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How this guide prices each option

Every price in this guide comes from the vendor's public pricing page as captured on 7 October 2026. We read the monthly and yearly figures, the contact or volume band each figure applies to, and the free-plan limits. Where a vendor does not publish a price for the size we need, the table says so and we do not estimate. Prices in US dollars are shown in the form $19/month or $205 a year, with the billing period named every time.

Two pricing models matter most for a startup. In a contact or profile model, the bill rises with the number of people in your database, whether or not they open anything. Klaviyo, Drip, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and Customer.io all price this way at some point. In a volume model, the bill rises with the number of emails you send. Brevo and SendGrid Marketing Campaigns use volume bands, and Loops prices its free plan by sends and the newest contacts. A startup that signs up many users but sends only two lifecycle emails a month is usually better off in a volume model. A startup that sends a weekly newsletter to a large dormant list is usually better off in a model where contacts are free, such as Kit's free tier up to 10,000 subscribers.

Read the price, then the limit. A free plan with a cap on daily sends, a cap on the number of contacts that can be emailed, or a branding footer is not the same as a plan that scales for free. The sections below name the cap in each case.

What free plans really allow

Loops' Early Stage plan gives up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30-day window to the 1,000 newest contacts, with all features included. That is enough for a first activation path while the active audience is small; the Growing Audience plan is $99 a month when the audience cap no longer fits.

Loops' Early Stage plan is generous in a different way. It allows up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30-day window, and it includes every feature, but it only reaches the 1,000 newest contacts. An older list with more than 1,000 people will not be fully covered on that plan. The free plan also carries a Loops footer, which may matter for a product brand. Its paid Growing Audience plan is $99 a month and removes the send cap for subscribers, and it also includes transactional sends to users who are not in your audience.

Brevo's free plan is the most generous on contacts, with storage for up to 100,000 contacts, but it allows 300 email sends per day. That daily ceiling is the limit to plan around. A product that sends a welcome series to a burst of 2,000 signups in one afternoon will hit the cap long before the monthly total is reached. Brevo's Starter plan at $9 a month lifts the daily limit and starts at 5,000 emails a month.

Kit's free tier covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited email broadcasts, landing pages, forms and tagging. Its visual automations and email sequences are paid, starting with the Creator plan at $33 a month billed annually, which is $396 a year. That makes Kit a good free choice for a newsletter-led product, and a more expensive one for onboarding sequences that need to fire on product events.

Mailchimp and SendGrid also have free tiers, but they are small. Mailchimp's free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with a maximum of 250 sends a day. SendGrid Marketing Campaigns covers up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. SendGrid's separate Email API has a free trial of 100 emails a day for 60 days, which is useful for building and testing transactional mail, but it is a trial rather than a permanent plan.

Several tools have no ongoing free plan. Drip, ActiveCampaign and Close offer a trial. Customer.io offers a Startup Program with 12 months free for eligible early-stage companies that have raised under $10 million. Customerly lists free trials on its Core, Growth and Ultimate plans but no permanent free tier. A trial is useful for testing your event integration, but it does not solve a budget problem after the trial ends.

What a product-led startup actually needs to send

Most product-led SaaS teams need the same five lifecycle messages before they need anything sophisticated. The first is a signup-to-value sequence that stops when the user completes the activation event. The second is a stalled-user nudge for someone who has signed up but not reached activation after a set number of days. The third is a billing message: a trial ending, a payment failing, a plan being downgraded. The fourth is an expansion message for an account whose usage is rising toward a limit of the current plan. The fifth is a win-back message for someone who cancelled.

Each of these needs something from the platform. The signup and stalled-user messages need a reliable event for activation and a clean way to exit the journey. The billing messages need the payment events from your billing provider, plus a link the customer can act on. The expansion message needs a usage figure that the email tool can read, either as an event or as a property on the profile. The win-back message needs a suppression rule so that a person who returns is not still being sent a cancellation sequence.

The volume of these messages is small. A product with 5,000 contacts sending five lifecycle messages to each new user, and perhaps a few thousand campaign sends a month, will often be well inside the free or entry-level plans in this guide. The cost risk is not the message count. It is the number of people in the database who will never activate, and the number of messages that go out after someone has already done the thing the message asked for.

