Almost every list of free email marketing tools is a race to shove you onto a paid plan. This post is the opposite. Below is the honest version of what each free tier actually lets you do, where the wall is, and which free plan is genuinely the best free email marketing option for your situation.
No affiliate links in this one. Nothing to sell you. Just the numbers.
What “free” actually means in email
Every free plan limits you in one of two ways, and knowing which one matters more to you decides your choice in about thirty seconds.
- Contact caps. You can only store X people. Mailchimp and MailerLite work this way. If you have 4,000 contacts, you are out before you start.
- Send caps. You can store as many people as you like, but you can only send X emails per day or month. Brevo works this way. If you have 5,000 contacts and want to email all of them at once, a 300 per day cap is a real problem.
There is a third limit nobody mentions in the feature table: automation. Most free plans will happily let you blast a one off newsletter. The thing that actually makes money for a small business, a welcome sequence that runs while you sleep, is the feature most of them hold back.
So when you read the list below, ask two questions. How many people can I hold, and can I run an automated sequence without paying?
The free tiers, tool by tool
Limits move. These were accurate at the time of writing, and every one of them is on a public pricing page you can check in ten seconds before you commit.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)
Free: unlimited contacts, 300 emails per day. That is roughly 9,000 a month if you spread it out.
What you get: drag and drop builder, signup forms, basic automation workflows, and transactional email through the same account. It also handles SMS on a pay as you go basis, which almost no other free tool does.
The catch: Brevo branding sits in the email footer on free, and 300 a day means you cannot do a single big send to a list of 2,000. You have to drip it or upgrade.
Best for: people with a big existing list who email infrequently and in small batches, or anyone who needs transactional and marketing email in one place.
MailerLite
Free: 1,000 subscribers, 12,000 emails per month.
What you get: this is the most generous free plan for features. Automations are included. Landing pages and a simple website builder are included. Signup forms and pop ups are included. One user seat.
The catch: some templates and the HTML editor sit behind the paid plan, and you get a limited number of landing pages. Support is email only after the first stretch of your account life.
Best for: most small businesses under 1,000 contacts. If you want one answer and you want to stop reading, this is it.
Sender
Free: 2,500 subscribers, 15,000 emails per month.
What you get: the biggest free allowance of any tool here, with automation included. Forms, pop ups, segmentation.
The catch: the builder and the template library feel a generation behind MailerLite. You will spend longer making an email look right. Their branding appears on free sends.
Best for: lists between 1,000 and 2,500 where you do not want to pay yet and you do not care about design polish.
EmailOctopus
Free: 2,500 subscribers, 10,000 emails per month.
What you get: clean sends, drip sequences, landing pages, forms. It is deliberately simple and fast to learn.
The catch: reporting history is trimmed on free, and the feature set is thin if you want heavy branching logic or deep ecommerce tracking.
Best for: newsletters and simple sequences where you want it to just work.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit)
Free: up to 10,000 subscribers. Yes, really.
What you get: unlimited forms and landing pages, broadcasts, tagging, and the ability to sell digital products.
The catch: the visual automation builder and third party integrations are the paid upgrade. You can collect and email a huge list for free, but the “if they click this, do that” logic costs money.
Best for: creators, coaches, and anyone with a fast growing list who mostly sends broadcasts.
Mailchimp
Free: 500 contacts, 1,000 sends per month, capped at 500 in a day.
What you get: the familiar builder, one audience, basic reporting.
The catch: the free plan got cut hard. It used to be 2,000 contacts. Automation on free is close to useless, support is self serve, and you will hit the 500 contact wall quickly. Mailchimp is a fine paid tool and a weak free one.
Best for: honestly, nobody starting today. Pick MailerLite or Sender instead.
Omnisend
Free: 250 contacts, 500 emails per month.
What you get: the full feature set. Abandoned cart, browse abandonment, pop ups, product blocks that pull from Shopify or WooCommerce. Nothing is locked, only the volume.
Best for: an ecommerce store testing whether automated flows make money before paying. Build the three flows that matter, see the revenue, then upgrade with proof.
Zoho Campaigns
Free: around 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month, one user.
