15+ Best Email Broadcast Services in 2026
A broadcast is one message sent to a whole list or a segment, and the right service depends on what you send. For a newsletter, Kit is free up to 10,000 subscribers. For campaigns on a small budget, MailerLite costs $89 a month at 10,000 subscribers. For raw sending volume through an API, Amazon SES charges $0.16 per 1,000 emails. We read the pricing pages of fifteen vendors on 7 October 2026 and matched each one to the job it does best. All prices are in US dollars.
Our pick for each job
- Starting a newsletter: Kit. The free plan runs to 10,000 subscribers and includes unlimited broadcasts, forms and landing pages. Sequences arrive with the Creator plan, which starts at $33 a month.
- Growing a newsletter: beehiiv. Referrals and monetization are part of the product. Free up to 2,500 subscribers, then Lite from $49 a month.
- Paid subscriptions with no monthly fee: Substack. There is no subscription fee; it keeps 10% of what readers pay, plus card fees.
- Campaigns on a tight budget: MailerLite. Editor, landing pages and automation at the lowest list prices in this group, $89 a month at 10,000 subscribers on Comfort.
- Email, SMS and WhatsApp in one account: Brevo. A free plan with 300 emails a day, then Starter from $9 a month.
- Large volumes from your own system: Amazon SES if you can build the surrounding tooling, or SendGrid if you want a ready-made campaign interface next to the API.
Quick Comparison
| Service | Best For | Starting Price | Free Tier | Automation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SendGrid | High sending volume | $19.95/mo (Email API Essentials) | Marketing Campaigns: 2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails/mo | Moderate |
| Mailgun | Developer control | $15/mo (Basic, 10,000 emails) | 100 emails/day | Basic |
| Amazon SES | Lowest sending cost | $0.16 per 1,000 emails (Essentials) | 6-month free plan, up to $200 credit (new AWS customers) | None |
| Mailchimp | Well-known all-rounder | $13/mo (Essentials, 500 contacts) | 250 contacts, 500 sends/mo | Extensive |
| Constant Contact | Small businesses | $12/mo (Lite, varies with contacts) | Trial only | Moderate |
| Brevo | Email, SMS and chat together | $9/mo (Starter, from 5,000 emails) | 300 emails/day | Extensive |
| Campaign Monitor | Design and brand control | $13/mo (Lite, 500 contacts) | 30-day trial only | Moderate |
| Buttondown | Plain newsletters | Free for the first 100 subscribers; add-ons from $9/mo | 100 subscribers | Light |
| beehiiv | Newsletter growth | $49/mo (Lite) | Up to 2,500 subscribers | Moderate |
| Substack | Paid newsletters | 10% of paid revenue plus card fees | Free to publish | Light |
| Kit | Creators with an audience | $33/mo (Creator, 1,000 subscribers, billed yearly) | Up to 10,000 subscribers | Sequences from Creator |
| MailerLite | Campaigns on a budget | $12/mo (Comfort, 500 subscribers) | 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails/mo | Moderate |
| Ghost | Website plus newsletter | $15/mo (Starter, 1,000 members, billed yearly) | Self-hosting only | Light |
| Moosend | Online stores on a budget | $7/mo (Pro, 500 contacts, billed yearly) | 30-day trial only | Extensive |
| Benchmark | Simple needs | $19/mo (Pro, from 1,000 contacts) | 500 contacts, 2,500 emails/mo | Moderate |
What a 10,000-subscriber list costs
Entry prices say little because nearly every vendor scales its price with list size. This table reads one list size from four pricing pages. Watch the billing basis: some figures assume a yearly commitment, others a month-to-month plan.
| Service and plan | Price at 10,000 subscribers | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Kit, Creator | $116/month | Monthly rate when billed yearly. The free plan already covers this list size, minus sequences. |
| MailerLite, Comfort | $89/month | Month-to-month rate; Power costs $129 at this size. |
| beehiiv, Lite | $139/month billed monthly, $119/month billed yearly | Pro is $239 and $199 respectively. |
| Mailchimp, Standard | $135/month (5,001 to 10,000 contacts band) | Mailchimp counts contacts rather than subscribers; the next band, 10,001 to 15,000 contacts, starts at $230. |
Over twelve months the gap is easier to see. MailerLite Comfort at $89 comes to $1,068 a year (12 x $89). Kit Creator at $116 comes to $1,392 (12 x $116), a difference of $324 for the same list, and Kit's figure assumes you pay for the year up front. If you only send broadcasts and do not need sequences, Kit's free plan makes that comparison moot until the list passes 10,000. Sources: Kit, MailerLite, beehiiv, Mailchimp.