Loops

Loops is built for SaaS teams that want lifecycle emails close to the product rather than inside a large marketing suite. Its free Early Stage plan includes all features, with up to 4,000 sends in any rolling 30-day period, sent to the 1,000 newest contacts. That makes it an efficient choice for a product in its first months, when the active list is small and the newest users are the ones being activated.

The paid Growing Audience plan is $99 a month and includes unlimited sends to subscribers, plus transactional sends to users who are not in your audience. That last point is useful for a product that needs password resets, invoices or product notices to reach people who are no longer on a marketing list. Loops also supports up to 10 emails per second on its free plan, which is enough for most launch events.

Where it falls short: the free plan's send window applies to the newest 1,000 contacts, so a team with an older, larger list cannot treat the free plan as a full database. The free plan also displays a Loops footer in messages. Teams that need deep behavioural branching across many account-level states should test the workflow against a real account structure before committing, because the way a team models workspaces and seats can be harder to change later.

For a single founder or a three-person team, Loops is a sensible middle ground: cheaper to start than Customer.io or ActiveCampaign, with a clear paid step. The paid price is shown as one figure on its pricing page, so read the terms on the Loops pricing page before you rely on it for a list that is growing past 1,000 contacts.

Brevo

Brevo is the most economical choice on contact count in this guide. Its free plan allows storage for up to 100,000 contacts and 300 email sends a day, which is enough for a small launch list with a short welcome series. Once the send volume grows, the Starter plan at $9 a month starts at 5,000 emails a month and removes the daily sending limit.

For SaaS lifecycle work, the step that matters is Standard at $18 a month. It adds automation, A/B testing and advanced reports. A product that wants a welcome series, a stalled-user nudge and a monthly update will need Standard, not Starter, so budget for that plan from the start. Professional, at $499 a month for 150,000 to 10 million monthly sends, is a larger commitment that most early-stage SaaS teams will not need.

Where it falls short: the daily cap on the free plan is the main constraint for a launch, because a burst of signups can exceed 300 a day quickly. Brevo's event and product-data connections are less deep than those of Customer.io, so an activation model based on many named product events will take more work to build. The strength is cost and simplicity: a team that needs campaigns and a few behaviour-based sequences can run them without a large bill.

Read the Brevo pricing page for the current send-volume bands, which change the monthly figure more than the contact count does.

Kit (formerly ConvertKit)

Kit suits a product whose growth is built on an audience: a newsletter, a course, a community or a creator-led tool. Its free tier covers up to 10,000 subscribers and includes unlimited email broadcasts, landing pages, forms, audience tagging and segmentation. For a product that mostly sends an update and wants to learn which subscribers care about which topic, the free tier does a lot of work without a monthly bill.

For a SaaS onboarding flow, the limitation is the price of automation. Visual Automations and email sequences begin on Creator at $33 a month billed annually, which is $396 a year. Pro is $66 a month billed annually and adds deliverability reporting, unlimited users and a newsletter referral system. Kit also offers a 14-day free trial on paid plans without a credit card.

Where it falls short: a SaaS team that needs billing-event messages and product-event branching on a list of active users will likely find Kit's tagging model less direct than a tool built around product events. It is a good choice when the audience itself is the product, and a weaker one when the product's state changes every day.

Read the Kit pricing page before deciding whether the Creator plan fits the onboarding work you have in mind.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is familiar, and many small teams can publish a campaign in an afternoon. For a SaaS startup, that is its main value: a simple welcome series, a product-update newsletter and an occasional announcement can all run without a dedicated lifecycle engineer. Its Standard plan starts at $20 a month at the 500-contact selector, and the contact-tier pricing rises to $100 a month for 2,501 to 5,000 contacts, with up to 60,000 emails a month in that band.

The free plan is small. It covers 250 contacts and 500 sends a month, with a maximum of 250 sends a day. A product with a launch list of more than 250 people will be on a paid plan almost immediately. Between 500 and 2,500 contacts, the page does not give a price for every size, so ask for pricing at your exact contact count if you land in that range.

Where it falls short: Mailchimp has less depth for behavioural branching and product-event triggers than Customer.io or ActiveCampaign. A team that starts with simple messages can use it well, but it can become restrictive once activation depends on many product states. Treat it as a deliberate, simple choice, and plan an exit path if the product grows past that model.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is built for ecommerce-style data: purchases, catalogue browsing, cart events and repeat behaviour. A product that sells physical goods or digital bundles alongside a SaaS subscription may find it useful. Its free plan covers 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month, with $5 of mobile messages. The Email plan at 1,000 profiles is $30 a month, 5,000 profiles is $100 a month, 10,000 is $150 a month and 25,000 is $400 a month.

