Is MailerLite Free? Yes, for 250 Subscribers, and Half What It Was

Yes, MailerLite has a free plan, and it is a real one rather than a trial. It is also half the size it was a year ago. People ask is mailerlite free about 90 times a month in the United States, and the honest answer has three parts: what the plan includes, what changed on 16 June 2026, and what happens on the day you outgrow it.

Every figure here comes from the vendor's own pricing page, plan-change notice and billing help, read on 9 October 2026.

The short answer

MailerLite Free covers up to 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with two user seats ^[5]. It includes email campaigns, three automations, one website and one landing page, three signup forms, one digital product or booking, and more than 100 integrations ^[2]. It has no time limit and needs no card.

It is not the generous free plan people remember. Until 16 June 2026 it covered 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month. The vendor's notice states both cuts in plain words: "Subscriber limit was reduced from 500 to 250 active subscribers." and "Sending limit was reduced from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails." ^[5]

At the limit, sending stops and nothing is charged. That is the single most important thing to know about it, and it is the opposite of how the paid plans behave.

## What the free plan includes

The pricing page's comparison table lists the free column alongside Comfort and Power ^[2]. In outline:

• Sending: 2,500 emails a month, to up to 250 subscribers.
• Audience tools: unlimited segments and interest groups, embedded forms and pop-ups.
• Editors: drag-and-drop, custom HTML and the simple editor.
• Automations: three active, with up to five steps each.
• Sites: one website of up to five pages and one landing page.
• Commerce: one active digital product or booking.
• Seats: two.
• Integrations: 100+, including the MCP connection for AI assistants, with limits.

Some features opened up on Free in June. The vendor lists custom campaign and landing page templates, blogs, promotional pop-ups and the HTML campaign editor among them ^[5].

That is a usable toolkit for a newsletter in its first months. A writer with a few hundred readers can run a welcome sequence, publish a landing page for a lead magnet, and sell one product, without paying.

The limits, in numbers

	Free	Comfort, cheapest band
Subscribers	250	500
Emails a month	2,500	5,000
Seats	2	3
Active automations	3	50
Steps per automation	5	100
Active forms	3	10
Sites and landing pages	1 + 1	10 combined
Digital products or bookings	1	5
Support	community	24/7 email
Price	$0	$12 a month

Two less visible limits. Free accounts cannot send through the API or the MCP server: on Free, "API and MCP access is limited and doesn't include sending." ^[2] And the MailerLite logo stays on your emails; removing it is a Comfort feature.

The sending allowance is the limit most people hit first. At 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails is ten sends to the full list a month. A weekly newsletter plus a short welcome sequence fits. A daily digest does not.

## What changed on 16 June 2026

The vendor changed its free and paid plans on the same day. For Free, the notice lists the changes ^[5]:

• Subscribers: down from 500 to 250.
• Monthly emails: down from 12,000 to 2,500, a cut of 79%.
• Seats: up from one to two.
• Feature use limits introduced: three automations, three forms, one product, one landing page and one website of up to five pages.
• Several premium features unlocked.

The vendor's stated reason is that clear limits will keep the plan "running faster and more reliably, while also protecting your email deliverability and preventing misuse" ^[5].

Reviewers who have been on the free plan for years describe a longer history. One writes that "the free subscriber limit went from 1000 to 500" before the second halving ^[12] and calls the sequence a rug-pull. The vendor's page records only the second step, so that is the one we state as fact. Either way, the direction is consistent: the free plan has become a starting point rather than a place to stay.

What happens when you go over

Nothing is charged. The vendor is explicit: "If you're on a Free plan, you'll only be charged if you choose to upgrade to a paid plan manually." ^[5]

Instead, things stop. Over 250 subscribers, campaigns stop sending, automations stop running, and new subscribers cannot be added manually, by API or through integrations. Over 2,500 emails, sending pauses until the next monthly reset ^[5].

