Low-Budget Email Sequence Tools, by Monthly Ceiling

What each ceiling buys, side by side

The table gives one named pick per ceiling, the list it covers at that price and the main thing you give up. Every number comes from the vendor's own pricing page; the sections after the table show the other plans that fit each ceiling and the arithmetic behind the pick.

Read the figures with their billing basis in mind. ActiveCampaign and Kit quote the monthly rate of an annual plan, Drip, Loops and Resend quote monthly slider readouts, and MailerLite quotes monthly billing, with its annual rate at 500 subscribers shown as $10.80 against $12 a month. A ceiling is only useful if it matches how you will actually be billed, so check which basis a number uses before comparing two tools.

The $0 stack: which free plan, and what it stops you doing

A zero-dollar setup is one free plan chosen for the cap you can live with. The caps differ in kind: Loops limits sends and who receives them, Brevo limits sends per day, MailerLite limits the number of subscribers, and Mailchimp limits almost everything. Compare the cap that will bind first for your product, not the headline figure on the pricing page.

Loops free: every feature, a rolling send allowance

Loops' pricing page says the free plan includes unlimited contacts and up to 4,000 emails to your 1,000 newest contacts in any rolling 30-day window, with marketing and transactional sends counted together. Free emails carry Loops branding and go out at up to 10 emails per second, and every feature is available. Loops' events documentation describes how an event sent from your backend starts a workflow, and how Stripe, Clerk and Supabase webhooks arrive as platform events, so a sign-up or a billing change can begin a sequence without you maintaining lists by hand.

The allowance is easy to price. 300 new sign-ups on a four-email welcome path send 300 x 4 = 1,200 emails, and one broadcast to 1,000 contacts adds 1,000, for 2,200. Add 800 receipts and password resets sent through the same account and the month reaches 3,000, which leaves 4,000 - 3,000 = 1,000 sends, enough for exactly one more broadcast. The cost of the free plan is who it leaves out: once the list passes 1,000 contacts, only the newest 1,000 are mailed, so your oldest sign-ups, often the longest-standing users, stop receiving anything.

Brevo free: a daily cap, a large store of contacts

Brevo's pricing help article describes its Free plan as 300 daily email sends and storage for up to 100,000 contacts, with marketing automation for up to 2,000 contacts, transactional email, a drag-and-drop editor, one user seat and email support. Because the cap is daily, the useful arithmetic is per day. 300 x 30 = 9,000 sends in a 30-day month, but a broadcast to 2,000 contacts needs 2,000 / 300 = 6.7, so 7 days of allowance, and any onboarding emails sent on those days come out of the same 300. Brevo's free plan suits a steady trickle of mail to a larger list and does badly at a launch-day announcement.

Resend free: code-first, with a small marketing tier

Resend's pricing page lists a free transactional plan of 3,000 emails a month with a 100-a-day limit and 3 domains, and its marketing tab lists a free tier of 1,000 contacts with unlimited broadcast sending, 10,000 automation runs and 3 segments. Per Resend's automations documentation, automations start from custom events in your application and can include delay, wait-for-event and condition steps. That suits a team that wants receipts and a first sequence from one vendor. The limit to plan around is the 1,000-contact tier: the next price read on the marketing tab is $40 at 5,000 contacts.

MailerLite free: a platform trial with a hard stop at 250

MailerLite's Free plan is up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month with 2 seats. Its comparison table limits free accounts to 3 active automations of 5 steps each, plus one website and landing page and 3 active forms, and its FAQ says sending, campaigns and automations alike, is locked once active subscribers pass 250 until you pay or remove subscribers. Divide 2,500 emails by 250 subscribers and each person can receive 10 emails a month, which is generous, but the stop at 251 makes this plan a way to try the platform and not a place to stay. Sending through the API or MCP server is not available on Free.

