Cheapest email marketing tool — prices at three list sizes

For anyone looking for the cheapest email tool the answer is unusual: at two of the three list sizes we compare, the cheapest is zero euros. Only at 10,000 contacts does the question become a real price comparison — and then the order is decided by how often you send.

The short answer

• Cheapest overall

  EmailOctopus

  2,500 subscribers for nothing, and after that €16/month where MailerLite asks €29 and Mailchimp €39.11.

  Start free — 2,500 subscribers (ad)

• Cheapest for a large list

  Brevo

  10,000 contacts for €28/month, because the price follows sending volume, not list size.

  Start free — 300 emails/day

• Free plan with no sending limit

  Systeme.io

  2,000 contacts and unlimited sending without paying anything; measured by subscribers the most generous is EmailOctopus with its 2,500.

  Start free — 2,000 contacts (ad)

Cheapest by list size

Below is the cheapest option at three standard list sizes, both free and paid. Prices were read from the services’ own price lists in a browser on 3 September 2026, excluding VAT.

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Read from the services’ own price lists (EmailOctopus, Brevo) on 3 September 2026, excluding VAT. EmailOctopus’s free plan holds 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month; Systeme.io’s free plan 2,000 contacts with no sending limit. Brevo’s figure assumes two newsletters a month, because its price follows sending volume. Brevo’s free plan does not limit list size at all, so 10,000 names fit on it — but the 300-email daily limit spreads a campaign over 34 days, so it is not usable for a monthly newsletter. EmailOctopus’s price is the monthly price on annual billing. The yearly column is the monthly price multiplied by twelve.

Two things from the table. A list under 2,500 subscribers does not need to cost anything, and that is the most important single figure in the price comparison. And on the 500-contact row the cheapest paid option is Brevo, not EmailOctopus — but because the same list fits on EmailOctopus’s free plan, the row is in practice theoretical.

All seven side by side

The same comparison across the whole field. The free plan column tells you when no paid plan is needed at all.

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Prices exclude VAT, billed monthly unless stated otherwise.(ad) = ad link

• The price is the monthly price of the cheapest paid plan at that list size. The Free plan column shows when you do not have to pay.
• EmailOctopus and ActiveCampaign: the price list only shows the monthly price on annual billing. Monthly billing costs more.
• GetResponse and ActiveCampaign: the smallest list sold is 1,000 contacts, so the 500-contact column shows that price.

Sending pace flips the order at a large list

The 10,000-contact row is the only one where the cheapest is not clear-cut. Brevo bills for emails sent, so its €28 holds at two newsletters a month. EmailOctopus bills by subscriber count, so its €36 holds regardless of sending pace — up to the quota limit, which at 10,000 subscribers is 100,000 emails a month, exactly the bottom row of the table.

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10,000-name list, prices read from the price lists on 3 September 2026 excluding VAT. Brevo’s row is the Starter plan at that monthly email volume; EmailOctopus’s price is the 10,000-subscriber tier and does not change with sending pace.

The turning point falls at the fourth newsletter. At two newsletters Brevo is cheaper, from the fourth on EmailOctopus — from the table row, €41 against €36. The rule of thumb is therefore a multiplication: subscribers times sends per month, and that figure goes into Brevo’s price list. The same line is opened up in full separately: Brevo vs EmailOctopus.

Cheapest by situation

• List under 2,500 names → EmailOctopus: the free plan covers the whole list and 10,000 emails a month. Try it free (ad)
• List under 2,000, newsletter sent often → Systeme.io: the free plan has no sending limit at all. Try it free (ad)
• Over 5,000 names, newsletter once or twice a month → Brevo: in the 20,000-email package the contact quota jumps to half a million. Try it free
• Over 5,000 names, newsletter weekly → EmailOctopus: the price does not move with sending pace: 10,000 subscribers for €36/month. Try it free (ad)
• Cheapest paid plan with list cleaning in the app → MailerLite: €29/month at 2,500 subscribers, and “Clean up inactive” removes the inactive in one view. Try it free

Four things that do not show on the front of the price list

For anyone looking for the cheapest, these matter more than the first digit of the monthly price, because each of them changes the final bill.

