MailerLite has a reputation as the fair-priced alternative to Mailchimp, and on the evidence it has earned the price half of that reputation. It publishes its whole price list. Every rung, both plans, monthly and annual, from 500 subscribers to 200,000. Nobody else in this category does that. What it does not put on the pricing page is the part that decides what you will actually pay: how the subscriber count is taken, and what happens when it moves.
That is the review in two sentences. The rest is the measurement. mailerlite pricing draws
1,000 searches a month in the United States and so does mailerlite price, five times the 210
for what is mailerlite. People arrive asking what it costs. The honest answer is a number you
can read off a table, and then a set of rules that move you to a different row of it without
asking.
What you are buying
One product with four plans: Free, Comfort, Power and Enterprise. The paid plans differ in volume, not in features, and the vendor says so plainly: "Every paid plan gets our full feature set. You only pay more for a bigger list or more sending." [2]
That set is wide for the money. Email with a drag-and-drop editor, a custom HTML editor and a simple one. Automations of up to 100 steps. Websites with a blog section, landing pages, pop-ups and signup forms. Surveys and quizzes inside the email. A commerce layer for digital products, bookings, paid newsletters and recurring subscriptions, run through Stripe and sold "without paying us a commission" [10]. An MCP server that lets Claude or ChatGPT draft campaigns and read subscriber activity in the account.
What is missing is the depth at the top of this category. There is no SMS in the marketing product. There is no customer data platform and no sales pipeline. Transactional email is a separate product, MailerSend, with its own price list. Klaviyo runs six channels off one customer profile. MailerLite runs one channel very well and builds sideways from it, into the pages and the products that a person who sells what they write actually needs.
The plans were renamed this year. In the vendor's words, "Growing Business plan is now called Comfort, and the Advanced plan is now called Power." [4] Older reviews and comparison pages use the old names.
Model your list growth against the published ladder before you sign. It is the one vendor in this category that lets you.
Read on 9 October 2026, the pricing page shows Comfort at $12 a month and Power at $25 a month for up to 500 subscribers [2]. That much is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the page's own script. It carries the whole ladder: 29 subscriber bands from 500 to 200,000, each with a monthly and an annual price for both paid plans. Nothing has to be inferred.
A sample of it, monthly, Comfort then Power:
| Subscribers | Comfort | Power |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $12 | $25 |
| 1,000 | $19 | $39 |
| 2,500 | $33 | $49 |
| 5,000 | $49 | $69 |
| 10,000 | $89 | $129 |
| 25,000 | $179 | $239 |
| 50,000 | $319 | $389 |
| 100,000 | $439 | $489 |
| 200,000 | $819 | $1,119 |
The annual price is exactly 90% of the monthly on every one of the 58 price points. We checked that in an interpreter rather than by eye. It matches the published rule: "For annual plans, you'll automatically get a 10% discount." [3] Nonprofits get 30% instead, and the two do not stack.
Compare the rest of the field. Mailchimp names twenty contact bands and withholds the price of most of them from American readers. Constant Contact names its bands and prices only the first. Klaviyo's pricing page is a calculator that returns nothing until you type. Against that, MailerLite's table is a public good. You can model your next three years of list growth before you sign up, and that is the single most useful thing a buyer in this category can do.
An account can be reviewed and suspended on its first campaigns. Warm up with a small, clearly opted-in list and keep the consent records.
The page loads in its "Billed yearly" state [2]. So the first numbers a reader sees are $10.80 and $22.50 a month, with the monthly $12 and $25 struck through beside them. The annual total is $129.60 for Comfort and $270 for Power at the entry band.
This is the same default we measured at Constant Contact, and it is milder here for two reasons. The monthly price is on the same page, visible, not in another company's store. And the discount is a flat 10%, not a figure you have to divide your way back from.
It still steers. The headline price on this page is the one that needs a year paid up front, and an annual plan locks less than it seems. The terms promise that new clients "can secure the current pricing for the upcoming year by signing up for an annual plan" [8], and that holds for the band you buy. It does not hold for your list. During the year, "if your subscriber or sent email count increases above the limit, the system will automatically charge the account's default payment method a pro-rated amount based on the new annual cost" [3]. At the end of the year, the terms say every plan will "renew at the then-current price applicable at the time of renewal" [8]. You pay a year ahead and still carry the price risk.