Some things keep going, and that is where the risk sits. Forms and landing pages "will continue to be active and collect subscribers without showing any errors to your visitors" ^[5]. So people keep signing up and receive nothing. A welcome sequence that has stopped is invisible to the person waiting for it.

Integrations behave in a particular way too. Over the limit, connected e-commerce integrations keep syncing customers who are already subscribers, "but they will not add newly opted-in customers to your email list" ^[5].

Your data stays. The vendor states that all account data remains and that the account stays active.

## Getting back under the limit

You have two ways back: upgrade, or reduce.

Upgrading means Comfort at $12 a month for up to 500 subscribers, or $10.80 a month billed yearly ^[2]. That is the cheapest paid band, and it doubles your subscriber limit and sending allowance.

Reducing means removing active subscribers. The vendor points to a clean-up tool for inactive subscribers in the Subscribers section, and to its MailerCheck service for low-quality addresses ^[5]. Unsubscribed and bounced addresses do not count, so they need no action.

There is a timing catch. The billing count on MailerLite is cumulative within a period: an address "that was Active at any point during the cycle counts toward your subscriber limit, even if it is deleted later" ^[3]. On a free account the count resets on your account's monthly date. So a clean-up may not restore sending until that reset. Clean before you hit the line, not after.

Feature limits work separately. Over three automations or three forms, you cannot create, activate or edit those items until you are back under, and an item you deactivate while over the limit cannot be reactivated until you are ^[5].

The 14-day trial is not the free plan

New accounts get a 14-day trial of premium features ^[2]. It is easy to confuse with the free plan and it is something different.

During the trial you can use features normally reserved for paid plans. When it ends, "these features will no longer be available unless the account is upgraded", and "None of your data including subscribers, automations, forms, sites, etc will be removed from your account once the trial ends." ^[2]

So nothing is lost at the end of the trial, but anything you built with a premium feature stops being editable or usable on Free. If you build your first automation with a premium trigger in week one, expect it to stop in week three.

The practical advice is to build on the free plan's own features from the start, and treat the trial as a way to decide whether Comfort is worth $12 a month.

Free accounts are also the audience for MailerLite's occasional upgrade sales. The GOLITE50 sale ran from 25 August to 24 September 2026 and gave 50% off the first month of a monthly Comfort or Power plan, but only to "new or existing customers on the new MailerLite free plan" ^[18]. Paying accounts were excluded, and so were users who installed the MailerLite app through the Shopify App Store. The discount applied for one month and could not be used on renewals. If you are on Free and planning to upgrade anyway, it can be worth waiting for the next one; if your sending is already paused, it is not worth the wait.

## A newsletter's first year on Free

Here is what the limits mean for a typical new newsletter, sending once a week and growing steadily.

Months one to three. The list grows from zero to about 120. Four newsletters a month to 120 people is 480 emails, plus a three-email welcome sequence for 40 new subscribers a month, another 120. Total about 600 a month, a quarter of the allowance. Everything fits, including a landing page for a lead magnet and one paid product.

Months four to six. The list reaches about 220. Weekly sends now use about 900 emails, the welcome sequence 150, and an occasional extra announcement 220. Total about 1,270. Still inside 2,500. The three-automation cap starts to matter: a welcome sequence, a purchase follow-up and a re-engagement flow fill it.

Month seven. A post is shared widely and the list jumps from 230 to 310 in a week. At 251, campaigns and automations stop. The signup form keeps working, so the 60 new people receive nothing ^[5]. The owner notices days later.

The choice. Clean back under 250 and wait for the reset, or upgrade to Comfort at $12 a month, $144 a year, or $129.60 billed yearly ^[2]. Comfort doubles the subscriber limit to 500 and the allowance to 5,000.

Months eight to twelve. At around 480 subscribers on Comfort, the next line is 500. Crossing it moves the plan to the 1,000 band, $19 a month, automatically ^[3].

The lesson is in month seven. The free plan does not bill you, but it does not warn your subscribers either. Set yourself an alert at 200.

