Email Tool Pricing Changes in 2026: Data From Our Own Snapshots

Most of the 2026 changes hit free plans. This report covers the 18 email tools we verify every week, not every tool on the site.

Among them, MailerLite was the only one to raise its paid list prices, and nobody cut a list price. MailerLite and Mailchimp halved their free plans and Kit took automations off its free plan. Flodesk went the other way and added a limited free plan after moving new members to subscriber-based pricing. Separately, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign raised prices for customers still on old plans.

This report is built from our own pricing snapshots and weekly verification runs. Every price below is a monthly-billing price, and every figure traces to a snapshot or a dated verification entry. The full dataset is a CSV download.

The 2026 changes at a glance

Tool	What changed	Before	After	Change	Effective
MailerLite	Comfort plan (was Growing Business), monthly	$10	$12	+20%	2026-06-16
MailerLite	Power plan (was Advanced), monthly	$20	$25	+25%	2026-06-16
MailerLite	Free plan subscribers	500	250	-50%	2026-06-16
MailerLite	Free plan emails per month	12,000	2,500	-79%	2026-06-16
Mailchimp	Free plan contacts	500	250	-50%	first recorded 2026-01
Mailchimp	Free plan emails per month	1,000	500	-50%	first recorded 2026-01
Kit	Free plan automations and email sequences	included	removed	n/a	first recorded 2026-09-22
Flodesk	New free plan, list-building tools only	none	no email sends	n/a	first recorded 2026-07

Who raised prices: MailerLite

MailerLite renamed and repriced its two paid plans on June 16, 2026, the date its own help center gives. Our weekly check first recorded the change on June 23. Growing Business became Comfort and went from $10 to $12 a month at the entry tier, a 20% rise. Advanced became Power and went from $20 to $25, up 25%. Both figures are monthly billing at the entry subscriber tier.

That is the only like-for-like list price increase in the 2026 data. For scale, Kit’s Creator plan rose from $29 to $39 in October 2025 (34%), so MailerLite’s rise is smaller than the last big move in this market. The chart below puts it next to the earlier changes we have clean snapshots for.

Hollow marker: before. Filled marker: after. Scale starts at zero. Red marks a change that is worse for users, green one that is better.

Who cut prices: nobody, on a like-for-like basis

The only price cut recorded since January 2025 is Systeme.io’s Startup plan, which was down from $27 to $17 by our May 2025 snapshot. Nothing in 2026 matches it.

Flodesk looks like a cut if you compare snapshots naively: the old flat-rate Email plan was $38 a month for unlimited subscribers, and the new Lite plan is $25 a month at the entry tier. That is a different product. Flodesk retired the flat-rate plan for new members on December 2, 2025 and now prices by subscriber count, so $25 covers a small list and climbs as the list grows. Existing members keep the flat rate. Earlier versions of our pricing trends page counted this as a price cut. We have changed that.

Free plans: what shrank in 2026

Three free plans got worse in 2026. MailerLite and Mailchimp halved their main limit, and Kit kept its limit but took away automations.

Hollow marker: before. Filled marker: after. Scale starts at zero. Red marks a change that is worse for users, green one that is better.

• Mailchimp cut its free plan from 500 contacts and 1,000 sends a month to 250 contacts and 500 sends. Our January 2026 snapshot was the first to record it, and Mailchimp’s pricing plans help page confirms the new limits. We could not find a date from Mailchimp itself. In our June 2023 snapshot the same plan allowed 2,000 contacts. Paid prices did not move: Essentials is still $13 a month.
• MailerLite cut its free plan from 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails a month to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails on June 16, 2026, the same day as the price rise. MailerLite’s free plan update page gives the date and both limits. That is its second free plan cut since 2024: our snapshots show 1,000 subscribers in January 2024 and 500 by September 2025.
• Kit removed visual automations and email sequences from its free Newsletter plan. Our weekly check first recorded this on September 22, 2026. That run’s sources date it September 3, which Kit has not confirmed. The subscriber limit did not change. Kit’s own free plan help page now lists both as Creator and Creator Pro features and says existing automations stop running on the free plan.
• Flodesk went the other way. Our July 2026 snapshot records a new free plan, but it covers list-building tools only (forms and landing pages) and sends no email. We could not establish the date it launched.

If you are choosing a tool partly because it is free, our best free email marketing tools page ranks current free plans by what they include today.

Legacy accounts: increases you will not see on a pricing page

Two vendors raised prices for customers on older plans in 2026. Neither changed its public list price, so neither belongs in the list-price numbers above.