Where it falls short for a B2B SaaS team: Klaviyo is priced per profile and is organised around individual shoppers. An account with several seats, a workspace and a shared billing relationship does not map neatly onto a single profile. Before choosing it, check that account-level and seat-level data can be kept distinct, or the lifecycle messages may go to the wrong person in a team account.

Read the Klaviyo pricing page for the current profile bands, and for the SMS options, which are priced separately.

Drip

Drip is a behaviour-led lifecycle tool, with segments, workflows and onsite campaigns. Its pricing is based on the number of people in your list and the email volume they receive. The lower bands start at $39 a month for 1 to 2,500 people, $49 a month for 2,501 to 3,000 people, and $89 a month for 4,501 to 5,000 people. At 9,001 to 10,000 people the price is $154 a month, and at 22,501 to 25,000 people it is $369 a month.

Drip has a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, but no ongoing free plan. That makes it a poor choice for a product that wants to start free and grow into a paid tier, and a reasonable one for a team that has already decided on a paid stack.

Where it falls short: a multi-seat SaaS team will need to check how workspace and user states are represented, because Drip's model is organised around people and their actions. Its customer-behaviour orientation suits ecommerce journeys, such as browse, trial, purchase and repeat purchase, more naturally than the account-expansion journeys that many SaaS products need.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a mature option for branching automation, lead scoring and a campaign editor that many marketers already know. Its tiers are Starter at $15 a month, Plus at $49, Pro at $79 and Enterprise at $145, each with a starting price at 1,000 email contacts. Starter includes email marketing, marketing automation, a standard CRM and ecommerce integrations. Pro adds advanced segmentation, and Enterprise adds premium segmentation and a dedicated account team.

For a product-led startup, the appeal is that a team can begin with a sales-assisted path: a user who reaches a usage threshold can be handed to a person, with the record kept in the same system. That is useful when a product has both self-serve and sales-assisted paths. The price is less predictable than a flat-plan tool, because the starting price scales with the number of contacts, and the page does not give a figure for every size.

Where it falls short: ActiveCampaign's automation is powerful enough to encourage logic built around email opens and clicks rather than product value. Make the product event the trigger, and treat email engagement as a supporting signal. There is no ongoing free plan, so the trial period is the only way to test it before paying.

SendGrid Marketing Campaigns

SendGrid is a delivery foundation as much as a campaign tool. Its Marketing Campaigns free plan covers up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails a month, which is enough for a small product to run a welcome series and a monthly update without paying. Basic is $15 a month and covers up to 100,000 contacts and 300,000 emails in the plan selector. Its separate Email API has an Essentials plan at $19.95 a month for 50,000 to 100,000 emails, and a free trial of 100 emails a day for 60 days.

SendGrid suits a team that owns its segmentation and product logic in its application. The email tool sends what the application decides to send. That is more engineering work than a tool with visual journeys, but it keeps the lifecycle logic in code that the team already maintains, and it can be a cheap way to send transactional emails and campaign emails from the same infrastructure.

Where it falls short: the campaign side is thinner than the marketing platforms in this guide. Without an event pipeline, preference handling and reporting built around your product, SendGrid will not give you an activation model on its own. Budget for the surrounding work before you choose it for a lifecycle programme.

Customer.io

Customer.io is built for event-driven messaging. A team defines product events, such as a project being created or an integration being connected, and uses them to start, change or stop journeys. This is the most direct fit in this guide for a product that already tracks named, reliable events. Its Essentials plan is listed at $100 a month billed monthly. The Essentials 10k profiles plan is $145 a month, the 20k profiles plan is $235 a month, and the 50k-plus band starts at $505 a month.

Eligible early-stage companies that have raised under $10 million can receive 12 months free through the Startup Program, according to the pricing page. That is the strongest budget argument for Customer.io, and it is worth checking eligibility before you pick a cheaper tool that you will later need to replace.

Where it falls short: its flexibility carries an instrumentation cost. Identity, event naming, suppression rules and ownership must be defined before a large canvas is useful. A team without a clean event model will spend more time fixing journeys than sending messages. It is a poor choice for a team that only needs a welcome email and a newsletter.

