Unlimited sending on every tier, including the free one
Every other service in this comparison meters something about your sending. Contacts held, emails sent, active profiles, or a ratio between them. beehiiv meters none of it.
Unlimited email sends and unlimited posts appear on every tier, starting with the free one. What you pay for is the size of your subscriber list and which features you unlock, and once you have paid, sending as often as you like costs nothing extra.
For a publication that goes out three times a week, that is a different product to everything else here. It scores 7.8, which is above one of the picks in our email marketing comparison, and it sits outside the four deliberately. More on that below.
Where the free tier stops
Launch is $0 and it is generous in an unusual direction: a newsletter, a website with custom domains, a podcast, unlimited sends, unlimited posts and API access excluding the send API.
It caps at 2,500 subscribers, and that cap does not move. Select a larger band on the pricing page and the Launch card still says 2,500, so at the ten thousand subscriber anchor this site uses, there is no free beehiiv.
It also has no automations, no polls, no A/B testing and no referral programme. Those are the growth and engagement features, and they are the paywall.
Compare that with Kit, whose free plan runs to ten thousand subscribers and whose paywall is also automations. Kit gives you four times the list for free. beehiiv gives you a website and a podcast alongside the newsletter.
The monetisation stack is what you are actually paying for
This is the part that has no equivalent anywhere else in the category, and it is the real reason to choose beehiiv over a general email tool.
Scale, at $96 a month on annual billing at the anchor, adds an ad network, a recommendation network for growing the list from other newsletters, and paid subscriptions with a zero percent take rate. Max at $193 adds a sponsorship storefront and up to ten publications.
So the pitch is not "send email cheaply". It is "turn the list into revenue, and keep all of it". If you intend to sell sponsorships or paid subscriptions, those features are the product and the subscription pays for itself or it does not, which is a much cleaner buying decision than comparing send allowances.
One irritation worth naming: removing beehiiv branding from your emails requires the Max plan, not merely a paid one.
beehiiv against Kit, which is the real comparison
Almost nobody chooses beehiiv against Mailchimp. They choose it against Kit, so make that easy.
Take Kit if your list is under ten thousand and you want it free, if you sell digital products, and if your monetisation is your own offers rather than advertising.
Take beehiiv if you send often, because unlimited sending beats a ratio. Take it if you want a website and podcast in the same product. Take it above all if you intend to earn from sponsorships, ads or paid subscriptions, because that stack is here and is not there.
At the anchor, Kit is free and beehiiv is $96. That gap only makes sense if the monetisation features earn more than the difference, which for a serious newsletter they plausibly do.
Why it is not in the four
It scores above Brevo, which holds our Best Value slot, and it is still outside the picks. The reason is scope rather than quality.
beehiiv is a newsletter platform, not an email marketing service. There is no ecommerce data model, which is Klaviyo territory, no transactional sending, and the whole product is organised around a publication rather than around campaigns and audiences. Somebody arriving at that comparison wanting to email their customers about an offer would be sent to the wrong tool. A score is a property of the product, not a queue position, and the full method is on how we rate.
Who should use it
Newsletter publishers who intend the newsletter to be the business, or a meaningful part of it. High frequency senders. Anyone who wants the website, the podcast and the list in one place.
Not shops. Not transactional senders. And if the free tier is the point, Kit carries four times the list for nothing, while MailerLite free stops at 250 subscribers, a tenth of what Launch allows.
Subscriber bands, feature gates and free tier limits on this page were read from the vendor pricing page with the band selector set to ten thousand, on .