The Full Breakdown
The list runs from sending infrastructure through marketing platforms to newsletter products. The numbers are positions in that order, not a quality ranking.
SendGrid belongs to Twilio and sells two separate things that are easy to confuse: an email API for application mail, and Marketing Campaigns for people who build newsletters in a browser. The two have their own price lists. According to Twilio's pricing page, the Email API starts at $19.95 a month on Essentials (the selector spans 50,000 to 100,000 emails a month) and at $89.95 on Pro, which includes dedicated IPs. The free trial allows 100 emails a day for 60 days.
Marketing Campaigns has its own free plan: up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, with paid Basic from $15 a month. A team can therefore run product notifications through the API and a monthly newsletter through a dashboard without opening a second account.
Where SendGrid falls short: The dashboard is busier than a pure marketing tool, and its automation is narrower than platforms built around lifecycle journeys.
Our pick if: your volume is high, your team sends system mail and campaigns, and one vendor relationship is worth more to you than the best campaign editor.
Mailgun is aimed at developers who want to see what happened to each message. Its pricing page lists an API and SMTP relay, inbound routing, email validation, dedicated IPs, deliverability analytics and SAML SSO. The free plan allows 100 emails a day, which is about 3,000 in a 30-day month.
The paid ladder is by volume. Basic is $15 a month for 10,000 emails, Foundation is $35 for 50,000 (the first month is free), and Scale is $90 for 100,000. Extra emails cost $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic and $1.30 on Foundation. Log retention grows with the plan, from one day on Basic to thirty days on Scale.
Where Mailgun falls short: Marketing features are thin, so a newsletter author who wants a template editor and subscriber forms will find little here.
Our pick if: engineers own your email, you care about log depth and domains, and you do not need a ready-made campaign interface.
Amazon SES delivers email and nothing else. On the Essentials plan, SES pricing is $0.16 per 1,000 emails. New AWS customers get a free plan for six months with up to $200 in credits. Two heavier plans add fixed fees: Pro at $0.22 per 1,000 plus $105 per account and region each month, and Enterprise at $0.23 plus $500.
A worked case: a weekly newsletter to 10,000 subscribers is about 40,000 emails a month, so Essentials costs 40 x $0.16 = $6.40, or $76.80 a year. The same volume on Mailgun Foundation is $35 a month, $420 a year. That gap shrinks once you count your own time, because SES leaves templates, unsubscribes, bounce handling and reputation monitoring to you.
Where SES falls short: There is no marketing interface and no automation, and the AWS console takes real learning.
Our pick if: you have developers, high volume and a reason to keep cost per email as low as it goes.
Mailchimp offers a large template library, many integrations and automations for the common cases. Its free plan covers one seat and one audience with up to 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, capped at 250 a day, so it suits a trial run more than a working newsletter.
Billing follows contacts, not subscribers. The pricing page shows Essentials at $13 a month for 500 contacts and Standard at $20. Further up, Standard costs $100 for 2,501 to 5,000 contacts, $135 for 5,001 to 10,000 and $230 for 10,001 to 15,000.
Where Mailchimp falls short: The cost climbs with the list faster than MailerLite does, and the interface carries years of accumulated features that a plain newsletter never touches.
Our pick if: your team already knows the tool or a required integration depends on it. For a fresh start on a small budget, there are cheaper routes.
The Constant Contact pricing page lists three plans whose price rises with your contact count: Lite from $12 a month, Standard from $35 and Premium from $80. Paying yearly lowers those starting figures to $10.20, $29.75 and $68 a month. There is no permanent free plan, only a free trial that does not ask for a card.
Lite allows monthly sends up to ten times your contact count. Standard raises that to twelve times and adds automation, scheduling and A/B testing. Premium goes to twenty-four times and adds advanced segmentation, reporting and 500 SMS a month.
Where Constant Contact falls short: Automation does not start until Standard, and on price alone it trails MailerLite and Brevo.
Our pick if: a small team wants a traditional template-based platform and does not mind paying more per contact for it.