Kit, Mailchimp and EmailOctopus: newsletter plans at $0

Kit's free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited landing pages, forms and broadcasts plus tagging and segmentation, but Visual Automations and sequences begin on Creator. Mailchimp's Free plan is 1 audience, 250 contacts and 500 sends a month with a cap of 250 a day, and its comparison table marks marketing automation flows as not included on Free. EmailOctopus's free plan is 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month with EmailOctopus branding, 30-day reports, 1 landing page, 1 form and 1 user; its pricing page does not list automations, so confirm in the product that it can run a timed series before you build around it. 10,000 / 2,500 gives four emails per subscriber per month. All three work for a broadcast newsletter, and none of the first two can send a day-three follow-up by itself at $0.

Under $25 a month: the first paid sequences

Twenty-five dollars is where plans stop being trials and start being a month's real work. The question at this ceiling is which plans still allow a full welcome-to-trial-end path, and the answer depends on automation limits more than on the headline price. The table lists every plan on this page that fits, with the limit that matters.

Sources, in the order of the table: MailerLite's pricing page, ActiveCampaign's pricing page, Mailchimp's pricing page, Brevo's pricing help article, HubSpot's Marketing Hub pricing page and EmailOctopus's pricing page.

Reading the table: where each plan runs out

MailerLite is the plan in this table that pairs a stated 50 active automations and 100 steps per automation with a price under $25 at 1,000 subscribers. Its Comfort plan gives you 10 times the subscriber tier in monthly emails, so 1,000 subscribers can receive 10 emails each a month. The things Comfort does not include are on the page too: multiple automation triggers belong to Power, which MailerLite lists at $39 for 1,000 subscribers, and unlimited seats and 24/7 live chat belong there as well.

ActiveCampaign Starter reads $15 at 1,000 contacts, billed annually, but caps each automation at 5 actions and allows one user. Five actions limits an automation to five emails before any wait or condition is counted, so a seven-email trial path cannot fit, and a second teammate cannot log in. The next plan up, Plus, starts at $49 for the same 1,000 contacts and also allows one user.

Mailchimp is cheap only while the list is tiny. Essentials is $13 for up to 500 contacts, but its comparison table limits flows to 4 steps; Standard lifts that to 200 steps per flow and 200 flows at $20 for 500 contacts, and its next band is $100 for 2,501 to 5,000 contacts. If the list is likely to pass 2,500 contacts within a year, the Mailchimp ladder is steeper than the others in this table.

Brevo is priced by emails per month, and its tier table ties each volume to a contact band: 5,000 emails with storage for up to 500 contacts, 10,000 with up to 1,500, and 15,000 with up to 2,500. The number to watch is contacts per tier, not the entry price. Starter shows a "Sent by Brevo" logo in the footer that a $9-a-month add-on removes (Brevo's pricing page showed $10.80 for that add-on on 7 October 2026), so $9 + $9 = $18, the same as Standard's entry price. Standard already includes automation for unlimited contacts, A/B testing and priority email support, which makes it the sensible Brevo plan whenever the footer matters.

HubSpot is a different kind of purchase. Its pricing page prices Marketing Hub Starter at $7 per seat, and its email automation row reads 1 automated action in the free column and up to 10 on Starter. That fits a team whose CRM is already HubSpot and that needs a few automated emails; it does not fit a seven-email path with branches.

Under $50 a month: about 5,000 contacts

Fifty dollars is the first ceiling where event-triggered sequences, a few thousand contacts and several team members all fit in one plan. The plans below reach between 1,000 and 5,000 contacts, so the right one depends on how fast the list is growing and where it comes from.

Sources: Loops, Resend's marketing tab, MailerLite, Drip, ActiveCampaign and Kit, each on their own pricing page.

Choose by where your sequences start

Choose Loops when events from your app start the sequences. Its workflows begin on an Event received trigger, the events API needs only an email or user ID plus an event name, and the paid plan has no seat fee and no cap on sends to subscribers. At 4,788 subscribers the monthly bill is $48, and the next readout on the slider is $99 at 9,998 subscribers, so you can see the curve before you commit.

Choose Resend's marketing plan when developers own email and want receipts and sequences from one vendor. Its transactional ladder and its marketing ladder are separate: Pro transactional is $20 for up to 50,000 emails, while Pro marketing is priced by contacts, from $40 at 5,000. The pricing page also lists automations at a per-run rate of $0.0015, so before relying on a flat monthly figure, count how many contacts will enter an automation each month and read what your plan includes.

