How Much Does Email Marketing Cost? 2026 Price Data

Reading time: 9 min · Last verified: September 2026 · SMTPedia editorial team

Ask what email marketing costs and most answers give you a range so wide it decides nothing. The reason is that three different things get priced under the same name: the size of your list, the number of messages you send, and the software wrapped around both. A newsletter of 500 readers and a store sending 400,000 receipts a month are both doing email marketing, and one of them pays under ten dollars.

Every figure on this page is the starting price recorded on the SMTPedia pricing page for that platform, and each one links back to it. Those pages carry the full plan ladder, the overage rates and the date the vendor page was read. This one carries the shape of the market.

The short answer

Starting price, all 35 platforms

Sorted by the cheapest paid plan. Where a platform runs a permanent free tier, the card says so before the paid figure. Every card opens the pricing page that maintains the number.

SelzyFree, then EUR 5.25/mo MailerSendFree, then $7/mo BrevoFree, then $9/mo EmailOctopusFree, then $9/mo iContact$9/mo MailjetFree, then $9/mo Moosend$9/mo SendX$9.99/mo Sender.netFree, then $10/mo Campaign MonitorEUR 12/mo SendPulseFree, then EUR 11/mo Constant Contact$12/mo MailerLiteFree, then $12/mo MailchimpFree, then $13/mo ActiveCampaign$15/mo AWeberFree, then $15/mo MailgunFree, then $15/mo PostmarkFree, then $15/mo SendGridFree, then $15/mo SMTP2GOFree, then $15/mo GetResponseFree, then EUR 16/mo OmnisendFree, then $16/mo Benchmark EmailFree, then $19/mo Elastic EmailFree, then $19/mo HubSpotFree, then EUR 20/mo per seat KlaviyoFree, then $20/mo ResendFree, then $20/mo SparkPost$20/mo Flodesk$25/mo Drip$39/mo KitFree, then $39/mo Sendloop$39/mo GoHighLevel$97/mo Customer.io$100/mo Amazon SES$0.16 per 1,000

Amazon SES sits at the end because it is not priced per month at all. Since 21 July 2026 every new SES account starts on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails with no fixed fee, and the older $0.10 rate survives as à la carte pricing for accounts that were already sending. Pro adds a fixed $105 per account and region each month, Enterprise $500.

What a growing list does to the bill

The entry price tells you almost nothing about what you will pay in a year, because platforms meter different things and climb at different rates. Two ladders make the point, both read from the vendor pages in August 2026.

Flodesk multiplies its list by ten and its bill by 2.9. Klaviyo multiplies its profiles by thirty and its bill by 17.5. Neither is wrong: Flodesk sells a flat-ish curve on subscribers, Klaviyo bundles ten emails per profile per month and a marketing suite. But a buyer comparing $25 against $20 at the bottom of those two ladders is comparing nothing useful.

Three ways platforms price email

Per contact

You pay for the size of your list and send as much as you like. Mailchimp, MailerLite, AWeber, Kit, Drip, Klaviyo and most marketing suites work this way. It suits a list you mail often, and it punishes a list you keep but rarely use, because an inactive subscriber costs the same as a buyer.

Per email sent

You pay for messages, and your contact count is free or close to it. Amazon SES, Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark, Brevo and Mailjet price this way. It suits transactional traffic and large dormant lists, and it becomes unpredictable when your sending volume swings.

Per seat, or per account

The bill follows your team rather than your audience. HubSpot prices Marketing Starter at EUR 20 per month per seat, so a team of four multiplies the line before a single contact is counted. GoHighLevel sells agency accounts at $97 a month and up. This is the model that surprises people, because the number on the pricing page is per something the buyer was not thinking about.

Put 100,000 emails a month through the per-message platforms and the spread stops being theoretical.

Nine times, for a message that arrives in the same inbox. What the money buys at the upper end is the campaign software around the send: the editor, the segmentation, the reporting, the support line, and on Mailgun Scale a thirty day log retention that the raw relay does not offer. Amazon SES gives you none of that. It gives you an SMTP endpoint and a bill.