Brevo, formerly Sendinblue, combines email with SMS, WhatsApp and live chat. Its free plan allows 300 emails a day. Paid plans are priced by monthly sending volume: the Brevo pricing page starts Starter at $9 a month and Standard at $18, both from 5,000 emails a month. Starter has no daily sending limit. Standard adds automation, A/B testing and advanced reports, and Professional begins at $499.
The daily cap on the free plan matters for broadcasts: at 300 a day, a list of 10,000 would need about 34 days to receive one send, so a weekly newsletter to a list that size needs a paid plan.
Where Brevo falls short: If you only send email, you pay for a dashboard with several areas you will not open.
Our pick if: newsletters, order-status text messages and chat should live in one account instead of three.
Campaign Monitor puts weight on layout. It has a template designer and a visual journey editor, plus link checking and inbox previews. According to its pricing page, three plans at 500 contacts cost $13 (Lite), $31 (Essentials) and $171 (Premier) month to month, or $11.70, $27.90 and $153.90 billed yearly. At 10,000 contacts Lite is $117, Essentials $182 and Premier $300. Nothing is free forever; there is a 30-day trial.
Where Campaign Monitor falls short: Prices rise quickly with the list, and the deeper automation sits in the upper plans.
Our pick if: design review matters more to you than the price per contact.
Buttondown suits people who write a newsletter in Markdown and send it. On its pricing page the first 100 subscribers are free, with an editor, a custom sending domain and hosted archives. Above that the price follows a subscriber slider.
Extra features are sold as add-ons. $9 a month adds tagging and segmentation, paid subscriptions, comments and surveys, analytics, RSS-to-email and sponsorships. $29 adds automations and several newsletters, and $79 adds whitelabeling.
Where Buttondown falls short: There is no drag-and-drop editor and few templates, so designed promotional campaigns are not what it is for.
Our pick if: you are a writer or developer who values a quiet tool without marketing overhead.
beehiiv bundles a referral program, network recommendations, monetization and analytics into one product.
The beehiiv pricing page lists a free plan up to 2,500 subscribers and two paid plans. Lite starts at $49 a month (up to 100,000 subscribers, with paid subscriptions and automations) and Pro at $95 a month (up to 250,000 subscribers, with more advanced analytics), both on yearly billing. On the slider, Lite shows $109 a month for 5,000 subscribers and $139 for 10,000 when paid monthly.
Where beehiiv falls short: It is a newsletter product, not a general marketing tool. Complex branching or product-data triggers belong on an automation platform.
Our pick if: your goal is a bigger readership funded by ads or subscriptions.
Substack costs nothing while you publish for free. Once you charge readers it keeps 10% of the revenue on top of payment processor fees, as its paid-subscription page describes. You carry no fixed fee in quiet months.
Readers can find new newsletters through recommendations inside Substack, and its app gives them a place to read outside the inbox.
Where Substack falls short: The 10% grows with your income. Branding and layout can be adjusted only so far, and part of your audience lives on a third party's platform.
Our pick if: paid subscriptions are the business model from day one and you would rather not carry a monthly bill.
Kit, formerly ConvertKit, serves people who earn money from their own audience. Kit's pricing page shows a free plan up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited landing pages, forms and email broadcasts, plus tags and segmentation. You can sell digital products and subscriptions on it as well.
Automation is where the free plan stops. Visual automations and sequences belong to Creator, which is $33 a month at 1,000 subscribers ($390 if paid yearly), $116 at 10,000 and $166 at 25,000. Pro starts at $66 and adds unlimited users and a referral system. Paid plans have a 14-day trial without a card, and the vendor offers free migrations.
Where Kit falls short: The product is shaped around creator businesses, not stores with a product catalog, and the price steps up noticeably with every list band.
Our pick if: you are launching a newsletter and can wait on sequences.
MailerLite covers an editor, landing pages and visual automation, billed by active subscribers. Its free plan allows 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month. At the first paid step, 500 subscribers, the MailerLite pricing page puts Comfort at $12 a month ($10.80 billed yearly) and Power at $25 ($22.50 yearly) with unlimited emails.
The ladder is easy to plan around. Paid month to month, Comfort costs $19 at 1,000 subscribers, $49 at 5,000, $89 at 10,000 and $179 at 25,000.
Where MailerLite falls short: Branching customer journeys driven by product data suit a platform such as Customer.io better, and some features are reserved for Power.
