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MailerLite Pricing Guide
Everything essential, nothing intimidating — an excellent starter home with honest limits.
MailerLite wins affection through restraint: fast editor, responsive support, kind pricing while audiences are small. Verify tiers on the official MailerLite pricing page.
Who this guide is for
This guide is for bloggers, indie makers, and small SaaS teams in their first year — people who want a welcome series live this week, a fair bill while the list is small, and a clear-eyed view of where the product's ceiling sits before success runs into it. MailerLite is frequently the right first home; the sections below explain why, and the exact moments it stops being enough.
We also write for existing customers staring at the Comfort-versus-Power decision, or wondering whether the active-subscribers-only counting rule really is as fair as it sounds. Both questions have specific answers in the tier table and FAQ, and both change what you pay next quarter.
If you are comparing several vendors in one sitting, hold a single twelve-month list-and-cadence projection against every guide's tier table. Starter pricing converges near 250 subscribers and diverges sharply by 5,000 — the divergence comes from send caps and counting rules, not feature checklists.
And if lifecycle automation is already revenue-critical for you — trial nurture, dunning, expansion — read the ceiling section before the pricing section. The cheapest tier is irrelevant if the product cannot express the flows your funnel needs.
The starter years
Welcome automations, interest groups, RSS campaigns, signup forms, and paid newsletters cover bloggers, indie makers, and small SaaS projects in their first year. Straightforward analytics without jargon keep a solo founder oriented — and the active-subscribers-only counting is genuinely fairer than rivals that meter the unsubscribed.
The editor deserves separate credit: it is fast enough that the distance from idea to published email stays short, which matters more in year one than branching depth ever will. Teams that later migrate often say the same thing — MailerLite taught them cadence and list discipline while the stakes were small.
Welcome automations
Time-delay sequences from signup, with interest-group tagging, give a new project a credible onboarding track without a canvas full of conditions.
Interest groups and segments
Preference-based grouping covers content interests and signup sources — the segmentation vocabulary most first-year audiences actually need.
RSS and paid newsletters
RSS-to-email digests and paid-subscription features let a publication business start without adding a separate membership tool on day one.
Honest counting
Only active subscribers count toward limits, so unsubscribed contacts do not quietly inflate the bill the way they do on several better-known rivals.
The ceiling and the migration path
Multi-branch trial nurture, billing-event dunning, and revenue attribution sit outside the design brief — teams migrate once automation becomes a growth lever rather than a courtesy. Plan the path early so success never strands automation. Compare starter axes in our verified pricing snapshot.
The ceiling is a design choice, not a defect. MailerLite deliberately skips deep branching and billing objects to keep the product approachable — which is exactly why the early years feel calm, and exactly why advanced trial logic becomes tag workarounds that collapse when the funnel grows.
Watch two signals rather than a calendar: first, when your nurture design needs branches the builder cannot express without splitting into three parallel automations; second, when a missed billing event would show up in churn numbers you are now accountable for. Either signal means the starter phase is over — migration should be a scheduled project, not a surprise.
Counting nuance worth knowing: active-subscribers-only means unsubscribed and cleaned contacts stop counting — but a subscriber who simply never opens mail still counts as active until you remove them. Cold-but-subscribed records are a cost and a deliverability concern, not a billing loophole.
- Audit the list — separate truly mailable subscribers from cold records, and note interest-group structure you will need to rebuild.
- Export consent data — preserve signup source and date so the receiving platform can honor original permissions.
- Warm the new sending path — ramp volume over days while MailerLite continues the low-frequency sends.
- Dual-run the welcome track — one overlap cycle so a tagging mistake surfaces before it costs a cohort.
- Cut over deliberately — pause MailerLite automations first, keep one broadcast cycle, then cancel the plan.
Pricing tiers and the billing axis
| Plan | Entry price | Send allowance | Reality check |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 — up to 250 subscribers | 2,500 emails per month | A genuine runway for one welcome series; tight once weekly sending begins |
| Comfort | From $12 per month | Capped at 10x the subscriber tier | Cheapest paid entry — and the cap that surprises cadence-heavy senders |
| Power | From $25 per month | Unlimited sends under fair use | The tier weekly-plus-nurture programs actually need; fair-use terms still apply |
| Counting rule | Applies to all tiers | Only active subscribers count | Unsubscribed contacts do not bill; still-subscribed cold records do |
The axis is subscriber-based with a send cap on the lower paid tier — a structure that rewards light, consistent sending and penalizes bursts. Comfort at $12 looks like the obvious buy until you multiply planned monthly sends by list size: weekly digests plus a five-email welcome to a list approaching 2,500 can brush the 10x ceiling while the contact count still looks modest. The upgrade to Power is small in dollars and large in headroom.
The active-subscribers-only rule is the fairest counting policy in this comparison set. Unsubscribed contacts stop costing you money the moment they leave, which removes the perverse incentive to delay cleanup that per-contact rivals create. It does not, however, forgive cold records that remain subscribed — sunset policy still pays for itself twice, in deliverability and in bill.
Model three numbers before choosing tiers: subscribers at twelve months, emails per subscriber per month, and whether bursts (launches, seasonal pushes) exceed ten. If sends-per-subscriber times your list clears 10, Power is not an upsell — it is the correct tier, and skipping it to save thirteen dollars guarantees a mid-quarter forced upgrade.
Free deserves honest framing too: 2,500 monthly emails is enough to validate messaging on a small cohort, but it silently prioritizes broadcasts over automation volume. Budget the step to Comfort or Power the day nurture plus broadcasts exceeds that allowance, and re-verify current band prices on the official pricing page before annual commitments.
