Email pricing, verified line by line

Pricing geometry · the four meters

What you are actually billed on

Headline tiers are the least useful thing on a pricing page. What decides your bill is the meter underneath: the unit the vendor counts, and what happens when your usage crosses the line it drew. Four geometries cover almost every tool in this index, and a fifth — split meters — appears where transactional and marketing volume are priced apart.

Per-contact: you pay for stored people

The vendor counts the records in your account, whether or not anyone emailed them this month. Loops states the pattern cleanly — free 1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends monthly, then contact-based pricing with unlimited sends on paid. Kit scales by subscriber band with unlimited sends inside each band, free to 10,000 subscribers, Creator $33, Pro $66. Drip runs a single contact meter at $39 monthly up to 2,500 people with unlimited sends, and Mailchimp charges contacts multiplied by a send allowance: free 250 contacts and 500 sends, Essentials 10x, Standard 12x.

The strength is predictability: send as often as you like and the bill does not move. The trap is growth you cannot see — every dormant signup, every unconfirmed address, every churned user who never got deleted still sits on the meter. Model your list twelve months out, not the list you have today.

Per-email: you pay for volume sent

The counter-model. Contacts are free to store; each send draws down a quota or a dollar. Sequenzy states it directly — contact-unlimited, pay-per-email economics, free 2,500 monthly, paid from $19, with $99 per 120,000 shown. Mailgun prices blocks from $15 per 10,000, Postmark from $15.00 per 10,000, and MailerSend prices per thousand with a free allowance and overages. Brevo steps volume instead: free 300 daily, Starter $9, Standard $18, Professional $499.

This geometry punishes frequency and rewards list hygiene. A big dormant list costs nothing; a daily newsletter at high volume can outrun a contact-based price quickly. Teams with fast-growing top-of-funnel signups tend to prefer it, and teams that send one heavy broadcast a month should still run both numbers.

Per-profile with metered sends: you pay twice, gently

Customer.io packages the two units together — Essentials built around 5,000 profiles plus 1M emails, with metered overages on each side. You pay for the audience you can act on and for the volume you deliver, and the interesting number is the overage rate, because that is what your bill is made of in any month you exceed the package.

This is the geometry to model most carefully. A profile overage and an email overage stack in the same month, and a growth spike hits both at once. Read the package as a bundle of allowances rather than a price, then ask what the marginal profile and the marginal thousand emails cost.

Quote-based: you pay what procurement negotiates

ActiveCampaign publishes tiers — Starter, Plus, Pro, Enterprise — but the number arrives through a conversation, with send multipliers of 10x to 15x attached to each tier. The absence of a public figure is itself information: budget for the negotiation, model the multiplier, and do not let the quote substitute for your own arithmetic.

Split meters: transactional and marketing priced apart

Resend is the clearest case — transactional and marketing meters split, with automation-run pricing layered on top: transactional free 3,000 monthly, Pro $20 per 50,000, marketing free 1,000 contacts, and automation runs priced after the included 10,000. Split meters are honest about two different workloads, and they are easy to under-model, because three meters can each look cheap alone.

Pick the geometry first, then compare prices inside it. Comparing a contact-based sticker against a per-email sticker without normalizing volume is the single most common mistake in email tool selection — and the one this index exists to prevent.

Most teams end up hybrid: transactional volume on a per-email infrastructure meter, lifecycle marketing on whatever their audience tool charges, automation runs as the sneaky third line. When you shortlist, price each workload against the tool that meters it, then sum — never assume one vendor's headline tier covers all three.

The geometry also predicts how a bill behaves under pressure. Contact meters rise quietly with list growth; per-email meters jump the moment frequency changes; profile-plus-overage meters spike twice in the same month; quote-based meters change when your contract does. Knowing the shape of the curve matters more than knowing the intercept.

Meter comparison · all fourteen guides

Every meter, side by side

The table below uses only figures printed in the fourteen guide blurbs on this page — no derived numbers, no estimates. Where a guide does not state a figure, the cell says so instead of filling the gap.

Read the meter column before the free-tier column. A generous free tier on the wrong meter still bills you at scale: 300 emails a day is 300 emails a day, regardless of how many contacts you store, and a 10x send multiplier is only generous if you send.

The three cells that say "not stated" are findings, not omissions — those vendors did not render the figure on their official pages during our verification pass, so the guides say exactly that rather than estimating. Quote-based pricing gets the same treatment: the tier names are public, the numbers are a conversation.

Two patterns are worth pulling out of the rows. Six vendors meter sends (Sequenzy, Mailgun, Postmark, SendGrid, MailerSend, Brevo) while five meter people (Loops, Kit, Drip, Mailchimp, Klaviyo) — and the split falls almost exactly along the line between product-led SaaS teams and audience-first newsletter or commerce programs. The remaining rows are the specialists: split meters at Resend and Customer.io, and the negotiated quote at ActiveCampaign.

Free tiers cluster around two designs: a small daily allowance (300 or 100 emails a day) that suits low-frequency programs, and a monthly contact or subscriber allowance that suits growing lists. Neither design is better; they fail in different months, which is why the burn-off calculation below matters more than the word "free."

Decision · in one box

Which meter fits your program

Geometry beats logo. The cheapest tool on the wrong meter becomes the most expensive line item in your budget within a few growth cycles, and the correct tool on the wrong meter is a migration you will run in twelve months anyway.