Best for: anyone already inside the Zoho ecosystem with the CRM. If you are not, the interface is more work than it is worth.
beehiiv and Substack
Different animal. These are publishing platforms, not marketing automation. beehiiv is free to a few thousand subscribers with a hosted website attached. Substack is free forever and takes a cut of paid subscriptions instead. Pick these if you are writing a newsletter as the product. Do not pick them to run a business’s customer email.
What every free tier makes you pay for
The upgrade triggers are predictable. Here is when paying is actually the right call, and when it is not.
- Removing their branding. Usually the cheapest paid tier. Worth it once you are selling something over a few hundred dollars, because the footer logo reads as amateur. Not worth it on day one.
- Branching automation. Tags, conditions, wait steps based on behaviour. Worth paying for the moment you have more than one offer. Before that, a straight five email welcome sequence does the job and most free plans allow it.
- Extra user seats. Free plans are almost all single seat. If two people need access, you pay. Sharing a login is fine until it is not.
- Deliverability support. On free you get a help doc. On paid you get a human when your open rate collapses. This is the upgrade people underrate.
- Dedicated IPs and advanced reporting. Ignore these until you are sending hundreds of thousands of emails.
If you want a wider view of what we pay for and what we refuse to pay for across the whole stack, that is all written up in the cheap tech stack.
Set it up today in about 45 minutes
The tool choice is the least important part. This sequence is what makes email work for a small business, and all of it is possible on free.
- Pick one tool and stop shopping. Under 1,000 contacts, MailerLite. Up to 2,500, Sender or EmailOctopus. Big dormant list, Brevo. Ecommerce, Omnisend.
- Authenticate your domain. Add the SPF and DKIM records the tool gives you to your DNS, then add a DMARC record. This is free and it is not optional. Google and Yahoo both require bulk senders to authenticate, offer one click unsubscribe, and keep spam complaints low. Google’s own sender guidelines say to stay under a 0.10 percent spam rate and never hit 0.30 percent. Skip this step and your emails land in spam no matter which tool you picked.
- Import your list honestly. Only people who asked to hear from you. Scraped lists burn your domain reputation, and that damage follows you to every tool you ever use.
- Build one form and one landing page. Most free plans include both. Put the form in your site footer and on your two highest traffic pages.
- Write a three email welcome sequence. Email one, deliver what they signed up for and say who you are. Email two, the single best piece of advice you have, no pitch. Email three, the offer, with one clear link.
- Send something to the whole list this week. A dormant list is worth nothing. The fastest way to find out if email works for you is to send a useful email and watch what happens.
That is the whole job. If you want the broader version of this approach applied to every channel, it is in the free Cheap Marketing Playbook.
When paying someone makes more sense than paying a tool
Here is the part most blogs skip. The tool is rarely the bottleneck. Free plans will carry a business to a few thousand contacts without complaint. What stalls people is that nobody writes the emails.
If your list is sitting there and you have sent two campaigns in a year, upgrading to a paid plan changes nothing. The honest fix is either to block ninety minutes a week to write, or to hand it off. That is the point where our email and SMS marketing work earns its fee, because the output is sequences that actually go out. And if you just want to know whether your current setup is leaking money, the free audit covers it with no obligation.
Once you also need texting, booking and a CRM next to your email, HighLevel puts them in one account and bills email per send instead of by list size. It has a 14 day free trial.
FAQ
Can I just send marketing emails from Gmail?
For under about 50 people, yes, BCC them and move on. Past that it breaks. Gmail caps daily recipients, you get no unsubscribe link, no open or click data, and bulk BCC sending gets your personal address flagged. Once you have a list you care about, use a real tool. The free tiers exist for exactly this reason.
Which free plan has the best automation?
MailerLite for general small business, because automations are included on free rather than teased. Omnisend if you sell products, because its free plan unlocks every feature and only limits volume, so you can run abandoned cart flows at 250 contacts and see real revenue before paying a cent.
Is it hard to move lists between tools later?
Moving contacts is easy. Export a CSV, import it, re-authenticate your domain. Moving automations is the painful part, because you rebuild them by hand in the new tool. So it is worth spending twenty minutes picking now rather than rebuilding six sequences in a year. Your contacts are yours, always keep a CSV backup somewhere you control.
One last thing. The tools above are good enough that cost is no longer a reason to skip email. The only real reason left is not sending. Fix that first.