The practical reading is simple. Compare MailerLite on the monthly figure, the way you would compare anything else. Take the annual plan only when you know your list will stay inside one band for twelve months, because the discount is 10% and an upgrade inside the year is charged on the annual price.
Compare on the monthly price. The page opens on the annual rate, and an annual plan is still re-priced by any upgrade inside the year.
Here is the rule that the pricing page does not carry, from the billing help page: "To keep things fair, we use a cumulative count during one billing cycle, meaning any email address that was Active at any point during the cycle counts toward your subscriber limit, even if it is deleted later." [3]
Read that twice. Deleting subscribers does not lower this month's bill. The vendor gives a worked example: "if you delete subscribers on April 1st and your billing date is April 5th, those subscribers will continue to count toward your limit until April 4th." [3] A list cleaned in the middle of a cycle is billed at its peak for the rest of that cycle.
There is a reason for the rule and the vendor names it. Without it, an account could add a thousand addresses, send, delete them and add a thousand more, and never leave the smallest band. The help page calls that out directly: "deleting subscribers and re-uploading new ones to bypass the limits of your plan violates our terms of service" [3]. So the cumulative count is an anti-abuse rule. It also catches honest list hygiene.
The comparison with Mailchimp is closer than the vendor's comparison page suggests. That page says "we only count your active contacts!" [9], which is true of status: Mailchimp bills unsubscribed contacts that are still stored, and MailerLite does not. On time, the two behave the same way. Our Mailchimp measurement found it also bills the peak contact total of the month, even if the list shrinks before the month ends. Where they differ is what happens at the band line. Mailchimp keeps your tier and adds contact blocks until you change it yourself. MailerLite moves the tier for you.
Two meters that move the plan up
The plan upgrades itself, and it has two triggers. "Auto-upgrades apply to both subscriber and sending thresholds." [4]
The first is list size. Cross the ceiling of your band and the plan moves to the next one. At that moment "the system will calculate a pro-rated amount based on the new monthly cost and the time remaining in the current billing cycle", and from the next cycle the card is charged the new monthly amount [3].
The second is sending, and it only applies to Comfort, because Power is unlimited. Comfort allows ten times the top of your band each month: "The multiplier is based on the top of your tier, not your exact subscriber count." [2] On the 1,000 band that is 10,000 emails, whether the list holds 200 people or 900. Send more and the plan moves up a band. The billing page gives the example of a 5,000-subscriber account that sends over 50,000 emails and is "upgraded to Comfort 8,000, then moved back to Comfort 5,000 at renewal" [3].
That last clause is the generous part. A send-triggered upgrade reverts on its own. A subscriber-triggered one does not, because your list is still that size. Both are charged at the moment they happen.
Neither is hidden. Both are written down, with worked examples, on a page last edited on 16 June 2026. They are simply not on the page where people decide.
Clean your list just before your billing date, not just after it. Deleted addresses count until the cycle closes.
Up is automatic. Down is manual, and it waits. "When downgrading, your original plan will finish the billing cycle (monthly or annual), then the new (lesser) plan will start at the next billing cycle." [3] On an annual plan that can mean most of a year at the higher band.
Two published controls soften this, and they are what separate MailerLite from the ratchet we measured at Constant Contact. The first is a brake on pending upgrades: in Plan and billing, "Click Cancel scheduled upgrade." [3] The second is the automatic reversal of send-triggered upgrades at renewal, described above. Constant Contact publishes neither.
The refund policy does not soften anything. The vendor is "required to provide a refund only if we terminate our Services to you without cause before the end of a year for which you have paid", and "There is no other circumstance in which you will be entitled to a refund from us" [6]. Unused months, forgotten cancellations and a plan purchased by mistake are listed as not refundable. Individuals who are not using the product for business have a 14-day right of withdrawal. Businesses do not.
