Email marketing pricing has four different meters.
The advertised monthly price is only useful after identifying what the provider counts: people, stored records, messages, or automation participation.
Active subscribers
MailerLite and Kit organize pricing around active subscribers. The key question is which subscriber statuses count and when the count is measured.
Stored contacts
Brevo can store far more contacts on the free plan than it can email in a day. Storage and sending are separate constraints.
Email volume
Brevo's paid tiers specify monthly email volume. MailerLite separates plan type from subscriber tier and documents different sending rules for Comfort and Power.
Duplicate records
GetResponse documents that the same email address in multiple lists can count multiple times, making list architecture part of cost control.
A simple cost worksheet
- Count unique people. Start with the current number of deliverable, consented subscribers.
- Count stored records. Include inactive records only when the provider bills or limits them.
- Calculate messages. Multiply recipients per campaign by campaigns per month, then add automations and transactional sends.
- Map duplicate lists. Check whether one person in multiple lists is billed once or several times.
- Identify the first upgrade trigger. The binding constraint may be a daily quota, contact cap, send cap, automation cap, or branding requirement.
monthly messages = campaign recipients + automation deliveries + transactional messagesUse the peak month, not the average month, when a provider bills by the maximum list size reached during the period.
Example
A business stores 20,000 contacts but emails only 200 recent buyers per day. A send-volume model may fit. A newsletter with 2,000 subscribers receiving twelve campaigns and several automations each month needs a different calculation even though the stored database is smaller.
Official sources
Facts on this page were checked against the following provider documentation on 2026-07-14.
- MailerLite: Pricing
- MailerLite: Plan and billing
- MailerLite: Free plan update
- Brevo: Pricing plans
- Brevo: Free plan limits
- Brevo: Contact quotas
- GetResponse: Pricing
- GetResponse: Free account
- GetResponse: Pricing calculation
- Kit: Newsletter Plan
- Kit: Newsletter Plan onboarding
- Kit: Paid plan comparison
- Kit: Billing