimp's defining trait is its billing unit: you pay per contact, and subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts all count toward your total until you archive them.
Pricing: the entry price is marketing, the 10,000-subscriber price is the product
Every platform advertises its cheapest number and buries the curve. Price your list at the size you expect in eighteen months, not the size it is today, because switching platforms mid-growth costs more in deliverability risk and migration labor than any monthly fee.
At a small list, the ranking is straightforward. Kit can be free to 10,000 subscribers if you send broadcasts by hand. Beehiiv is free to 2,500. Mailchimp Essentials is $13 a month at 500 contacts and climbs to $45 at 2,500. Once you need automations, Kit Creator at $39 a month and Mailchimp Standard at $20 to $60 (depending on band) undercut beehiiv Lite at $59 a month — but only beehiiv's fee unlocks ad revenue that can exceed the subscription itself.
At 10,000 contacts, the three converge in an uncomfortable band. Third-party captures of 2026 pricing put Mailchimp at $110 on Essentials and $135 on Standard, Kit Creator at about $139, and beehiiv Lite at $139 (Pro at $239). The differences that matter at this size are structural, not the headline number. Mailchimp counts every contact including people who unsubscribed, so a list with 20% churn bills like a list 25% larger until you archive the dead weight — archiving is free, and skipping it is the most common billing surprise in the industry. Kit and beehiiv bill on subscribers, a cleaner unit, but Kit's per-bracket jumps at larger sizes are steep: buyer-reported data puts Creator near $379 a month at 50,000 subscribers, where beehiiv's flat-band pricing stays flatter for longer.
Two pricing traps deserve their own callouts. First, Kit's free plan has no automations, so "free to 10,000" means free only if you send everything manually — the moment you want a welcome sequence, you are on Creator. Second, Mailchimp's send multipliers cap monthly volume at a multiple of your contact tier (10x on Essentials, 12x on Standard), so a daily sender with a big list can hit send limits before contact limits. Always check the live pricing page before committing: all three vendors changed plans, names, or free limits within the last eighteen months, and older reviews quote numbers that no longer exist.
Growth: how each platform finds your next thousand readers
If your newsletter grows only when you personally promote it, growth tooling matters less than price. If you want the platform to do some of the finding, the three diverge sharply.
Beehiiv is the clear leader here, and growth is arguably the reason to choose it. The recommendation network lets publications recommend each other, with paid recommendations paying per verified subscriber delivered — you can buy growth from complementary newsletters or get paid when your audience flows outward. The referral program bakes subscriber-get-subscriber mechanics into every issue. And the website builder means every post is an indexed web page pulling search traffic, not just an email that dies in inboxes. For a publication whose business model is audience size, this stack has no equivalent on the other two.
Kit grows lists through commerce gravity rather than network effects. Landing pages, forms, and paid recommendations exist, but Kit's real growth engine is the funnel: a free download captures the subscriber, a sequence nurtures them, and a product or paid newsletter converts them. Subscriber scoring on the Pro tier tells you who is actually engaged. This works brilliantly when you have something to sell and indifferently when you don't — Kit assumes the email list exists to move products, because for its target customer it does.
Mailchimp grows lists the traditional way: signup forms, popups, landing pages, integrations with everywhere your customers already are, and ad-platform connections that turn site visitors into contacts. There is no cross-publication network and no referral engine. For a shop or service business whose list grows with foot traffic and orders, that is sufficient. For a publisher trying to compound an audience, it means every subscriber costs you effort or ad spend that beehiiv's network might have delivered organically.
Monetization: where the revenue lines come from
Here the platforms separate into three different business models wearing similar interfaces.
Beehiiv stacks three revenue lines natively: paid subscriptions at a 0% platform cut, ad-network sponsorships placed with one click, and paid-recommendation income per subscriber referred. A newsletter with 10,000 engaged readers can plausibly earn more from one monthly sponsor slot than the Lite plan costs — which reframes the $139 fee as a cost of goods sold against ad inventory rather than an overhead expense. Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents still applies to paid subscriptions, and payouts arrive through Stripe, so your ad and subscription revenue lands in the same place as any other card income.
Kit monetizes through direct sales. Digital products, paid newsletters, and (via integrations) courses all sell through Kit's commerce rails with that 3.5% plus 30-cent fee on every transaction. There is no ad network, so sponsorship income means manual invoicing and insertion. The math favors Kit when your average transaction is large: the platform fee on a $200 course sale is $7.30, trivial against the margin, while beehiiv's 0% subscription cut matters most when subscription volume is high and prices are low. Pick based on what you sell, not on which fee percentage looks smaller in isolation.
Mailchimp has no native monetization beyond selling through integrations. It connects to your store, your course platform, your payment processor — and the sale happens over there. That is fine when email is a marketing channel for a business that earns elsewhere, which describes most Mailchimp customers. It is a gap when the newsletter is supposed to pay for itself: every revenue line needs a third-party tool, a separate login, and its own fee, and none of it appears in Mailchimp's reporting.
Automations: the feature that decides whether you stay
Ask what happens when someone joins your list at 2 a.m., because the answer reveals each platform's soul.
On Kit's Creator plan and above, the answer can be elaborate: a welcome sequence, tag-based branching, product pitches timed to engagement, win-back series for cold subscribers, all in a visual builder with unlimited automations and sequences. This is Kit's home turf. Reviewers consistently rate its automation depth above both competitors at comparable prices — but remember it does not exist at all on the free plan, so trialing Kit free tells you nothing about the product you would actually pay for.
