Mailchimp alternatives without the subscriber tax

Per-subscriber pricing is invisible at 500 contacts and brutal at 25,000 — which is roughly where a side-project newsletter turns into a small publication with a real, engaged audience. That is precisely the point at which most platforms decide you should start paying meaningfully more for having grown one.

The three big models are all variations on the same idea:

• 01
  Mailchimp bills primarily by contacts on the list, with a monthly send allowance layered on top roughly proportional to that contact count. Send well beyond the allowance and you buy pay-as-you-go credits.
• 02
  Kit (formerly ConvertKit) bills by subscriber-count tier directly — no send allowance to worry about, but the tier jumps are steep.
• 03
  Substack charges no monthly fee at all, but takes a flat 10% of paid-subscription revenue, permanently, for as long as you use it.

These figures are publicly listed self-serve plan prices, sampled from each provider's own pricing page in July 2026. Providers change list pricing, run regional variations and add paid add-ons — treat these as directional anchors, not live quotes; check each provider's own pricing page for an exact number today.

Mailchimp and Kit figures: publicly listed self-serve plan prices, USD, as of July 2026. Kit's 25,000-subscriber range covers the Creator and Creator Pro tiers. newsletters.hosting figures: our own flat, net (excl. VAT) plan anchors — Creator up to 10,000 subscribers, Studio up to 50,000. Currencies are not converted; the point is the shape of the curve, not a cent-for-cent comparison.

Substack has no monthly fee, so it does not appear in the table above — a free Substack newsletter costs €0. But its 10% cut of paid-subscription revenue is not free once you sell subscriptions: at €2,000/month in paid revenue, that is €200/month gone, every month, for as long as you stay — on top of your payment processor's own fee.

“A subscriber costs the same fraction of a cent to email at 500 or at 500,000. What changes is what the platform charges you for having grown.”

The direct, open-source alternative to a hosted newsletter SaaS is Listmonk — a mature, self-hosted newsletter and mailing-list manager. It handles campaigns, subscriber segments, templates and bounce processing, running on infrastructure someone else operates and patches for you. The subscriber database underneath is a plain Postgres instance: exportable as CSV or a full dump, any time, no ticket required.

That is the meaningful difference from renting a SaaS seat: the software and the data are not locked to the invoice. If you ever want to run it yourself, or move to a different host, you can walk out with the database, not just a CSV of email addresses.

Bring your CSV, keep your list. Mailchimp, Kit and Substack all let you export subscribers as a CSV — email addresses, names, tags, and usually a consent or subscription-date field. That file imports into Listmonk with those fields intact, so your opt-in history travels with the list, not just the raw addresses.

Before your first campaign goes out from the new domain, SPF, DKIM and DMARC get configured correctly, and a short warm-up plan governs how fast you ramp sending volume — new domains and large migrated lists both benefit from a measured start rather than blasting the full list on day one. Most single-domain migrations from Mailchimp or Kit finish in under a day end to end, including DNS propagation; larger or older lists get a longer warm-up window, not a longer migration.

Nobody scrapes, buys, or cold-adds anyone in this process. Only people who already said yes to your old provider come across. A list that has been dormant for years gets flagged for a re-permission send rather than silently reactivated — reactivating stale addresses is exactly the kind of thing that wrecks a new domain's sender reputation, and it is not worth the risk.