Where it fits in the five-stage lifecycle
Read left to right, MailerLite covers welcome and reader-style nurture genuinely well, which matches its audience: creators and small products whose lifecycle is mostly content plus a simple funnel. Win-back is quietly good too — because only active subscribers count, the cleanup you perform after a sunset campaign is also immediate cost relief, a rare alignment of hygiene and billing.
Convert and retain expose the boundary. Without subscription objects, trial-started and trial-expiring messages rely on connectors relaying events into tags; product-usage digests require your app to push properties that the builder then branches on. Each is possible; each is owned infrastructure with failure modes that surface during exactly the moments recovery mail must not fail.
The practical placement: stages one, two, and five for content-led products on any tier; stages three and four only while a connector remains healthy and monitored. When those stages become the business, the platform underneath them should natively speak billing events.
Automation depth: what you can and cannot build
MailerLite's automation builder handles classic, time-shaped marketing automation cleanly and stops well short of event-driven subscription lifecycle. The distinction is not polish — it is which events exist natively when a branch evaluates.
Build freely
Welcome series, time delays, interest-group and field conditions, link-triggered paths, RSS-driven sends, re-engagement campaigns, and basic if-then splits around subscriber actions.
Build with connectors
Trial started, trial expiring, and payment failed — relayed from your billing system into tags or custom fields, with you owning latency, retries, and silent failures.
Out of reach natively
Deep multi-condition decision trees, invoice retrial branches that read real subscription state, seat-expansion triggers, and attribution that closes a flow back to a specific upgrade.
Cap-aware sending
On Comfort, every campaign consumes a 10x allowance — automation volume and broadcasts share one ceiling, so launch weeks collide with nurture unless Power is already in place.
- Comfort's 10x send cap applies across the account, not per automation — bursts exhaust it fastest.
- No native billing objects; dunning-adjacent mail depends entirely on connector reliability.
- Branching depth is intentionally limited — complex trial logic splits into multiple automations quickly.
- Revenue attribution is lighter than commerce- or billing-native rivals; prove lift with external analytics if finance asks.
- Power's unlimited sends sit under fair-use terms — review them before betting a launch on burst volume.
Honest framing: for a content-led first year, these limits rarely matter — the builder matches the job. They matter the moment a connector carries revenue-critical billing events you cannot afford to lose.
Where MailerLite fits for SaaS teams
MailerLite's strengths are real: a fast editor, fair active-subscriber counting, a free tier that launches a welcome series, and pricing that stays kind while lists are small. A SaaS team whose trial nurture and dunning already move churn metrics should plan a later migration to a deeper event model.
Common mistakes when adopting MailerLite
- Choosing Comfort purely on sticker price when planned sends exceed 10x the subscriber tier. The thirteen-dollar saving guarantees a forced mid-quarter upgrade during your busiest week.
- Treating the free tier's 2,500 emails as an all-purpose budget — one welcome series to a full 250-subscriber list can consume most of it before the first broadcast goes out.
- Assuming cold-but-subscribed records are free because counting is "active only." They remain active until you remove them; sunset them for the bill and the inbox.
- Ignoring Power's fair-use terms before a launch burst. Unlimited is real, but reading the terms once beats discovering boundaries during peak send.
- Building billing-dependent flows through connectors before anyone monitors them — the first failed relay will arrive with a failed payment.
- Waiting until trial nurture is revenue-critical to plan migration. Warm the destination while the starter tier is still comfortable.
- Exporting subscribers without engagement history, then wondering why warm segments feel cold after the move — map interest groups and recency before the export, not after.
MailerLite pricing FAQ
What does the MailerLite free plan include?
250 subscribers and 2,500 emails per month as of the September 2026 snapshot — enough to publish a welcome track and test messaging on a real cohort. It is not enough for weekly broadcasts plus multi-email nurture once the list is near the subscriber ceiling. Treat free as validation, and budget the step to Comfort or Power before launch cadence begins rather than after sends start queueing.
Comfort or Power — how do I decide?
Comfort from $12 caps sends at 10x the subscriber tier; Power from $25 removes the cap under fair use. The arithmetic is simple: if planned sends exceed ten per subscriber on average — or seasonal bursts will — Power is the correct tier from the start. If you send one or two broadcasts a month to a tidy list, Comfort is genuinely enough — the cap only surprises teams who never modeled cadence.
Do inactive subscribers count toward my plan?
Only active subscribers count — unsubscribed and cleaned contacts stop counting, which is fairer than rivals that keep billing you for the unsubscribed. A subscriber who has simply stopped opening, however, is still active until you remove them. Run a regular sunset policy so cold-but-subscribed records do not accumulate: you get deliverability gains and, on larger lists, visible savings.
Can MailerLite run failed-payment dunning?
Not natively. There are no subscription, invoice, or plan objects, so payment events must arrive through a connector that maps them into tags or custom fields — and you own that relay's reliability end to end. For a product where dunning is a revenue line item, platforms with native Stripe, Paddle, or Lemon Squeezy triggers remove the whole translation layer.
Is the Power plan's unlimited sends really unlimited?
Unlimited under fair use — the terms exist to prevent sending patterns the deliverability infrastructure will not support, and they are worth reading once before a launch week. For normal newsletter-plus-automation cadence, teams report no friction; for extreme burst patterns, confirm current fair-use language on the official pricing page. When fair use and your calendar disagree, the calendar usually needs a ramp, not a loophole.
When should a SaaS team migrate off MailerLite?
When nurture design needs branching the builder cannot express without splitting into parallel automations, or when a missed billing event would appear in churn numbers you answer for. Either signal means automation has become a growth lever; schedule the migration calmly while the current tier still works — migrating in comfort is far cheaper than migrating after a botched dunning cohort.