There is also a pause. Once a calendar year a subscription can be paused for two months with no charge, after which it renews by itself [3]. For a seasonal list that is worth knowing.
The arithmetic for a buyer is short. Every automatic move is upward and immediate. Every downward move is manual and delayed. Plan on the band you will touch at your peak.
What changed on 16 June 2026
"New pricing was introduced on June 16th, 2026." [3] Paid accounts did not all move that day. Each moves "at its next renewal date or when the plan is manually upgraded/downgraded" [4]. Comfort gained features, including the preference centre, smart sending and the AI writing assistant, and lost its unlimited use: it now carries limits of 50 automations, 10 forms, 10 sites and landing pages, and 5 digital products, plus the ten-times sending cap.
The vendor's plan-change page asks the question every existing customer was asking and answers it in one word. "Can I keep my current plan or lock in my current pricing?" The answer is "No. All paid accounts move to the Comfort or Power plan at their next renewal or manual upgrade/downgrade." [4]
We cannot tell you how large the increase was for an existing account. The help pages link to the current price list and do not publish the previous one, and we will not reconstruct it from memory. What we can say is how the change was delivered: as a renewal, on a date the customer did not choose, with a feature cap the customer did not have before.
The terms make that structure permanent rather than exceptional. The vendor may revise prices "by updating the price list on the MailerLite pricing page" [8], and any discount applies only to the period in which it is claimed. There is no grandfathering clause anywhere we could read.
If you are on Comfort and send often, check the ten-times rule against your real sending before choosing Comfort over Power.
MailerLite still has a real free plan. It sends campaigns, runs three automations, hosts a website and a landing page, and carries three signup forms and one digital product [2]. It is smaller than it was.
The vendor's notice is explicit about the same date. "Subscriber limit was reduced from 500 to 250 active subscribers." "Sending limit was reduced from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails." [5] The sending allowance fell by 79%. In exchange, seats went from one to two and several premium features opened up, including custom templates, blogs and the HTML editor.
Long-standing users describe an earlier cut as well. One Trustpilot reviewer writes that "the free subscriber limit went from 1000 to 500" before the second halving [12]. The vendor's page states only the step from 500 to 250, so that is the one we treat as fact.
What happens at the limit is the useful part, and it is gentle on the wallet. Over 250, sending, automations and imports pause; forms keep collecting new subscribers "without showing any errors to your visitors" [5]. Nothing is charged unless you choose to upgrade. That is the opposite of the paid plans, where crossing a line moves the bill. A free account crossing a line stops.
Two warnings. API and MCP access on Free "doesn't include sending" [2]. And because the count is cumulative, cleaning a free list back under 250 takes effect when the count resets.
Several marketing pages predate the June 2026 limits. The help centre is the authority on what your plan includes.
Pick on volume and on how much you build, never on features. The features are the same.
Comfort is enough for most newsletters. At 500 subscribers it costs $12 and allows 5,000 emails a month, which is ten sends to the full list. The constraints that bite are the feature caps: 50 active automations, 10 forms, 10 sites and landing pages combined, 5 digital products or bookings, and three seats [3]. Support is email only below 50,000 subscribers.
Power removes the caps and the send meter. "Unlimited*, fair use policy applies." [3] It adds unlimited seats, multiple automation triggers and 24/7 live chat. The asterisk is real: the terms reserve the right to contact an account whose usage places undue burden on the system [8], with no number attached.
The gap between the plans is not constant, and that is the interesting part of the table. Power costs 2.08 times Comfort at 500 subscribers. At 100,000 it costs 1.11 times. So the premium for unlimited use is steepest exactly where a small list needs it least. Above 100,000 it widens again, to 1.37 times at 200,000.
A rule of thumb from the arithmetic. Under about 5,000 subscribers, stay on Comfort unless you have more than three people logging in or more than 50 live automations. On the 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 and 100,000 bands, a month over Comfort's send cap costs exactly the Power price for that band, so an account that trips the meter most months is paying for Power and getting Comfort. Check your own sending against the ten-times rule before you choose.