1. Billing period. EmailOctopus’s and ActiveCampaign’s price lists state the monthly price on annual billing. EmailOctopus’s monthly billing costs more by the price list’s own saving figure: €12 a year at 500 subscribers and €48 at 10,000. ActiveCampaign’s monthly-billing price is not shown on the price list at all.
2. Minimum list size. GetResponse and ActiveCampaign only sell a list of 1,000 contacts or more, so a 200-name list costs the price of a thousand — €16 a month at GetResponse and €15 at ActiveCampaign.
3. Counting rule. The price list says what a thousand contacts cost, not what counts as a contact. At Mailchimp an unsubscribed contact counts toward the monthly limit until it is archived separately; at EmailOctopus and MailerLite it does not count at all. The same list can therefore be a different size on two services’ meters.
4. Extra fees. Removing the Brevo logo costs €8.10 a month on the Starter plan, and Sales Essentials €26.08 a month. Mailchimp’s list price rises after the first-year discount, and exceeding the contact or sending limit is billed separately.

The counting rules for all seven services with sources: how contacts are counted. Help pages read 5 September 2026.

What the cheapest lacks

This is the part price comparisons usually leave unsaid. The two cheapest have the basics, but not the tools. Both EmailOctopus and Systeme.io give you authentication records, remove bounces and complaints automatically and ban purchased lists — but neither’s help pages describe a deliverability meter, a built-in cleaning tool or a dedicated IP. List cleaning and domain warm-up remain manual work.

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Tooltester ended the series with the January 2024 round and explained why in August 2026: seed lists proved unreliable and providers started optimising for them. The figures are therefore history, not a measurement of current deliverability.

Source: Tooltester deliverability test, 12 rounds 8/2017–1/2024. About 80 seed addresses, 28 providers, shared IP addresses. Average across all platforms in the latest round 83.1%. Average and range calculated from the published rounds.

Deliverability features from the help docs

Eight points read from each provider’s own help pages on 13 September 2026. This replaces percentages as a buying basis: a feature can be checked and dated, a seed-list result no longer can. Every cell links to the article it was read from.

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Yes = the help page describes the feature. No = the help page says it is absent or points to an external tool. — = not found in the help pages; that does not mean the feature is absent.

There are two options in this price class that do offer tools, and they offer different things. Brevo — €21 at 2,500 contacts — is the only one in the comparison that shows a deliverability score in the app, but list cleaning is manual. MailerLite cleans out the inactive in one view and costs €29, i.e. €13 a month more than EmailOctopus. Whether cleaning done by the app is worth the €156 yearly difference depends on what one newsletter earns you.

The other thing missing is breadth. EmailOctopus lacks conditional automation branches, a CRM and native e-commerce connectors; Systeme.io lacks fine-grained segmentation and reporting. The cheapest is cheap because it does less — an honest deal, as long as you know what you are buying.

One figure we do not convert

Systeme.io bills in dollars, and its cheapest paid plan is $17 a month for 5,000 contacts. We give no euro amount for it and do not include it in the “cheapest paid” column, because the conversion would need an exchange rate — and a rate is exactly the kind of figure that goes stale faster than a price list and carries no date.

In practice this means one thing for the buyer: at a dollar-priced service the total on the bill varies from month to month without the price changing. If you compare euros to the cent, it is worth knowing.

When the cheapest does not pay

Three situations where choosing the cheapest costs more than it saves. An online shop: if you need a native shop connector and transactional emails, the cheapest do neither. Multi-step automation: conditional branches and scoring are in ActiveCampaign, which at a 10,000-contact list is the most expensive in the comparison. Frequent sending to a large list: then the volume-based model turns expensive, and the contact-based one is cheaper even though its list price looks higher.

The whole field compared by segment: best email marketing software. The real limits of the free plans: free email marketing.