What MailerLite costs
MailerLite charges on the size of your list rather than a flat monthly fee. There is a real free plan for small lists, and the cheapest paid plan, Comfort, starts at $12/mo (Comfort). From there the price steps up at each subscriber band, so your bill tracks your list rather than your feature list. Plans and pricing checked July 2026 and every figure on this page is pulled live from our database rather than typed in by hand.
One point in favor of MailerLite for American buyers: although the company is based in Lithuania (Lithuania), it publishes a native US dollar rate card. What you see is what your card is charged, with no exchange-rate drift between the quote and the invoice.
Active subscribers, not every contact
The billing basis is the single most important thing to understand about MailerLite's price, and it is where the money actually moves. MailerLite bills on Active subscribers. Mailchimp bills on All contacts including unsubscribed, and Constant Contact on All contacts including unsubscribed until removed.
That difference compounds. Every list accumulates dead weight over time: people who unsubscribed two years ago, addresses that bounced, contacts imported from a trade show and never mailed again. On a contact-billed platform, all of them keep counting toward the band that sets your invoice, and you pay to store people you are not allowed to email. On MailerLite they stop counting the moment they go inactive. The result is that two businesses with identically sized audiences can land on quite different bands, and the older and less curated your list, the bigger the gap.
It also changes your housekeeping incentives in a healthy direction. Pruning unengaged subscribers lowers next month's invoice on MailerLite, which is the same thing that improves your deliverability. On a contact-billed tool, cleaning your list only helps the invoice if you fully delete the records, which many teams are reluctant to do.
What each plan actually gives you
Free is a genuine plan rather than a trial: Yes (250 subscribers, 2,500 emails /mo). You get the drag and drop editor, signup forms and landing pages, which is enough to validate a newsletter or run a small launch list. Automation is not part of it, and your emails carry MailerLite branding. Note that the send allowance is the cap most people hit first, because it works out at ten times the subscriber cap.
Comfort is the entry paid plan at $12/mo (Comfort). It lifts the free caps, adds A/B testing (Yes (Comfort+)) and lets you drop the MailerLite branding. Automation on this plan is the basic builder only (Basic (Comfort), Advanced (Power)). Critically, Comfort still carries a monthly send ceiling of ten times your subscriber count: a 500-subscriber band covers 5,000 emails, a 5,000-subscriber band covers 50,000, and so on. The headline figure is the smallest paid band, so what you pay depends on where your list sits.
Power is the plan that removes the send ceiling entirely and unlocks the advanced automation builder, plus live chat support. It is priced on the same subscriber bands as Comfort. At the smallest bands Power costs a little over twice Comfort, and that multiple narrows as your list grows into the thousands, so the upgrade gets relatively cheaper the bigger you get.
The gate that catches people out
Unlimited sending is a Power feature, not a Comfort feature. It is worth stating plainly because it is widely misreported, and because the failure mode is expensive: you plan a high-frequency campaign on the entry plan, hit the send ceiling before the subscriber ceiling, and get pushed up a band mid-quarter. Advanced automation sits behind the same gate. If your plan involves mailing a small list several times a week, or running branching multi-step flows, price Power rather than Comfort from the start and treat the entry figure as irrelevant to your budget.
Native MCP, which is unusual here
MailerLite ships Native MCP (official, beta), an official Model Context Protocol server currently in beta. Almost nothing else in this category does. If you run AI agents that draft campaigns, pull subscriber counts or manage segments, MailerLite can be wired into that workflow directly rather than through a general-purpose automation tool sitting on the API. It is early, and beta means beta, but it is a real differentiator for anyone building agent-driven marketing operations rather than a marketing claim.
Who MailerLite suits
MailerLite fits small businesses, creators, nonprofits and lean marketing teams who want a clean editor and a bill that stays proportional to a real, engaged list. It scores well on deliverability (High) and reviewers rate it highly (4.7 from 2,277 reviews on Capterra). With 140+ integrations and 100+ templates it covers the common stack without pretending to be an enterprise suite.
Where MailerLite falls short
There is no native SMS marketing: No (separate Transactional product). If text is part of your channel mix, Brevo, Mailchimp and Constant Contact all support US SMS and MailerLite does not, which is a straightforward reason to pick one of them instead. Segmentation is Moderate (interests, activity, custom fields), so behavior-heavy e-commerce targeting is thinner than a store-focused tool like Klaviyo. Support is Business hours, with live chat reserved for Power. And the free tier, while real, is modest next to Kit's.
CAN-SPAM compliance
MailerLite handles the CAN-SPAM basics: Yes (unsubscribe, sender ID, address footer). One-click unsubscribe, accurate sender identification and a physical postal address in the footer are built into the sending flow rather than left to you. That is table stakes in this category rather than a selling point, and every rival on this page does the same, but it means you are not assembling compliance by hand. The active-subscriber billing model also nudges you toward honoring opt-outs promptly, since suppressed subscribers stop costing you money.
How MailerLite compares on price
MailerLite is cheap, but it is not always the cheapest, and it does not win every comparison.
Brevo starts lower, at $9/mo (Starter), and bills on Unlimited contacts (billed by sends). If you hold a large list and mail it infrequently, Brevo is structurally the better deal and MailerLite is not close.
Kit has the strongest free tier here by a distance: Yes (10K subscribers, 1 automation, no A/B). If your priority is a large free list, Kit beats MailerLite outright at that stage, with the trade-off of a single automation and no A/B testing.
Mailchimp starts at $13/mo (Essentials) and Constant Contact at $12/mo (Lite). Both bill on total contacts rather than active subscribers, which is the gap that widens over time. Constant Contact also has no free plan (No (free trial)), so there is no way to trial it on a live list without paying.
The live comparison table below costs all of them against your own subscriber count and send volume, which is the only number that settles it.