Email Marketing Cost by Number of Subscribers: GetResponse vs MailerLite vs Kit vs Moosend

Email tools love to advertise a starting price, usually for a list of a few hundred people. Then your list grows, and the number on the invoice grows with it, at a different speed for each tool. I wanted to see how that speed differs, so I lined up the official pricing pages for four email tools and wrote down what each one charges at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers.

The pain: the price you saw is not the price you pay

Say you started a newsletter or a small shop mailing list with a few hundred people. The tool you picked cost about the price of lunch. Now you are closing in on 1,000 subscribers, and you can see 5,000 from where you stand. The question is no longer "what is the cheapest plan?" It is "what will this cost me in a year, when the list is five times bigger?"

That is harder to answer than it sounds. Some tools charge by the number of people on your list. Some count only active people. Some cap how many emails you can send, and some limit how many automations you can build. A plan that is the cheapest at 1,000 subscribers is not always the cheapest at 10,000. And a big annual discount can change the ranking again.

How I compared

I did not use any of these tools for this article. Everything below comes from the vendors' own pricing pages, which I read and copied on 2026-10-16. So this is a comparison of what the price lists say, not a review of how the software feels in daily use.

I looked at four things:

1. The monthly price at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers, billed monthly and billed yearly (shown as the monthly equivalent).
2. Cost per 1,000 subscribers at each size, which shows how fast each tool's price grows relative to your list.
3. What each plan caps: emails per month, number of users, and number of automations.
4. Free options and trials, because a free plan can change the math completely when the list is small.

The four tools are GetResponse, MailerLite, Kit (formerly ConvertKit) and Moosend. I picked them because all four publish a price for each list size, which makes a like-for-like comparison possible. GetResponse and MailerLite both run affiliate programs, and I may earn a commission if you sign up through the links in this article. The numbers below come from the pricing pages either way, and I show the cases where GetResponse is not the cheaper choice.

Comparison table: what each plan includes and caps

Pricing checked on 2026-10-16. All prices are in USD per month. GetResponse's page says its prices are net amounts, so tax is extra. MailerLite says prices may be subject to taxes. Kit's and Moosend's pages did not say either way, and Moosend's page shows a "$" sign without naming the currency, so I recorded it as USD.

Two things in this table matter more than they look.

First, MailerLite's Comfort plan caps your sends in proportion to your list. At 1,000 subscribers that is 10,000 emails a month, at 5,000 it is 50,000, and at 10,000 it is 100,000. Most small lists will never notice. But if you mail a 1,000-person list every day (about 30 sends a month, so roughly 30,000 emails), you would run past the Comfort cap. Power has no cap.

Second, GetResponse's cheapest plan allows only one custom automation. Everything else in the "grown-up" list, such as unlimited automations and abandoned-cart emails, starts at Marketer. That matters a lot for the next section, because the Starter-versus-Marketer gap is large at small list sizes.

The original part: what each tool costs at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers

This is the table I wanted when I started. "Yearly" means the monthly price when you pay for a year up front.

And here is the same data as cost per 1,000 subscribers, the number that shows how fast each price grows relative to the list.¹

¹ How the numbers are calculated. The first table is copied from each vendor's pricing page for that list size: GetResponse (list-size slider), MailerLite (subscriber tiers), Kit (subscriber slider) and Moosend (contact-count tiers). The second table is the first divided by the list size in thousands: cost per 1,000 = price ÷ (subscribers ÷ 1,000). Examples: GetResponse Starter at 5,000, billed monthly = $54 ÷ 5 = $10.80; MailerLite Power at 10,000, billed yearly = $116.10 ÷ 10 = $11.61. I rounded to the nearest cent. "Yearly" figures are the monthly equivalents shown by the vendors: GetResponse takes 18% off, MailerLite 10% off, Kit shows 17% off, and Moosend 20% off. Kit and Moosend display whole dollars, so their true monthly equivalents are slightly lower than shown (for example, Kit's annual totals for Creator are $390, $890 and $1,390, which divide to $32.50, $74.17 and $115.83 a month). I used the displayed values. Kit Pro prices are the standard rates, not the first-year 25%-off promotion on the page. Kit Free is $0 up to 10,000 subscribers. Totals exclude tax.