Choose MailerLite Comfort when your list comes from forms, landing pages or content and you want those tools in the same plan. A 5,000-subscriber list can receive 10 emails each per month, and the Comfort page lists 50 active automations. It does not give you multiple automation triggers; MailerLite sells those from Power.

Drip's page lists dynamic segments, onsite campaigns and up to 50 workflows with unlimited sends, and it has no free plan, so the 14-day trial is how you try it without paying. At 3,000 people its $49 works out to more per contact than the other plans in the table. ActiveCampaign's Starter and Plus both cap you at one user; if two teammates need to edit automations, those plans fail the test before the first email is sent.

Kit Creator is the highest price per subscriber in the table: $33 for 1,000 subscribers is $390 a year, and it includes unlimited sequences and Visual Automations, branding removal and 24/7 email and chat support. That suits a creator whose list is the product. It does not suit a SaaS that needs to reach 5,000 contacts at this ceiling.

Under $100 a month: about 10,000 contacts

At a hundred dollars the list size becomes the deciding variable, because several tools reach 10,000 contacts under this line and others reach only 5,000. The table lists the biggest list each plan covers while staying under $100, with the line that matters.

Read straight across, the three plans that reach 10,000 contacts cost $99, $89 and $80, and the plans that stop at 5,000 cost $69 to $89 for sequence-first features such as multiple triggers or workflow limits. Customer.io's Essentials plan is not on this list because its pricing page starts at $100 for 5,000 profiles with 1 million emails a month, one dollar over the ceiling, and reads $145 at 10,000 profiles. Mailchimp Standard is out for the same reason: its 2,501 to 5,000 contacts band is $100.

What a thousand contacts costs at the top of each ceiling

Dividing each price by its list gives a fairer comparison than the sticker, because the tables above quote different list sizes. The cells show the division.

The spread is the point: the same dollar buys more than four times as many contacts at the top of the table as at the bottom. That is not a verdict on quality, since the cheaper rows give up multiple triggers, seats or workflow depth in different places, but it is the cost you accept when you choose a sequence-first plan at a smaller list.

Choosing among the 10,000-contact plans

Loops at $99 is the right choice when events from your product drive the sequences and you expect to send more than a typical newsletter schedule: its pricing page says paid plans do not cap total emails, and it allows up to 1,000 emails per second. Resend at $80 is the choice when your developers want one vendor for receipts and sequences and are comfortable with a per-run automation rate. MailerLite Comfort at $89 is the choice for a list that comes from forms, landing pages and content, as long as a single trigger per automation is enough.

If you need multiple automation triggers on MailerLite, the page puts them on Power, which reads $69 at 5,000 subscribers and $129 at 10,000, so the 10,000 mark leaves this ceiling. Kit Creator at 5,000 subscribers is $75 and at 10,000 it is $116, so Kit's sequences plan is a 5,000-subscriber answer under $100. Treat that jump as the budget signal: the plan you can afford at 10,000 contacts is not the same plan you can afford at 5,000.

Free plans compared by what they cut

Every free plan removes something, and the removed thing decides whether it can run a sequence. Four cuts show up repeatedly: the automation itself, the number of contacts that get mail, the number of sends, and the vendor's branding or support. The table sets them side by side, using each vendor's own pricing page.

Customer.io and Drip have no free plan to put in the table. Customer.io's pricing page offers early-stage companies that have raised under $10M a full year free through its Startup Program, which is eligibility-based, and Drip offers a 14-day trial with no credit card. ActiveCampaign's page lists paid plans from $15.

What happens when a free plan hits its cap

The caps fail in three different ways, and the failure mode matters more than the number. MailerLite stops everything: sending, campaigns and automation, locks once active subscribers pass 250, so a busy week leaves your onboarding path silent until you pay or remove people. Loops keeps sending but changes who receives mail, so every contact older than the newest 1,000 stops hearing from you. Brevo and Mailchimp cap by the day, so a launch spike leaves you choosing which emails go out today and which wait.