Free for teams and nonprofits

The free plan has two seats. That is one more than before June, and enough for a writer and an editor, or a volunteer coordinator and a treasurer.

Going from a paid plan back to Free removes extra users automatically. The vendor's cancellation page says that if the account has more than two users, "additional users will be automatically removed during the downgrade" ^[7]. They can be added back if you upgrade again.

There is no separate nonprofit free plan. Nonprofits receive 30% off any paid plan on proof of status ^[3], which brings Comfort at 500 subscribers to $8.40 a month. For a small charity whose list is near 250, that discount is usually a better answer than fighting the free limit.

A charity should also note that a free account cannot remove the MailerLite logo from its emails, and that support on Free is community resources rather than email. Both change on the first paid band.

## Free and AI assistants

MailerLite publishes an MCP server, so assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT can work with the account directly: drafting a campaign, finding a subscriber's activity, checking where an automation loses people.

On the free plan that connection is limited. The vendor's pricing FAQ is direct: "Email sending via the API and MCP server is available on paid plans. On Free, API and MCP access is limited and doesn't include sending." ^[2] An assistant can help you prepare a campaign on Free. It cannot send it.

The same applies to anything that sends through the API: a website integration that triggers an email, a script that sends a digest, a custom automation built outside MailerLite. On Free, those need a paid plan or a different route.

The built-in AI features are also mostly on the paid side. The AI writing assistant and smart sending arrive with Comfort, according to the vendor's plan-change notice ^[4]. If AI drafting is part of why you chose MailerLite, factor in the $12.

How it compares with other free plans

Free email plans in this category have shrunk across the board, and MailerLite's is still one of the more useful.

Mailchimp's free plan covers 250 contacts too, but only 500 emails a month with a daily limit of 250, one seat, and email support for the first 30 days, according to our measurement of its pages. It excludes scheduling and A/B testing. MailerLite's sends five times as much and carries three automations.

Constant Contact has no free plan at all. It offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid tiers instead.

We have not yet measured the free plans of Brevo, Kit, beehiiv or GetResponse with the same method, so we make no claims about them here.

On the evidence we have, MailerLite Free remains the best free plan in our measured set for a small newsletter. It is no longer large enough to run a business on.

When to stop using it

Three signals say it is time to pay.

Your list is within 50 subscribers of 250. Because the count is cumulative within a period and the plan stops rather than bills, a busy week can pause your sending without warning to you or your subscribers.

You are sending more than about eight times your list a month. The allowance is 2,500, so a list of 250 has ten sends; automations eat into that faster than people expect.

You want to remove the MailerLite logo, send through the API or an AI assistant, or run more than three automations.

At that point Comfort costs $12 a month and doubles the subscriber and sending limits. If you expect to keep growing, look at the full ladder first: Comfort is $19 at 1,000 subscribers and $33 at 2,500 ^[2].

Moving to a paid plan without surprises

The paid plans behave differently from Free, and the difference is worth understanding before you upgrade.

On Free, crossing a limit stops sending. On a paid plan, crossing a limit moves the bill. The vendor says so in its free-plan notice: once on a paid plan, "your account will automatically upgrade when you reach the subscriber or sending limit for the plan you're on." ^[5] The upgrade is charged pro rata at once, and coming back down is a manual downgrade at the end of the cycle ^[3].

Two habits help. Check the band you will reach at your peak, not your current count, in the published ladder. And find the "Cancel scheduled upgrade" control in Plan and billing before your first big import ^[3].

If you ever want to go back to Free, cancel the paid plan; it runs to the end of its period and the account then moves to Free, provided you are under 250 active subscribers ^[7].

## The verdict

MailerLite is free for up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, permanently, with a useful set of tools. It is the best free plan we have measured for a small newsletter, and it is half the size it was before 16 June 2026.

Use it to start. Watch the 250 line closely, because the plan stops quietly rather than billing you. And when you move to Comfort at $12, remember that the paid plans work the other way round: they keep going, and the bill moves with them.