Beehiiv's Lite plan includes 10 automations, with unlimited automations on Pro. The builder covers welcome series, onboarding, and re-engagement competently, though power users describe it as younger and less flexible than Kit's. For most newsletters — welcome, nurture, upsell to paid — ten automations is plenty, and the constraint only binds for complex multi-product funnels.
Mailchimp gates its automation builder behind Standard ($20 and up), leaving Essentials buyers with only basic single-step flows. On Standard and Premium the builder is mature, with prebuilt customer journeys for abandoned carts, post-purchase follow-up, and win-backs that reflect Mailchimp's e-commerce roots. If your automations orbit a store, Mailchimp's templates save real setup time. If they orbit content and subscriptions, you will build more from scratch than on Kit.
The bookkeeping both directions: subscriptions out, revenue in
Whichever platform you choose, it creates bookkeeping in two directions, and small businesses fumble both. The subscription going out is the easy one to get wrong: an annual plan paid upfront is a prepaid asset amortized over twelve months, not a single month's expense that torpedoes one month's profit. The revenue coming in is the easy one to forget: ad-network payouts and paid-subscription income are taxable revenue that must be recorded gross, with platform and processing fees booked as their own expense lines — netting them hides both your real revenue and your real costs.
Here is the pattern in a plain-text ledger for a newsletter on beehiiv's Lite plan at $49 a month billed annually ($588), with a $250 February sponsor payout arriving through the ad network. The beancount.io docs cover the mechanics if any of these postings are new to you:
2026-01-01 open Assets:Cash:Operating USD
2026-01-01 open Assets:Prepaid:Software USD
2026-01-01 open Expenses:Software:Email USD
2026-01-01 open Income:Newsletter:Ads USD
2026-02-01 * "beehiiv" "Lite annual subscription"
Assets:Prepaid:Software 588.00 USD
Assets:Cash:Operating -588.00 USD
2026-02-28 * "Amortization" "February email platform"
Expenses:Software:Email 49.00 USD
Assets:Prepaid:Software -49.00 USD
2026-02-28 * "beehiiv Ad Network" "February sponsor payout"
Assets:Cash:Operating 250.00 USD
Income:Newsletter:Ads -250.00 USDTwo details make this worth doing monthly rather than at tax time. First, separating Income:Newsletter:Ads from subscription and product income shows which revenue line actually pays the platform bill — the number that tells you whether beehiiv's $139 is cheap or ruinous. Second, tracking the platform subscription under its own expense account, rather than lumped into general software, lets you compute true cost per subscriber each month: total email expense divided by engaged subscribers. When that number drifts upward while open rates drift downward, your list is decaying and your per-contact billing is charging you for the privilege.
Common mistakes when choosing
Choosing on the entry price. The $13 Mailchimp plan, the free Kit account, and the free beehiiv account are different products from the paid tiers you will land on. Model each platform at your eighteen-month list size with the features you actually need, and the ranking often inverts.
Paying for ghosts. On Mailchimp, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward billing until archived. Schedule a quarterly archive pass — it takes minutes and can drop you a full pricing band. On any platform, suppress or remove chronically unengaged addresses: they cost money and hurt deliverability.
Trialing the wrong tier. Kit's free plan has no automations and beehiiv's free plan has no monetization, so a free trial evaluates the editor, not the business. Trial the paid tier with monthly billing for one cycle, build one real automation and one real revenue path, then decide.
Ignoring the exit cost. Export your list, tags, and engagement history before you need them. Every platform exports subscribers; not every export preserves the tags and segments your automations depend on. And remember that switching sending domains resets sender reputation — warm the new one gradually rather than blasting your full list on day one.
Letting revenue bypass the books. Ad payouts and subscription income that land in Stripe alongside other sales are easy to leave unclassified until April. Reconcile monthly, split revenue by line, and record platform fees as expenses: clean monthly numbers are what let you answer "is this newsletter profitable?" with arithmetic instead of vibes.
Which one fits your small business
Choose Kit if you sell things to your audience — courses, digital products, coaching, paid tiers — and want automations that sell while you sleep. Its free plan to 10,000 subscribers is the cheapest way to start, and its commerce rails keep the sale inside the same system as the pitch. Accept the 3.5% transaction fee as the price of that integration, and budget for Creator from the month you need your first automation, because the free plan will not send it.
Choose beehiiv if the newsletter is the product — a publication you grow, monetize with ads or paid subscriptions, and measure by audience. The recommendation network, referral engine, and ad network form a growth-and-revenue flywheel neither competitor offers, and the 0% cut on paid subscriptions keeps more of each reader's dollar. Accept that everything interesting requires Lite or above, and price the plan against expected ad income, not against the other platforms' fees.
Choose Mailchimp if email is a channel for a business that earns elsewhere — a shop announcing drops, a service firm nurturing leads, a restaurant filling Tuesday nights. The templates get you sending today, the integrations connect email to the systems that already run your business, and e-commerce automations on Standard cover the journeys that actually lift revenue. Accept per-contact billing by archiving ruthlessly, and re-check the price at every growth milestone, because Mailchimp's curve steepens exactly when success arrives.
Whichever you pick, do the eighteen-month math before you import a single contact: project your list size, price each platform at that size with the features you need, and subtract the revenue only one of them can generate. The cheapest newsletter platform is rarely the one with the lowest starting price — it is the one whose billing model matches how your list grows and whose revenue tools match how your business earns.
