Email Marketing Cost Calculator

Email marketing platform pricing is driven almost entirely by your subscriber (contact) count, not by how many emails you send. Platforms like Mailchimp, Kit (formerly ConvertKit) and Constant Contact put you in a pricing band based on list size, then let you send a generous number of campaigns within that band. Brevo is the exception: it prices by emails sent and lets you keep as many contacts as you like.

This calculator asks for the price of your plan rather than guessing one, because the bands and the prices move every year. Look it up on the platform’s pricing page for your list size. As a rough 2026 guide, most US platforms charge somewhere around $40 to $100 a month for 5,000 contacts.

How the tiers work

• Free tier: usually caps out around 500 contacts, with limited sends and platform branding on your emails. Fine for a brand-new newsletter, but you outgrow it quickly.
• Standard tier: the workhorse plan for most small senders. Price steps up as your list crosses thresholds (500, 2,500, 10,000, 50,000 subscribers) and adds automation, segmentation, and A/B testing.
• Premium tier: better deliverability, advanced automation, and priority support, at a considerably higher price for the same list size.

The two numbers that actually matter

Cost per campaign = Monthly cost / Emails per month

Cost per subscriber per month = Monthly cost / Subscribers

Cost per email sent = Monthly cost / (Subscribers × Emails per month)

Cost per campaign is the one to hold against what a campaign brings in. If a send earns more than it costs, sending more often pays, and on a flat plan the extra sends are free until you hit the plan’s monthly send limit. Cost per subscriber tells you whether your list is priced efficiently (a healthy figure is a fraction of a cent to a few cents per contact per month).

Worked example

Say your plan is $60 a month for a 5,000-subscriber list, and you send 8 emails a month. That is 40,000 sends, so:

• Cost per campaign = $60 / 8 = $7.50
• Cost per subscriber = $60 / 5,000 = $0.012/month
• Cost per email sent = $60 / 40,000 = $0.0015, or $1.50 per thousand

Watch the thresholds. Pricing jumps at each subscriber band, so a list of 2,501 can cost noticeably more than one of 2,499. Prune inactive subscribers before you cross a threshold. Dead contacts cost money every month and drag down your open rates, which hurts deliverability for everyone else on your list.