Our pick if: you need campaigns and simple automation and want to pay as little as possible.
Ghost joins a website, member management and a newsletter. A post can reach the site and the inbox without keeping two systems in step. The software is open source and can be self-hosted. The managed version, per Ghost's pricing page, starts with Starter at $15 a month for up to 1,000 members on yearly billing, without paid subscriptions. Publisher is $29 and adds paid subscriptions, custom themes and more staff users, and Business is $199 for up to 10,000 members.
Where Ghost falls short: The email side is leaner than at dedicated sending services, and segmentation runs through member labels rather than branching campaign logic.
Our pick if: your website is the center of the publication and the newsletter is an extension of it.
Moosend includes product recommendations, abandoned-cart emails and purchase tracking. It does not have a permanent free plan; instead there is a 30-day trial that asks for no card. On the Moosend pricing page, Pro at 500 contacts is $7 a month on yearly billing, with unlimited emails. Credit-based billing is also offered: 350,000 email credits cost $350.
Where Moosend falls short: The community is smaller, and there are fewer integrations and guides than around the big names.
Our pick if: you want store automation at a low price and accept a less familiar brand.
Benchmark keeps its feature list short. The free plan allows 500 contacts and up to 2,500 emails a month. Per the Benchmark pricing page, Pro starts at $19 a month and covers 1,000 to 100,000 contacts, with extra users at $15 a month.
Where Benchmark falls short: If you need detailed segmentation or a wide set of integrations, broader alternatives exist.
Our pick if: your organization sends one newsletter a month and wants no learning curve.
How to Choose an Email Broadcast Service
You are launching a newsletter
Start with Kit while you do not need sequences, since nothing is charged until 10,000 subscribers. If you plan to lean on referrals and ad income from the start, beehiiv fits better. If all you want is to write, Buttondown stays out of your way.
You want to earn from subscriptions
Substack only costs you when you earn (10%). Ghost makes sense when memberships and the website belong together and you want to control the platform.
You send campaigns for a business
MailerLite is the first stop on a small budget. Mailchimp is worth the extra when your team already knows it or an integration needs it. If SMS or chat should run in the same account, look at Brevo first. A store with cart and product emails should price Moosend.
You send large volumes from an application
Amazon SES is very cheap per email and needs developer time. Mailgun gives you more visibility into each delivery. SendGrid adds a campaign interface at the same vendor.
You are switching providers
Export your contacts together with their status (unsubscribed, bounced) and set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your sending domain on the new service before you schedule anything. Send the first campaigns to your most active contacts and widen the audience step by step. Kit's pricing page mentions free migrations; ask the other vendors whether they help with imports.
The Bottom Line
No single service wins every job. For a newsletter, Kit is the sensible default while sequences can wait, and beehiiv is the pick when audience growth is the aim. For business campaigns on a small budget, MailerLite has the lowest list prices among the platforms compared here.
For high volume sent through an API, choose Amazon SES if you can build around it and SendGrid if you want a finished interface. A wrong first choice is recoverable, since contacts can be exported.
FAQ
What is an email broadcast service?
It is a service that sends one message to an entire list or segment, such as a newsletter, an announcement or an offer. It also keeps track of subscribers, handles unsubscribes and reports on the send.
How do email broadcasts differ from drip campaigns?
A broadcast goes out once to every recipient you choose. A drip campaign is a series of messages triggered by an action or a time delay. Kit shows the split clearly: broadcasts are part of its free plan, while sequences start with the Creator plan.
Which service has the best deliverability?
Deliverability depends more on your list and sending habits than on the vendor: clean addresses, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records in place, and an easy unsubscribe. The services compared here supply tools for that work, but changing vendors will not repair a poor list.
Can I track revenue from email broadcasts?
Usually yes, by adding UTM parameters to your links and setting conversion goals in your analytics tool. That keeps revenue attributable to a campaign even when the sending service has no payment integration.
What is the cheapest email broadcast service?
For pure sending, Amazon SES at $0.16 per 1,000 emails, though it needs technical setup; new AWS customers get a six-month free plan with up to $200 in credits, per SES pricing. Among platforms with an interface, Kit is free to 10,000 subscribers, MailerLite has a free plan with 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month and paid plans from $12, and Moosend starts at $7 a month on yearly billing.