Customerly

Customerly combines support conversations with lifecycle messaging. Its pricing is per seat, with Core at $19 a month, Growth at $69 a month and Ultimate at $99 a month. Each plan includes a set number of AI conversations: 10 a month on Core, 20 on Growth and 50 on Ultimate. There is a free trial on Core, Growth and Ultimate, but no ongoing free plan.

For a small SaaS team where the founder or support lead answers most first questions, Customerly can connect a common objection to a useful email without adding a separate support tool and a separate email tool. Per-seat pricing means the bill rises with the team, not the list, so it can be cheap for a list of several thousand people and expensive for a team of ten. Check the AI conversation cap against your monthly support volume.

Where it falls short: it is less suited to a team that needs a large event-driven lifecycle or deep segmentation across a big contact base. If the product's feature adoption model depends on fine-grained event data, test the event depth before committing.

Other names you will see

Two common shortlist names do not appear in the main comparison. HubSpot's free Marketing Hub tools are useful if you already need a CRM, but the paid Professional tier is listed at $800 a month, which is a large step for a product still searching for activation. Braze and Iterable both publish no self-serve free plan and no public price in the pages we read; for both, the answer is pricing on request. They are built for larger, multi-channel programmes, and most early-stage SaaS teams will spend their budget better on a simpler tool.

How to choose by budget and product

Start with the number of contacts you expect to keep active over the next six months, not the number you have today. A list of 1,000 active users that receives four lifecycle emails each is a different problem from a list of 1,000 people who signed up once and never returned. Most early-stage products have far more inactive contacts than active ones, and inactive contacts are the main cost driver in contact-based pricing.

Next, decide whether the product's state can be sent as events. If your application can send a named event when a user activates, when a payment fails and when a plan limit is reached, you can use a tool built around events, such as Customer.io. If your application cannot send events yet, start with a simpler tool and send the few messages that matter, then move to an event-driven tool when the data is in place.

Finally, decide what must be free. For a pre-revenue product, the free plan that matters most is the one that covers the first few hundred users with all the features you need. Loops' Early Stage plan fits that stage. Kit's free plan fits a newsletter-first product. Brevo's free plan fits a team that needs broad contact storage and can live with a daily sending cap. Mailchimp and SendGrid's free plans fit very small lists.

Setup and migration checklist

Whatever tool you pick, the setup order matters more than the choice. Start by naming the activation event and writing down who is in the journey. Then wire in the billing events and the exit conditions. Only then build the messages.

Migration advice that saves money later

Most migrations fail on consent and suppression, not on templates. Export your subscribers with the source of each subscription, the date it was given, and any unsubscribe or bounce status. Import the unsubscribed list first, and confirm that the new tool respects it before you import anyone else. A new tool that sends to people who opted out will cost you more in complaints than any subscription fee.

Keep the old journey running until the new one has been live for a full cycle. A weekly product update is a good test case, because you can compare deliverability and click patterns in both systems. Do not move a billing-failure message until you have tested it with a real failed payment in a test account, because the link and the timing are the parts that customers notice.

Avoid building a large journey in the first week. Start with one journey that covers signup and activation. Once you can see which users activate, add the stalled-user nudge. Add the expansion message only when your usage data can be trusted. This order also keeps the cost of the platform small while the product is still changing.

How to read the price before you commit

A low monthly price is not the cost. For a product-led startup, the real costs are the contact count, the number of sends, the number of seats, the add-ons and the time to build the event pipeline. A tool priced per profile may look cheap at 500 profiles and rise sharply at 25,000. A tool priced per seat may look expensive with a team of ten and cheap with a team of two. A tool priced by sends may cost more than expected after a big product launch.

Model three months, not one. Estimate the contacts you will hold in each month, the emails each contact will receive, and the team size. Then compare the cost against the free plan and the next paid step. The table in this guide gives the figures at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 contacts. For a list of a different size, the pricing page of each vendor gives the band that applies.

Use the same test for every tool. Load a realistic sample of your users, send one activation message and one billing message, and check how the tool handles a user who activates halfway through the journey. The result will tell you more than any feature list.

Related guides

For related decisions, read our guides to startup activation and startup analytics, and the email-platform alternatives hub.