• Mailchimp applied an 11 to 13 percent increase in April 2026 to legacy accounts, meaning accounts opened before May 2019 that never moved to current plans.
• ActiveCampaign capped increases at 30 percent for legacy accounts migrating from old plans. That is the most an account can go up. We have no figure for what customers actually paid.

Both come from verification entries and are labelled as not like-for-like in the CSV. If you are on an old plan at either vendor, your renewal notice shows what you will pay. The public pricing page does not.

What this means if you pay for one of these tools

• MailerLite paying customers: the rise is $2 a month at the entry plan. It matters more if you also relied on the free plan for a second list. Our MailerLite pricing breakdown has the current tiers, the new free-plan limits and who the changes hurt most.
• Mailchimp free users: 250 contacts fills up quickly. See Mailchimp pricing for the paid tiers, which did not change in 2026.
• Kit free users: a welcome sequence now needs Creator, which is $39 a month on monthly billing. See Kit pricing for the tiers.
• Flodesk new members: see Flodesk pricing and price your own list size.

For the longer view across all tracked tools, see pricing trends.

Methodology

Basis. Prices are the monthly-billing list price of each paid plan at its entry subscriber tier. Annual rates are never used. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers. Where a source gave an approximate or derived figure, we left it out.

Two sources. List prices come from pricing-history.json, our dated price snapshots. A snapshot’s month is the first one that showed the new figure, so it can lag the real date. Free-plan limits and effective dates come from pricing-verified.json, the record kept by our weekly verification job. Each row in the CSV names the exact entry and quotes it.

Verification runs. The weekly job has 21 committed runs in this window: 2026-04-28, 2026-05-05, 2026-05-19, 2026-05-26, 2026-06-02, 2026-06-09, 2026-06-16, 2026-06-23, 2026-06-30, 2026-07-07, 2026-07-14, 2026-07-21, 2026-07-28, 2026-08-04, 2026-08-11, 2026-08-18, 2026-08-25, 2026-09-01, 2026-09-08, 2026-09-15, 2026-09-22. No run was committed for May 12. The data runs through the 2026-09-22 run.

What the runs can and cannot show. Runs start on 2026-04-28. Changes from January to April come from snapshot notes and from entries the first run carried over, so a quiet January to April is weaker evidence than a quiet summer. The runs work from web search results because several vendor pricing pages block automated requests. Treat any figure as a lead to confirm on the vendor’s own pricing page before you act on it.

Slug mismatches. The verification file keys three tools differently from our site: Kit is kit (site slug convertkit), Constant Contact is constantcontact (constant-contact) and HubSpot is hubspot (hubspot-email). The CSV carries both the site slug and the verification key.

Examined and left out:

• AWeber: An early June run recorded the free plan as removed. The 2026-06-09 run corrected it: the free plan (500 subscribers) is still offered.
• beehiiv: A May run flagged a possible Max plan increase that was never established, so it is not counted.
• Brevo (Sendinblue): The May run corrected our own note on free-plan contact storage to 100,000 contacts. That was a documentation fix, not a vendor change.
• HubSpot Email Marketing: July runs found a promotional Starter rate for new customers that may be time-limited, and clarified which figures are annual. Neither is a list-price change.
• Klaviyo: The 2026-09-22 run confirmed that on July 13, 2026 the Email + SMS plan was renamed Email + Mobile and text messaging moved from credits to per-message rates. The entry price stayed at $35, and per-message rates fall outside this report's list-price and free-plan scope.
• Moosend: Pricing sits behind an interactive calculator and cannot be verified statically, so no figure is published.
• Omnisend: From May 4, 2026 new Standard subscribers cannot buy SMS credits. That is a plan restriction, not a price or free-tier change.
• Constant Contact: The runs resolved a conflict over the 1,000-contact Lite price. It was a data question, not a change.
• Mailgun: Base plan prices were unchanged through the 2026-09-22 run. September sources disagree on the Scale plan's overage rate and we could not confirm it, so no overage change is reported.
• GetResponse: The January 2025 snapshot follows a plan restructure, so its entry price is not like-for-like and it is left out of the chart.

Download. email-tool-pricing-changes-2026.csv has one row per changed figure, including the earlier changes shown in the first chart, with a first_recorded column giving the run or snapshot where our data first showed each change, a window column separating 2026 from context and a like_for_like column marking the rows that should not be compared with list prices.

Sources

1. MailerLite pricing
2. MailerLite paid plans update (MailerLite Help Center)
3. MailerLite free plan update (MailerLite Help Center)
4. Mailchimp pricing
5. About Mailchimp pricing plans (Mailchimp Help)
6. Kit free plan (Kit Help Center)
7. Flodesk pricing
8. ActiveCampaign pricing