Kit (ConvertKit) Raised Prices 160%: The Best Alternatives for Creators

In September 2025, Kit — the platform formerly known as ConvertKit — raised its Creator plan price from $15 to $39 per month for monthly billing ($33/month on an annual plan). That is a 160% increase on the monthly rate, and some legacy users reported even steeper jumps depending on their contact tier. For many creators who had been loyal customers for years, the invoice shock was the final nudge to look elsewhere. You can verify current pricing at kit.com/pricing.

This guide covers the best alternatives to Kit for creators, bloggers, and newsletter writers. Each tool on this list was chosen because it meaningfully fills the gap Kit once occupied: approachable enough for non-technical users, capable enough to run real automations, and priced fairly for small-to-medium audiences.

What Made Kit Worth Using (and What Changed)

Before switching, it is worth being honest about what you are leaving behind. Kit earned its reputation for good reasons: clean subscriber management, tag-based segmentation, solid automation, and genuinely creator-friendly features like landing pages and link-in-bio tools. The interface is clear and the learning curve is low.

The problem is not the product. It is the price. At $15/month for 1,000 subscribers, Kit was easy to justify. At $39/month for the same list size, it sits in the same bracket as tools that offer substantially more — and well above what most early-stage creators should be spending.

Quick-Pick Summary

Tool	Best for	Starting price (1,000 subscribers)
MailerLite	Creators who need real automations at a low price	~$9–10/month
Beehiiv	Newsletter-first creators focused on growth	Free (up to 2,500), $43/month for paid features
Ghost	Building a paid publication or media brand	$15/month (Starter, annual)
Flodesk	Visual-forward creators who want beautiful emails	$25/month

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MailerLite — Best Kit Alternative for Automation

MailerLite is the most direct replacement for Kit in terms of feature coverage. You get full automation workflows, subscriber tagging, landing pages, pop-up forms, a website builder, and A/B testing — on a paid plan that starts at around $9–10 per month for 1,000 subscribers. That is roughly one-quarter of Kit’s current Creator pricing.

The interface is clean without being sparse. Automation workflows use a visual drag-and-drop editor that is easier to navigate than Kit’s, and the pre-built templates are good enough to use as a starting point without modification. For creators migrating from Kit, MailerLite’s import process accepts standard CSV exports and preserves tags, which reduces the friction of switching considerably.

Where MailerLite falls short compared to Kit is in the creator-specific extras. Kit has spent years building features aimed squarely at creators — things like the Creator Network (a recommendation system for newsletter growth) and native subscriber referral tools. MailerLite does not have direct equivalents. If those growth mechanisms were central to your Kit strategy, that gap matters. For most creators who used Kit primarily as a sending tool, MailerLite covers everything they actually need.

The free plan is also worth noting: MailerLite reduced its free tier from 1,000 to 500 subscribers in September 2025. If you are just starting out with a tiny list, the free plan works, but you will need to upgrade earlier than you might expect as you grow.

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Beehiiv — Best for Newsletter-First Creators

Beehiiv was built from the ground up for newsletters, by people who previously ran newsletters at Morning Brew. That heritage shows in the product decisions: the growth tools, the monetization features, and the recommendation network are all newsletter-native in a way that general email marketing platforms are not. Beehiiv’s pricing page is worth bookmarking since the tier structure scales with subscriber count.

The free Launch plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends and includes the website builder, custom domain, and access to the Beehiiv recommendation network. That is a genuinely useful free tier — more generous on subscriber count than any of the other options on this list. If you are under 2,500 subscribers and not yet generating revenue from your newsletter, there is no reason to pay anything.

The paid Scale plan starts at $43/month for 1,000 subscribers. That is more expensive than MailerLite at comparable subscriber counts, but the Scale plan adds monetization tools (paid subscriptions, boosts, ad network access), audience surveys, A/B testing, and advanced analytics. For a creator whose newsletter is a business — or becoming one — those tools pay for themselves quickly.

The trade-off versus Kit is in automation depth. Beehiiv is excellent at sending newsletters and growing an audience. It is not built for complex behavioral automations, multi-step sequences triggered by subscriber actions, or deep e-commerce integrations. If you were using Kit to run welcome sequences, tag subscribers based on link clicks, and build out automation funnels, Beehiiv is a step backward on that front. If you were mostly using Kit to send a newsletter and grow a list, Beehiiv is a step forward on nearly everything else.

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Ghost — Best for Building a Paid Publication

Ghost is a publishing platform, not an email marketing tool — and for certain creators, that distinction is exactly what makes it the right choice. If you want to run a paid subscription publication (think Substack, but with more control and no revenue cut), Ghost is the most capable option on this list.