Upgrades are automatic and charged at once. Downgrades are manual and start at the next cycle, which on an annual plan can be months away.
Trustpilot shows 4.1 from 3,362 reviews [12], the highest score in our email set, against 4.0 for Constant Contact, 2.5 for Mailchimp and 1.6 for Klaviyo. We pulled 100 recent reviews and coded them. The mean of the sample is 3.95, so the badge tracks its corpus.
The shape is the finding. Seventy reviews give five stars, twenty-three give one, and only seven sit between them. People either like this product a great deal or have been locked out of it.
Support is the largest theme, in 61 of the 100, and it splits 46 positive to 15 negative. The positive ones usually name a person: "Jordi was patient and clear in his guidance" [12]. That is unusual in this category, where support is more often the complaint.
The negative pole is account suspension. Eleven reviews describe an account suspended or terminated, ten of them at one or two stars. Several describe it happening on a first or third campaign to a list of a hundred or two hundred people. One describes a prepaid year ended after the first month. The reviewer had prepaid twelve months and, in their words, "used 1 month of it, and MailerLite unilaterally terminated our account while refusing to refund the unused portion." [12] The terms permit termination "with or without cause" [8].
Price is a complaint in only five reviews. As at Constant Contact, people complain about the direction the bill moves, not about where it sits.
Where the vendor contradicts itself
Four places, all on the vendor's own pages, all read the same day.
The sending limit on Comfort is described two ways. The pricing page FAQ says that at the limit "you can upgrade to Power for unlimited sending, or wait until your next billing cycle when your allowance refreshes" [2]. The billing page and the plan-change FAQ say "Automatic upgrades are triggered once the limit is exceeded" [4]. One describes a choice. The other describes a charge. The billing page is the more detailed and the more recent, so plan on the automatic one.
The features page promises "Unlimited automation workflows" [10]. Comfort is capped at 50 active automations and Free at three. The features page predates the June limits.
The same features page says "Surprise bills at the end of the month? No, thanks." [10] The billing page describes pro-rated charges triggered automatically in the middle of the month. Both can be true for a given account. They cannot both be the whole picture.
And the comparison page says "we only count your active contacts!" [9] while the billing page counts every address active at any point in the cycle, deleted ones included.
None of these is dishonest in isolation. Together they show a product whose pricing rules changed in June and whose marketing pages have not all caught up. Read the help centre, not the marketing.
The only refund the policy guarantees is for termination without cause. Unused time and forgotten cancellations are not refunded.
Frequently asked questions
How much does MailerLite cost?+
Comfort is $12 a month and Power $25 a month for up to 500 subscribers, paid monthly. Annual billing takes 10% off, which is $10.80 and $22.50 a month, or $129.60 and $270 a year. The price rises with your list in 29 published bands: Comfort is $19 at 1,000 subscribers, $89 at 10,000 and $319 at 50,000. Enterprise, above 200,000, is priced on request.
Is MailerLite free?+
There is a permanent free plan for up to 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with three automations, one website and one landing page. It was reduced on 16 June 2026 from 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails. At the limit, sending pauses and nothing is charged.
Does my bill go down if I delete subscribers?+
Not until your billing anniversary. MailerLite counts every address that was active at any point in the billing cycle, including ones you delete later. Downgrading the plan is a manual step and takes effect at the next cycle.
What is the difference between Comfort and Power?+
Volume, not features. Comfort caps sending at ten times your band's ceiling and limits you to 50 automations, 10 forms, 10 sites and landing pages, 5 digital products and 3 seats. Power is unlimited under a fair use policy and adds live chat support and multiple automation triggers.
Can I keep my old MailerLite price?+
No. The vendor's own answer to that question is 'No.' Every paid account moves to the Comfort or Power price list at its next renewal or at any manual change of plan made after 16 June 2026.