What do these tables say?

• At 1,000 subscribers, the cheapest paid options sit close together. Moosend is $16 a month, and GetResponse Starter and MailerLite Comfort are both $19. Kit's paid plans start much higher, at $39, but Kit's free plan covers you at this size.
• At 5,000, MailerLite and Moosend are a little cheaper than GetResponse's entry plan. On monthly billing, Moosend is $48, MailerLite Comfort is $49 and GetResponse Starter is $54. On yearly billing, MailerLite Comfort ($44.10) and GetResponse Starter ($44.28) are nearly tied.
• At 10,000, GetResponse Starter becomes the cheapest paid plan here. It is $79 monthly or $64.78 yearly, against $88 and $70 for Moosend and $89 and $80.10 for MailerLite Comfort. Over a year of annual billing, that is about $184 less than Comfort ($777.36 against $961.20).
• The price jump between 5,000 and 10,000 is very different from tool to tool. Doubling the list adds 46% to GetResponse Starter's monthly price ($54 to $79) and 20% to Marketer's ($95 to $114). For MailerLite Comfort the jump is 82% ($49 to $89), for Moosend 83% ($48 to $88) and for Kit Creator 56% ($89 to $139).

GetResponse vs MailerLite for a small business with 5,000 contacts

Since this is the comparison I started with, here it is in one place. There are two fair matchups, because the plans do not line up one to one.

Entry plan against entry plan. GetResponse Starter costs $54 monthly or $44.28 yearly at 5,000 contacts. MailerLite Comfort costs $49 monthly or $44.10 yearly. On paper, Comfort is $5 cheaper if you pay month to month and effectively the same if you pay yearly. Comfort also allows 50 automations and 3 users, while Starter allows one custom automation. If you need to build a welcome series plus a few follow-ups, the MailerLite entry plan is the better fit by the numbers. Comfort's trade-off is the send cap, which at 5,000 subscribers is 50,000 emails a month.

Full-featured plan against full-featured plan. GetResponse Marketer is $95 monthly or $77.90 yearly at 5,000. MailerLite Power is $69 monthly or $62.10 yearly. So at 5,000 contacts Power is $26 cheaper per month on monthly billing, and $15.80 cheaper on yearly billing. Both offer unlimited automations. Then the order flips as the list grows: at 10,000, Marketer is $114 monthly or $93.48 yearly, and Power is $129 or $116.10. Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000, GetResponse's higher tier becomes the cheaper one. I can't say exactly where, because my notes don't include GetResponse's in-between tiers.

The honest summary: for a list that stays near 5,000, MailerLite is cheaper at both levels. For a list heading to 10,000 and beyond, GetResponse's price curve is flatter, and its advantage grows.

Best pick for three kinds of readers

You send a newsletter and nothing fancy. Look at Kit's free plan first. It covers up to 10,000 subscribers at $0, with unlimited broadcasts, forms and landing pages. The catch is that it does not include Visual Automations or email sequences, and it has one user. If you want automations later, Creator is $39 monthly at 1,000 subscribers and $89 at 5,000, which is the most expensive entry plan in this comparison at both sizes. If you only need a paid plan with automation and care about the lowest price, Moosend Pro ($16 at 1,000, $48 at 5,000) and MailerLite Comfort ($19 and $49) are the cheapest entry plans on paper.

You run a small shop or service and want automations that scale. If your list will stay around 5,000, the numbers favor MailerLite: Power is $69, and Comfort at $49 still gives you 50 automations. If you expect to pass 10,000, GetResponse deserves a close look, because Marketer at $114 is cheaper than MailerLite Power at $129, and it adds abandoned-cart emails and sales funnels on the plan page.

You want one tool for email plus webinars or courses. This is where GetResponse is different from the rest. Its Creator plan adds webinars, a website builder, course creation (up to 500 students) and paid newsletters. At 10,000 subscribers Creator is $134 monthly or $109.88 yearly, which is a little less on yearly billing than MailerLite Power ($116.10), though not on monthly ($129). I could only confirm what the page lists, not how good any of these features are.

