"Contacts", "subscribers", "sends": the three rulers email pricing is measured with
Every email platform prices by the size of your list. None of them agree on what "size" means. Contact, subscriber, send, seat — each word is a different ruler, and the same 1,000-person audience measures as free on one platform and billable on another. Understanding the ruler matters more than comparing the headline prices.
Ruler one: the contact
Mailchimp measures contacts: everyone in your audience storage, whether they opted in this morning or bounced in 2023. The critical property of a contact-based ruler is that it counts your failures. Unsubscribed contacts, stale addresses, duplicates across audiences — they all occupy metered space. That is also why Mailchimp's free tier shrinking from 500 contacts to 250 matters so much: with contact-based pricing, cleaning your list is not hygiene, it is money. We treated list-cleaning-before-limits as the core tactic in moving from Mailchimp to Kit precisely because under this ruler, deleted rows are revenue.
The second property is the cliff behaviour. Mailchimp's paid plans bill by contact tier, and crossing into the next tier triggers automatic billing for the higher tier — the account keeps sending and the invoice steps up without a confirmation. A contact-based ruler therefore behaves like a taxi meter: continuous, silent, and only checked after the ride.
Ruler two: the subscriber
Kit measures subscribers: people who are actively on your list and receive your mail. The distinction sounds cosmetic until you see the numbers. Kit's free plan runs to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited sends, documented in Kit pricing explained — while Mailchimp's free plan stops at 250 contacts. Part of that gap is product strategy (Kit is buying the top of the funnel; Mailchimp already owns it). But part of it is the ruler: a subscriber metric that excludes dead addresses is intrinsically smaller than a contact metric that includes them, so the same audience reads as half the size.
Subscriber-based pricing shifts the maintenance burden back onto the vendor. Bounces and unsubscribes stop being your inventory problem. What it does not forgive is re-importing the same audience you exported from somewhere else — cleaned lists matter under every ruler, just less.
Ruler three: the send — and the seat
The third axis is volume. Mailchimp attaches a monthly send allowance scaled to your contact count (its free tier: 500 sends a month, 250 per day). beehiiv prices mostly by subscription tier instead: its free plan covers 2,500 subscribers, and its paid Lite plan runs to 100,000 — a step function where the ruler is the ceiling your list may grow to, not what you currently use. We compared the two in beehiiv pricing explained and Kit vs MailerLite.
And hovering over all three rulers is the seat: some platforms also charge per staff member (Mailchimp's paid tiers include 3, 5, or unlimited seats). A two-person team on a seat-limited plan can hit that wall before the contact wall.
Same list, four prices
Take one real object: an active list of 1,000 engaged subscribers, plus 400 stale addresses you never cleaned.
- On Mailchimp's free plan, the combined 1,400 contacts exceed the 250-contact cap — the plan does not fit at all. The cheapest fitting paid tier starts at 500 contacts ($20/month at the tier we verified), and 1,400 contacts bills higher still.
- On Kit's free plan, 1,000 active subscribers fits inside 10,000 with room for 9,000 more — $0, with the trade-off that automations are excluded.
- On beehiiv's free plan, 1,000 subscribers sits under the 2,500 ceiling — $0, with 30-day analytics.
- On Podia, the same list is an email feature inside a course platform: Mover at $42/month includes just 100 subscribers — the email allowance is the binding constraint, as we showed in Podia pricing explained.
One audience. Four rulers. A spread from $0 to well over $40 a month before you have compared a single feature. That is why our per-platform breakdowns always name the ruler in the first paragraph — and why what a 500-subscriber list costs re-prices one list across platforms instead of comparing platforms feature by feature.
What we cannot verify
The numbers above come from each vendor's own pricing pages, verified October 23, 2026: Mailchimp (250-contact free tier, tier-based billing, send allowances), Kit (10,000-subscriber free plan, no automations), beehiiv (2,500 free, Lite to 100,000), Podia (Mover $42 with 100 subscribers). Definition edge cases — how each vendor treats unsubscribed versus cleaned contacts at the boundary — are documented inconsistently across vendor help centres and we have not stress-tested each platform's metering with a real list. Migration discounts and grandfathered legacy plans exist and are not visible from public pages. See How We Test.