Cheap newsletter pricing with unlimited sending

If you've watched a newsletter grow past a few thousand subscribers on any of the major platforms, you've noticed the same thing: the price chart bends sharply upward. Mailchimp at 5,000 subscribers is around $75 a month. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) hits $79 around 7,500. Beehiiv, MailerLite, Brevo — same pattern. The bigger your list, the more you pay, whether or not you send more email.

That climb is the reason you're reading this. The good news is that subscriber-based pricing doesn't have to be expensive, and it doesn't have to limit how much you send. This post is about paying far less for the same list — and never being metered on sending.

Why the bill climbs so fast

Most of the big newsletter platforms are really marketing suites: automation builders, behavioural triggers, segmentation, landing pages, a small CRM. That machinery is genuinely expensive to run for every contact, and the per-subscriber price is how they pay for it. If you use all of it, the price can be fair.

But if you mostly just write a newsletter and send it to people who asked for it, you're paying for a toolbox you barely open — and on several platforms you get metered or capped on sending on top of the subscriber fee. That's the part that stings: your list grew, your bill grew, and you didn't do anything differently.

The fix isn't to abandon subscriber-based pricing. It's simple, predictable, and easy to reason about. The fix is to make it cheap, and to stop charging for sending on top of it.

Your cheaper options

There are cheaper routes than the big suites, and each has a catch worth knowing before you switch.

Self-hosted. Listmonk is the open-source standard. You pay only for a server and an SMTP provider, and list size never escalates the bill. The catch is the operational work, which is more than the tutorials admit: DNS records that fail silently, deliverability, bounce handling, updates. Worth it if you enjoy infrastructure, expensive in time if you just want to write.

Volume-metered tools. EmailOctopus and Buttondown price mainly on how much you send rather than how big your list is, which keeps large, idle lists cheap. The catch is the inverse of the big platforms: send often and you climb tiers or run into a send cap.

Substack. Free to start, but it takes 10% of your paid subscriptions for as long as you use it, and your audience lives inside their platform. If you ever leave, you take the email addresses and start over. Free is rarely free.

A cheaper way to do subscriber pricing

There's a fourth option, and it's the one we built Yellaro on: keep subscriber-based pricing — because it's the most predictable way to bill — but make it genuinely cheap, and stop metering sending altogether.

So you're priced for the size of your list, the same intuitive way, but well below the big platforms, and you can email that list as often as you like. Your list size is the only number that moves your bill.

What we charge

Yellaro runs managed Listmonk hosting. Plans are by subscriber count:

• Starter — €8/month, up to 1,000 subscribers
• Grow — €19/month, up to 5,000 subscribers
• Pro — €39/month, up to 15,000 subscribers
• Scale — €79/month, up to 50,000 subscribers

Sending is unlimited on every plan, and annual billing gets two months free.

To put €8 in context: at 1,000 subscribers, MailerLite runs around $15 a month, Kit around $39, and EmailOctopus around $14 — and several of those still limit how much you can send. Yellaro is €8, and you can send as much as you want. (Competitor prices move around; check their pages before you switch.)

If your list grows past your plan's subscriber limit, we email you and give you 72 hours to upgrade or trim before sending pauses. We don't bill overages, and we don't spring a usage invoice on you at the end of the month. Predictable cost in, predictable behaviour out.

Because sending is unlimited, how often you publish never changes the bill. A weekly newsletter to 20,000 subscribers and a daily one to the same list both sit on the Scale tier at €79. On a platform that meters or gates sending, the daily version costs more — sometimes a lot more.

The honest catch

We won't pretend subscriber pricing has no downside: you do move up a tier as your list grows. That's the trade you make for a bill you can predict. But the tiers are cheap, the steps are gradual, and sending is never the thing that costs you.

The right platform isn't just the one with the lowest sticker price today. It's the one whose bill still makes sense when your list doubles — and where writing more often is never the thing that makes it go up.