What I left out, and why

AWeber. On the day I checked, AWeber's pricing page showed me two different versions of itself, apparently an A/B test. One showed only prices for lists of 0 to 500 people. The other had a slider, but it jumped from 2,500 to 6,250 to 10,000, with no tier at exactly 1,000 or 5,000, and its plan descriptions did not match its own price rows. I could not tell which version is the real one, so I did not put AWeber's subscriber-based prices in the tables. Two things were consistent: AWeber caps monthly sends as a multiple of your list size (10 times for Lite and 12 times for Plus in the plan descriptions), and its 14-day trial asks for a credit card, unlike the other four here.

Brevo. Brevo does not price by subscribers at all. It prices by emails sent per month, which makes a straight comparison with the table above impossible. To show how different it is, here is what the official page lists for some example sending habits:

On Brevo, the 5,000-person list and the 10,000-person list cost the same in this example, because they send the same number of emails. That is a very different way to pay, and it can be cheaper if you send rarely. Marketing automation is listed under Standard rather than Starter, and the Starter page lists removing the Brevo logo as an extra cost. Brevo's page also shows a free plan limited to 300 emails a day, which would not cover a single send to a 1,000-person list. I did not read all of Brevo's tiers, so I left it out of the main comparison. If you send often, price your own list by emails rather than by people.

Drawbacks worth knowing

I would rather you hear these from me than find them after signing up.

• GetResponse is not the cheapest at the sizes most readers are at. At 1,000 subscribers it ties MailerLite and costs $3 more than Moosend. At 5,000 it is $5 above MailerLite on the entry plan and $26 above on the full-featured plan, on monthly billing. It only comes out ahead as the list nears 10,000.
• GetResponse's entry plan is thin on automation. Starter allows one custom automation. Moving to Marketer, which has unlimited automations, costs $40 more a month at 1,000 subscribers ($59 against $19) and $41 more at 5,000 ($95 against $54).
• GetResponse's discount needs a 12-month commitment. The 18% annual saving applies to a 12-month contract, and after the 14-day trial you lose the premium features. I could not confirm a permanent free plan on its pricing page. My notes also do not say how GetResponse counts duplicate or unsubscribed contacts, while Kit's page states that only unique, active subscribers are counted. Ask before you import an old list.
• MailerLite's free plan is small, and the Comfort plan caps sends. The free plan stops at 250 subscribers (some other sites still say 1,000, which is out of date). Comfort's send limit is 10 times your list. The page also says every paid plan gets the full feature set, which seems to conflict with its own limits table (automations, users). I could not reconcile the two, so check before you rely on either.
• Kit's paid plans are the priciest here. Creator is $39 at 1,000 subscribers against $16 to $19 for the other entry plans, and $89 at 5,000 against $48 to $54. Kit's free plan is generous in list size, but it leaves out automations. The Pro plan's first-year 25% discount returns to the standard rate in year two.
• Moosend has no permanent free plan, and annual billing is paid in one lump. The 20% yearly discount means paying once a year. I also could not confirm Moosend's currency code or whether its prices include tax.
• Pricing pages change. AWeber showed me two versions in one day. Treat the numbers here as a snapshot from 2026-10-16, not a promise.

Try the one with the flattest price curve

If you expect your list to grow well past 5,000 and you want automations, abandoned-cart emails or webinars in the same tool, GetResponse is the one I would look at first, using the 14-day trial, which needs no credit card. Put your own list size into its slider and compare the number with MailerLite's before you decide.

Try GetResponse free →

If MailerLite's lower cost at 5,000 subscribers or its 50-automation entry plan is a better match, it has a 14-day free trial with no card as well.

Try MailerLite free →

Sources

All pages below were read on 2026-10-16. Prices change; check the page before you buy.

• GetResponse pricing: https://www.getresponse.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-16)
• MailerLite pricing: https://www.mailerlite.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-16)
• Kit pricing: https://kit.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-16)
• Moosend pricing: https://moosend.com/pricing/ (checked 2026-10-16)
• AWeber pricing: https://www.aweber.com/pricing.htm (checked 2026-10-16; two page versions seen, no subscriber-based prices used)
• Brevo pricing: https://www.brevo.com/pricing/ (checked 2026-10-16)