Ghost Pro’s Starter plan costs $15/month when billed annually (or $18/month monthly) and includes 1,000 members, a custom domain, and newsletter sending. However, the Starter plan removed paid subscriptions in the July 2025 pricing update — you need the Publisher plan at $29/month (annual) to accept subscriber payments. Ghost takes 0% of your subscription revenue; you only pay Stripe’s standard processing fee. See Ghost’s official pricing for the latest tier details.

The publishing experience in Ghost is excellent. The editor is distraction-free, the themes are typographically sharp, and the combination of free and paid subscriber management is built into the core product. Compared to Kit, Ghost is less about marketing automation and more about building a durable content brand with its own home on the internet.

Where Ghost is the wrong choice: if you need classic email marketing features — segmentation by behavior, automation workflows triggered by actions, multiple lists, or integration with a Shopify store — Ghost does not offer those. Ghost is for creators who want a publication, not for marketers who want subscriber automation.

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Flodesk — Best for Visual-Forward Creators

Flodesk built its following on email design. The templates are genuinely beautiful, the editor is drag-and-drop with a low learning curve, and the emails consistently look polished across different email clients. For creators who care deeply about how their emails look — photographers, designers, brand strategists, lifestyle creators — Flodesk was long popular because of its old flat-rate pricing model ($38/month for unlimited contacts and unlimited sends). That flat rate is gone for new users.

As of December 2025, Flodesk moved to subscriber-based pricing for new sign-ups. The Lite plan starts at $25/month for 1,000 subscribers. Legacy users who signed up before December 2, 2025 keep the old flat rate as long as they maintain their subscription.

At $25/month for 1,000 subscribers, Flodesk is still meaningfully cheaper than Kit’s $39/month, and it includes automation workflows, forms, and landing pages. The automation is simpler than Kit’s — basic sequences work well, but complex conditional branching is limited. Flodesk also lacks a native free plan (it offers a 14-day trial).

If your priority is email aesthetics and you do not need advanced automation logic, Flodesk is a reasonable switch. If your priority is flexibility and price, MailerLite gives you more for less.

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Which Tool Should You Choose?

The right answer depends on what you were actually using Kit for, not what Kit is theoretically capable of.

Choose MailerLite if you used Kit primarily as an email marketing tool — sending newsletters, running automations, building landing pages — and you want the closest feature match at the lowest price. The learning curve is minimal if you already understand Kit’s approach to tagging and sequences. The Growing Business plan at around $9–10/month for 1,000 subscribers makes the math obvious.

Choose Beehiiv if your newsletter is the product — not a list-building tool for something else. Beehiiv is better at newsletter growth mechanics (the recommendation network, paid subscriber tools, ad monetization) than any general email marketing platform. The free plan is the most generous starting point on this list at 2,500 subscribers.

Choose Ghost if you want to build a publication, not just send emails. Ghost gives you a website, a member database, paid subscription management, and newsletter sending in a unified product. It is more like building a media brand than managing an email list. See our ConvertKit alternatives page for a broader side-by-side comparison.

Choose Flodesk if email design is your highest priority and complex automation is not. The new subscriber-based pricing removes Flodesk’s old affordability advantage at large list sizes, but at 1,000 subscribers the $25/month price is still reasonable.

What to Do If You Want to Stay on Kit

If you are heavily invested in Kit’s ecosystem — the Creator Network, the commerce tools, or integrations that would take weeks to rebuild — it may still be worth staying, at least temporarily. A few things to consider:

Annual billing drops the Creator plan to $33/month instead of $39/month, which reduces the sting somewhat. Kit also still offers its free Newsletter plan with 10,000 subscriber capacity if your automation needs are minimal and you want to reduce costs while you evaluate options. And if your subscriber list is generating revenue (through products, affiliates, or sponsorships), $39/month may be proportionally reasonable even if it stings emotionally after years at $15.

The price increase was significant and, for many loyal users, felt like a betrayal. But switching email platforms has real costs too — in time, in migration effort, and in the risk of breaking automations that took months to build. Weigh both sides before deciding.

The Bottom Line

Kit’s pricing increase pushed it out of the “obvious choice for creators” category it occupied for years. The product itself has not deteriorated — if anything it has improved — but at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers, it now needs to compete seriously with tools that offer more for less.

For most creators, MailerLite is the strongest direct replacement: comparable features, a fraction of the price, and a straightforward migration path. For newsletter-first creators with monetization goals, Beehiiv offers growth tools that Kit never prioritized. And for those who want to build a publication rather than manage a marketing list, Ghost remains in a category of its own.

Browse our full email marketing platform comparison or use the quiz to find the right tool for your specific situation.

Sources

1. Kit (ConvertKit) — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-04
2. Beehiiv — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-04
3. Ghost — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-04
4. MailerLite — Official Website — accessed 2026-04-04
5. Flodesk — Official Website — accessed 2026-04-04