Report · 7 September 2026
What email marketing really costs in 2026 - and why the bill grows when you do
Every tool in this category sells you the same story. Build your list. Grow your audience. The money is in the list.
They are right, and it is worth reading their pricing pages with that sentence in mind, because almost all of them are priced by the size of the list. The advice and the invoice point the same way. Grow, and pay us more for having grown.
This is not a scandal and nobody is hiding it. It is just a shape, and it is worth seeing clearly before you pick a tool, because the price you sign up at is rarely the price you end up paying.
The shape
Here is the pattern, read off four pricing pages in September 2026.
ActiveCampaign has a contact selector on its pricing page with bands from 1,000 to over 50,000. The plan you choose sets your features; the band sets your price. Its cheapest plan is £13 a month at 1,000 contacts and £127 a month at 10,000. Same plan, same features, ten times the bill. The full breakdown is in ActiveCampaign 2026 pricing, explained - what it really costs as your list grows.
Mailchimp does the same thing. Its pricing page asks for your audience size and calculates from there, and its own small print says that if you pass your contact or sending limit it will automatically bill you for the overage. Monthly sends are 10, 12 or 15 times your contact tier depending on plan.
Kit prices by subscriber too, and its plan prices are quoted "for 1,000 email subscribers" with the number rising from there. It is the outlier on sending, though: it says plainly that there are no sending limits on any of its plans, free ones included.
MailerLite prices by subscriber as well, but does one decent thing worth naming. It bills on active subscribers, and says that people who have unsubscribed or bounced do not count towards it.
Four companies, four products, one pricing shape.
The free tiers are real, and you should use them
This is the part a page like this is supposed to skip, so let us do it first.
If you are starting out, the free plans in this category are genuinely good and Bernard is not going to pretend otherwise:
| Tool | Free plan |
|---|---|
| Kit | up to 10,000 subscribers |
| MailerLite | up to 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month |
| Mailchimp | under 250 contacts, up to 500 sends a month |
Kit's is remarkable. Ten thousand subscribers is a serious newsletter, and it costs nothing. If a way to email a list is the only thing you need, take it, and spend the money you saved on something else.
Nothing below is an argument against that. It is about what happens next.
Where it bites
The bite comes at the size where a small business is doing well but is not big.
Follow one business on ActiveCampaign's cheapest plan as its list grows. Nothing about what she does changes. She sends the same monthly newsletter she always sent. She just got better at collecting addresses.
| Her list | Her yearly bill |
|---|---|
| 1,000 | £156 |
| 2,500 | £396 |
| 5,000 | £804 |
| 10,000 | £1,524 |
And the people driving that are not her best customers. A list is mostly people who signed up once, meant to read it, and never quite did. Under a per-contact price they cost exactly what a buyer costs.
That is also why "clean your list" is such standard advice. It is good advice. It is worth noticing whose bill it reduces.
The other bill nobody adds up
The email tool is not the only subscription, which is the thing that makes this category hard to compare honestly. The email tool prices the list. Somebody else is charging you for the website. Often somebody else again for the domain, the forms, the landing pages and whatever plugin glues the two together, which is the arithmetic Do you really need all these website subscriptions? works through in full.
So the real comparison is never "this email tool against that one". It is everything you pay to have a website that collects email addresses and sends email to them.
Where Bernard sits, honestly
Bernard is a website that can email your list. Emailing it is part of the yearly plan: no charge per contact, no second subscription, no separate bill for email. The price does not move when the list does.
At the small end that is not a saving, and this page is not going to pretend it is. Against a free plan Bernard costs more, because a free plan costs nothing. Against ActiveCampaign's cheapest band, Bernard's yearly plan is a little dearer than the email tool on its own, and you were paying for a website somewhere else as well.
The arithmetic changes in two places. One is list size: the per-contact bill keeps climbing and Bernard's does not. The other is that the website and the list stop being two things. Somebody who buys from you, enrols on a course or fills in a form is already a contact, with the permission they gave recorded beside them. Nothing to sync, no integration to keep alive, one bill.
What Bernard deliberately does not do
If any of these is the thing you need, one of the tools above is the better home and you should go there.
There is no workflow builder. Bernard has a fixed set of automatic emails for the ordinary jobs: greet a new subscriber, thank somebody after they buy, look after a new student, deliver a course by email, follow up an enquiry, chase an unconfirmed sign-up, open the doors to a waiting list. Good answers to common questions, not a canvas with branches, goals and lead scoring.
There is no open and click tracking, on purpose. You are told how many were delivered, how many bounced, who unsubscribed and who complained. Not who opened what.
There are no custom fields and no segments built on them. You group people with tags, and you can narrow an audience by tag and save that combination by name. There is no SMS, no WhatsApp and no separate landing-page product.
And there is a monthly sending allowance. It exists to protect your sending reputation, not to move you up a band, and a campaign that would exceed it is declined whole rather than quietly trimmed to part of your list.
The one thing worth taking from all this
Whichever way you go, find the contact selector on the pricing page before you sign up, and drag it to the list size you actually want to have in two years. That is your price. The number in the headline is what it costs to not have succeeded yet.
Paste your current address and Bernard will measure up, free, and show you the new place before you decide anything.
Questions people ask
- Why does my email marketing bill keep going up?
- Because almost every tool in this category is priced by the number of contacts or subscribers you hold, not by what you send or what you do. Grow the list and you cross into the next band, and the price rises whether or not those extra people ever open anything. It is the one pricing shape the whole category shares, and it is why the bill grows fastest exactly when the marketing is working.
- Is there a genuinely free email marketing tool?
- Yes, and they are worth taking seriously. Read on their own pricing pages in September 2026: Kit's free plan runs to 10,000 subscribers, which is a lot of newsletter for nothing. MailerLite is free to 250 subscribers with 2,500 emails a month, and Mailchimp is free under 250 contacts with a hard cap of 500 sends a month. If you are starting out, one of those is almost certainly the right answer and nobody should sell you anything else.
- Do email tools charge for people who never open anything?
- Under a per-contact price, yes. A dormant subscriber costs the same as your best customer, every month. MailerLite is the exception worth naming: it says it bills on active subscribers, and that people who have unsubscribed or bounced do not count. Everywhere else, the standard advice to clean your list is advice that saves you money, which is worth remembering when you notice how easy it is not to get round to.
- How many emails can I send on a paid plan?
- Usually a multiple of your contact limit rather than a flat number, which means the same figure sets both your price and your ceiling. ActiveCampaign gives 10 times your contact limit on its lower plans and up to 15 times at the top. Mailchimp uses the same shape, 10, 12 or 15 times your contact tier by plan. Kit is the outlier and says plainly that it has no sending limits on any plan.
- Does Bernard charge per contact?
- No. Emailing your list is part of the yearly plan, with no charge per contact and no separate bill for email, so the price does not move when the list grows. There is a monthly sending allowance, which is there to protect your sending reputation rather than to sell you the next band. The honest caveat is that Bernard is a website that can email your list, not a marketing automation platform, and the things it deliberately does not do are set out below.