If two tools survive the model within a few dollars of each other, stop optimizing price and compare the operating questions instead — approval gates, agent access, deliverability ownership, exit friction. Those decide whether the program works; a $10 monthly difference on a tool you will fight for a year is noise.

Cost modeling · twelve months out

How to model a year of email spend

A pricing page shows you month zero. What you sign up for is a curve — list growth, send frequency, seasonal spikes, and the month your free tier stops covering you. Model the curve with your own numbers in seven steps, and every guide in this index gives you the figures to plug in.

1. Fix the baseline. Current contacts, monthly sends, and the transactional-to-marketing split. If you do not know your monthly sends, that is step one, not a rounding error — the per-email tools are unpriceable without it.
2. Project the meter, not the tier. Per-contact meters grow with your list, dormant users included. Per-email meters grow with frequency. Multiply the right unit twelve months forward before you look at any price.
3. Find the free-tier burn-off month. Brevo's 300 daily, Sequenzy's 2,500 monthly, Mailgun's 100 daily, Mailchimp's 500 sends — each covers a different duration at your volume. The month it runs out is the month your real bill starts.
4. Price the overage, not just the included block. MailerSend's published overage, Resend's per-thousand rates after the included 50,000, Customer.io's metered overages on both profiles and emails — overage rates decide what an unusual month costs.
5. Apply multipliers honestly. Mailchimp Essentials carries 10x sends and Standard 12x; ActiveCampaign runs 10x to 15x by tier. A multiplier is an allowance, not a guarantee — check it against your step-two projection.
6. Run three scenarios. Today, twelve months of planned growth, and a stress case where the free list blooms and frequency doubles. If a tool only wins the first scenario, it does not win.
7. Re-verify at the end. Take the shortlist to the official pricing pages linked from each guide, confirm every figure you modeled, and date the check. Our numbers are September 2026 anchors; the vendor page is the live contract.

The exercise routinely changes verdicts. Contact-unlimited, pay-per-email economics like Sequenzy's tend to improve as a list grows, while contact-banded pricing degrades exactly when marketing is working — which is why we model twelve months rather than quoting month zero.

Budget the second-order costs too: the migration if you pick wrong, the engineering time to rewire triggers, and the deliverability work of moving pools. A tool that saves $30 a month and costs a quarter of re-integration has not saved anything.

Write the model down as a small spreadsheet with one row per vendor and one column per scenario. The exercise is less about precision — your projections will be wrong — than about seeing which column degrades fastest. A tool whose stress-case column explodes is a tool that will surprise you in Q4, regardless of how tidy its month-zero figure looks.

Re-run the model whenever your fundamentals change, not just when a vendor changes price: crossing 10,000 contacts, doubling send frequency, adding a transactional workload, or opening a second workspace all move you along the curve. The guide's figures change rarely; your position on the curve changes constantly.

Traps · what misleads buyers

Common pricing traps

Most bad email-tool purchases were made with correct arithmetic applied to the wrong question. These are the failure patterns our guides are structured to expose, each one visible in the meter table above.

• The contact tax on dormant records. Per-contact meters bill for churned signups and unconfirmed addresses forever. List hygiene becomes a billing decision, not just a deliverability one.
• Free-tier cliffs disguised as free plans. Daily caps — 300 at Brevo, 100 at Mailgun, SendGrid, and Postmark — cover a low-volume stage and stop abruptly. Model the cap at your frequency, not at the demo's.
• Send multipliers misread as send limits. "Essentials 10x" is an allowance tied to contacts; it constrains heavy senders on small lists and costs nothing for the reverse pattern.
• Stacked meters that each look cheap. Split pricing — sends, contacts, automation runs — can be three good deals that sum to one bad one. Price the stack, not the line items.
• Quote-based opacity. Without a public figure, the negotiation sets your price. Do your twelve-month model first and bring it to the call; the quote should answer your arithmetic, not replace it.
• Overage rates ignored until the spike. The included block is marketing; the overage rate is your budget in any month that exceeds it — holiday bursts, incident recovery, re-engagement sweeps.
• Headline tier envy. Brevo's Professional at $499 or SendGrid's Pro from $89.95 may be the tier shown first, not the tier you need. Buy the meter you can justify, then upgrade when a feature requirement — not a fancier screenshot on the pricing page — demands it.
• Sticker price without frequency. Monthly prices are meaningless until multiplied by your send volume. Two tools at "from $19" diverge sharply at 200,000 emails a month.
• Annual discounts committing you to a wrong meter. A prepay discount on the wrong geometry is a locked-in mistake. Model month-to-month first; take the discount only after the twelve-month model agrees.

None of these traps are exotic. They are all readable from a pricing page in about ten minutes, provided you know which unit the page is counting — which is the entire discipline this index applies on your behalf.

Snapshot · verified facts

What the sources confirm

Pricing pages change without notice. Treat this index as research plus verified anchors, and confirm the live vendor page at checkout. Our 15-tool comparison puts these figures in competitive context.

Method note

How these guides stay honest

Each guide uses only the verified figures above plus qualitative product facts. Where a base price wasn't rendered on the official page at research time — notably the Customer.io Essentials base — the guide says so instead of filling the gap. Every guide links its official pricing page for one-click re-verification.

For operating questions beyond price — approval chains, staging discipline, cost attribution, audit trails — see the 38 editorial discussion threads. Ranking policy and the editorial-scenario method live on about.