Free plans do not differ on quality. They differ on what they cap
Read six free plan pages and they all sound the same. Send beautiful emails, grow your audience, no credit card required. The real difference is buried in the limits, and there are only three of them: how many contacts you can hold, how many emails you can send, and which features you are locked out of.
So the question is not which free plan is best. It is which cap hits you first. A list of 4,000 newsletter readers you mail weekly has a completely different problem than a list of 200 customers you mail daily.
Work out which cap bites first
- Contact caps. These hurt fast growing lists. If you are adding hundreds of subscribers a month, a 500 or 1,000 contact ceiling is a deadline, not a limit. Look for plans that bill on sends instead, like Brevo.
- Daily send caps. These hurt frequent senders. A 300 emails per day cap is generous for a small list mailed weekly and unusable for a 5,000 person list mailed on a schedule.
- Feature caps. These hurt everyone eventually. Automation is the most commonly paywalled feature, and it is the one that actually earns money. See our MailerLite review and Kit review for how each handles free tier automation.
Decide what you can live without
Branding in the email footer is the trade most people over worry about. Subscribers do not care, and removing it is rarely worth an upgrade on its own. Missing automation is the trade that costs you real money, because a welcome sequence you cannot build is revenue you never collect.
Support is the quiet one. Several free tiers route you to a help center and nothing else. If you are technical, fine. If this is your first list, weight it heavily.
Check your escape hatch before you import
Before you upload a single contact, confirm two things: you can export your subscribers at no cost, and your signup forms are not so entangled with the platform that leaving means rebuilding your site. Free plans are supposed to be a starting point, and a starting point you cannot leave is a trap. Our platform migration guide covers what moving actually involves.
Price the upgrade before you build on the free tier
Every free plan is a funnel into a paid one. Model what you will pay at double your current list size, because that is the number you are really signing up for. If the jump is steep, start somewhere else. Our how to choose email marketing software framework walks through the budget math in full.
Then look at the ranked picks
Once you know your cap, your must have features, and your upgrade budget, the shortlist is short. Our best free email marketing software hub has the scored ranking with current caps for each plan, and the main hub covers what to move to when free runs out.
Still unsure? Take the ESP quiz and it will narrow it to two.