The free plan really does run to ten thousand subscribers
This is not a trial and it is not a teaser. Kit's free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited email broadcasts, unlimited landing pages and forms, audience tagging and segmentation, and the ability to sell digital products.
Ten thousand subscribers is the exact list size this site prices every email service at, and at that size the whole field looks like this: MailerLite is $89 a month, beehiiv is $96, Mailchimp is $135, Klaviyo is $150, and Kit is nothing.
The next largest free plan here is beehiiv at 2,500 subscribers, a quarter of the size, and every other one stops at 250. It is why Kit takes Best Free in the comparison and scores 8.4, the highest in the vertical.
What free does not include, which is the entire business model
Automations. That is the catch, it is the whole catch, and it is worth stating as plainly as the good news.
The free plan has no visual automations and no email sequences. You can broadcast to your list as often as you like, to as many as ten thousand people, and you cannot set up a welcome sequence that fires when somebody joins. For a lot of people that is the single feature they wanted an email tool for.
Also behind the paywall: A/B subject line testing, SMS marketing, apps and integrations, RSS campaigns and removal of Kit branding.
This is a coherent and honest way to build a free tier. Kit gives away the expensive part, sending, and charges for the part that makes a list compound.
What happens when you outgrow it
Creator at ten thousand subscribers is $116 a month on annual billing, and Pro is $158.
Creator sits between MailerLite Comfort at $89 and Power at $129, and Pro is above both. So the shape of Kit is unusual: the most generous free plan in the category attached to paid plans that are only mid priced at best. At the smaller end it is gentler, with Creator at $33 a month at a thousand subscribers.
The trial is fourteen days and takes no credit card, and Kit advertises free migrations, which is the right offer for a product whose main competitor is whatever you are already paying for.
Where it is the wrong shape
Kit is built around a creator publishing to an audience. Everything in it assumes one voice, one list and a stream of broadcasts and sequences.
That makes it wrong for an online shop, where the email needs to know what somebody browsed and bought, and Klaviyo exists for exactly that. It makes it awkward for a business running several brands or several audiences with different segmentation. And it is a narrower integration surface than Mailchimp by a distance, which matters if your stack has opinions.
Only two paid tiers also means there is no cheap step between free and Creator. You go from paying nothing to paying a three figure sum at the anchor, with nothing in between.
Who should use it
Anyone building a list who has not started monetising it yet, which is most people most of the time. Take the free plan, grow to whatever size you reach, and pay only when you want the sequence that turns a subscriber into a customer.
Writers, creators and one person businesses are the natural fit. Shops are not. And if you want automations from day one on a budget, MailerLite gives you fifty of them on its cheapest paid plan for a fraction of Creator.
Prices and plan contents on this page were read from the vendor pricing page with the subscriber slider set to ten thousand, on . Our full method is on how we rate.