What the free tiers really give you

Twenty-two of the 35 run a permanent free tier that actually sends email. They cap you in one of two ways, and the difference decides which one suits you: a ceiling on how many people you hold, or a ceiling on how many messages you send. Thirteen of them publish both numbers plainly.

Kit is the outlier worth naming: 10,000 subscribers and unlimited sending at no cost, in exchange for a single basic automation. Mailchimp is the other end, and it moved there recently. Its free plan was cut to 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends in the April 2026 Intuit rate revision, which a weekly newsletter to 125 people now exhausts in a month. If you last checked Mailchimp free against an older article, check again.

Five things that change the bill after you sign up

• Contacts against sends. A plan that caps contacts and a plan that caps sends are not comparable until you know your own ratio. Mailjet gives 6,000 free monthly emails without metering contacts at all; Mailchimp gives 500 monthly sends to 250 contacts. For a weekly newsletter to 1,000 readers, one of those works and the other does not.
• Overage, and the gap before it. Postmark has nothing at all between its free 100 emails a month and $15 a month for 10,000. MailerSend charges $1.50 per 1,000 above the Hobby allowance and $1.30 and down on Starter, so the cheaper monthly plan becomes the more expensive one as soon as you exceed it regularly.
• Forced branding. The free tier usually carries the vendor in your email. GetResponse puts a badge on every message you send on its free plan, and removing that badge is most of what the first paid tier sells.
• Annual billing. The discount is real and it is not uniform: MailerLite and Brevo take 10 percent off, Kit about 17, AWeber 16.7 by charging ten months for twelve, GetResponse a flat 18. Several vendors quote the annual figure as their headline price, so compare the same billing term on both sides.
• Seats and add-ons. HubSpot prices per seat, so a team of four multiplies the line. Amazon SES charges $24.95 a month for a standard dedicated IP, $15 a month per account for managed IPs plus a per-email fee, and $0.12 per gigabyte of attachments. Postmark dedicated IPs start at $50 a month and require both the Pro plan and 300,000 emails a month. None of that appears in a starting price.

What to budget, by what you actually send

If you are picking rather than budgeting, the comparison you want is probably narrower than this page: free email marketing platforms if the budget is zero, ecommerce email marketing if the money follows revenue, email APIs if you are sending from code, and SMTP relay services if you only need a way out of your own application.

Questions people ask about email marketing cost

What is the average cost of email marketing per month?

For a list under about 1,000 contacts, the median cheapest paid plan is $15 a month across the 30 platforms here that price in dollars. An average would mislead, because the range runs from $7 to $100 and the top of it is priced for agencies and product teams rather than for a list.

Can you do email marketing for free?

Yes, permanently, on 22 of the 35 platforms tracked here. The ceiling is what varies, and it varies enormously: Kit allows 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sending, Mailchimp allows 250 contacts and 500 monthly sends. Most free tiers carry the vendor branding in the message.

How much does it cost to email 10,000 subscribers?

On a subscriber-priced platform, expect somewhere around $70 a month: Flodesk Lite is $72 at that size, $66 on annual billing. On a profile-priced suite it is higher, since Klaviyo reaches $100 at 5,000 profiles. If you are mailing 10,000 people only a few times a year, a per-message platform such as Amazon SES would cost a few dollars instead, without any of the campaign software.

Why is email marketing so expensive at scale?

Because most platforms price the list, not the sending, and a list only grows. The delivery itself costs cents: 100,000 messages through Amazon SES is $16 on the Essentials plan new accounts start on, or $10 on its à la carte rate. What scales the bill is the software around it and the per-contact model it is sold under.

How these figures were collected

Every price here is the starting price recorded on the SMTPedia pricing page for that platform, and every card and table cell links to it. Those pages are built from the vendor rate card, they carry the date it was read, and they hold the detail this page deliberately does not reproduce: the full plan ladder, the overage rates, the regional exceptions. Where a vendor publishes no figure for something, this page says so rather than estimating it. Currencies appear as the vendor states them, which is why a few lines read in euros. The Amazon SES figures were re-checked on 17 September 2026 against the AWS pricing page and the AWS announcement of 21 July 2026 introducing the SES pricing plans. Prices move, and the platform pages are the version that gets updated first.