Is MailerLite better than Mailchimp?+
On price and on transparency, yes. MailerLite Comfort is $12 at 500 subscribers. Mailchimp Standard shows $20, a first-year promotional rate, and publishes almost none of its bands to American readers, while MailerLite publishes all 29. Both bill the peak list size of the billing period. Mailchimp also bills stored unsubscribed contacts, which MailerLite does not. Mailchimp Standard allows twelve times the contact limit in sends, against ten on MailerLite Comfort.
We score MailerLite 3.71 out of 5, second in our email set behind Klaviyo at 3.88 and ahead of Constant Contact at 3.63, Mailchimp at 3.46 and ActiveCampaign at 3.44. The weights come from our category rubric, where value and capability carry the most.
It scores highest on ease of use and documentation. The billing help is the clearest in the category, dated, with worked examples, and it answers the question most vendors avoid. It scores lowest on integrations and support reliability, the first because the Shopify app sits at 2.4 and the WordPress plugin at 3.0, the second because of how an account can end.
It fits a creator, a small publisher or a small business that sends newsletters, sells a few digital products or bookings, and wants landing pages in the same place. For that buyer it is the best price-to-capability ratio we have measured, and the published ladder means no surprises at signing.
It fits less well a store that lives on Shopify, where the vendor's own app is the weakest surface it has, or an organisation that needs SMS, a customer data platform or a sales pipeline.
The one habit to bring to it: plan for your peak, not your average. The bill will go up on its own when you grow. It will come down only when you ask, and only at the end of the cycle.
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Capability & depth</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.6<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Ease of use</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">4.1<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Integrations</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.5<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">AI</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.4<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Support & reliability</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.5<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">User sentiment</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">3.9<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<span class="text-sm font-semibold text-ink-100">Docs & learning resources</span>
<span class="text-sm font-bold text-white">4.0<span class="text-xs font-normal text-ink-300">/5</span></span>
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<p class="mt-3 text-xs text-ink-300">Weighted across the axes above (weights reflect what actually drives the decision in this category). <a href="/how-we-test" style="color:var(--color-accent)">How we score →</a></p>
- [1] MailerLite vendor pricing page (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing
- [2] MailerLite vendor documentation on plans and billing (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/help/plan-and-billing
- [3] MailerLite vendor notice on the move to Comfort and Power plans (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/help/paid-plans-update-faq
- [4] MailerLite vendor notice on the Free plan update (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/help/free-plan-update-faq
- [5] MailerLite vendor refund policy (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/help/mailerlite-refund-policy
- [6] MailerLite vendor documentation on cancelling a subscription (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/help/cancel-my-subscription
- [7] MailerLite Terms of Use (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/legal/terms-of-service
- [8] MailerLite vendor comparison page against Mailchimp (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/mailchimp-alternative
- [9] MailerLite vendor features page (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/features
- [10] MailerLite vendor documentation on deleting an account (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/help/how-to-delete-my-account
- [11] Trustpilot aggregate score and review corpus for MailerLite (2026-10) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailerlite.com?languages=all
- [12] App Store listing for MailerLite Manager, published by MailerLite, Inc. (2026-10) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mailerlite-manager/id1586139546
- [13] WordPress.org listing for the official MailerLite signup forms plugin (2026-10) https://wordpress.org/plugins/official-mailerlite-sign-up-forms/
- [14] MailerLite's own Shopify App Store listing (2026-10) https://apps.shopify.com/mailerlite-email-automation
- [15] MailerLite public status page (2026-10) https://status.mailerlite.com/
- [16] MailerLite vendor page on paid newsletter subscriptions (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/features/paid-newsletter-subscriptions
- [17] MailerLite GOLITE50 sale terms (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/legal/golite50-sale-terms
- [18] MailerLite vendor Free plan page (2026-10) https://www.mailerlite.com/free-plan
- [19] Mailchimp vendor pricing page (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/pricing/
- [20] Mailchimp vendor documentation on pricing plans (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans/
- [21] Mailchimp vendor plan comparison page (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/pricing/marketing/compare-plans/
- [22] Trustpilot aggregate score for Mailchimp (2026-09) https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mailchimp.com
- [23] Mailchimp vendor documentation on contacts (2026-09) https://mailchimp.com/en/help/about-your-contacts/
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