Two of those failures are easy to miss, because mail still goes out to someone. If you stay on a free plan, put the cap on a calendar: for Loops, the count of sends in the last 30 days; for MailerLite, the active subscriber count against 250; for Brevo, the largest day of sends against 300.

How many sign-ups a free plan can onboard in a month

This table assumes a four-email onboarding path for every new sign-up and one broadcast a month to the whole list, a deliberately modest workload. It subtracts the broadcast from the monthly cap and divides what is left by four.

The numbers are send capacity, not sign-up capacity. MailerLite shows 562 by the email arithmetic, but the 250-subscriber lock means you can hold at most 250 active people at once. The Mailchimp row stays at 62 only on paper, since its free plan excludes automation flows and the onboarding path would have to be sent by hand.

Team seats: the line item small teams forget to price

A budget that fits one founder's login can break the day a second person needs to edit a welcome email. Seat rules differ more than send rules between the cheap plans, and some vendors price seats separately while others do not charge for them at all.

For a team of three, the seat table changes the order of the ceilings. ActiveCampaign Starter at $15 for 1,000 contacts is one login, and the plan with three seats starts at $79, so the cheap sticker does not survive the second editor. Loops charges nothing per seat, and MailerLite Comfort at $19 for 1,000 subscribers includes three. Those two are the plans where a small team's actual monthly bill matches the number on the pricing page.

What staying cheap costs: missing triggers and hand work

The bill on a pricing page leaves out two costs: the automation you cannot build and the work you do by hand instead. Both depend on one question that no pricing table answers, which is what can start an automation.

Check what starts an automation before you check the price

A sequence for a product is usually triggered by something the product did: an account was created, a trial started, a project was made, a card failed. A tool that can only start an automation when a contact joins a list or a form is submitted forces you to turn product events into list changes with your own code. Loops accepts a named event with an email or user ID through its API, and Stripe, Clerk and Supabase webhooks arrive there as platform events. Resend's automations start from custom events defined in your app, with delay, wait-for-event and condition steps. Both are described in their own documentation.

For the other cheap plans, I did not find an app-event trigger on the pricing pages I read. MailerLite's table shows a row for multiple automation triggers that begins on Power and a row for ecommerce triggers, Mailchimp's flows are limited by steps on Essentials, and ActiveCampaign's Starter caps an automation at 5 actions. That does not mean the products cannot be wired to your app; it means the pricing page does not promise it, so read the vendor's developer documentation for the exact event or list-membership trigger before you pay. The test is one sentence: can I send a named event with a payload from my backend and have it start the welcome path?

Pricing the hand work

If a tool cannot start a path by itself, someone starts it by hand. Estimate the monthly cost as minutes per task, times tasks per month, divided by 60, times the value of your hour. As a worked example, assume 60 sign-ups a month that each need a 3-minute manual step, such as moving a contact into a group so the welcome path begins: 60 x 3 = 180 minutes, which is 3 hours. At $40 an hour that is $120 a month, more than a $99 plan would cost. At 10 sign-ups a month the same task costs 0.5 hours, or $20, and staying cheap is the right call. The hourly value and the volumes are assumptions to replace with your own; the formula is what matters.

The same arithmetic covers limits as well as missing triggers. A free MailerLite automation has room for 5 steps, so a seven-email onboarding path has to be split in two, and every split is a place where a contact can fall out of the flow. ActiveCampaign Starter's 5 actions force the same compromise. Mailchimp Essentials limits a flow to 4 steps, which is the reason the Standard plan's 200 steps exist. Every compromise you build is hours you pay later.

The sender-only route: cheap per email, expensive per hour

The cheapest way to deliver mail is a sending service. Amazon SES's pricing page lists its Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails, free-plan access for six months after account creation, and an example of 250,000 outgoing messages at 250,000 x $0.16 / 1,000 = $40.00. So 10,000 emails cost 10 x $0.16 = $1.60, and 100,000 emails cost 100 x $0.16 = $16.00. Those numbers are the price of delivery. SES lists sending, SMTP and the API, not a sequence builder, so the schedule, the exit conditions, the unsubscribe page and the bounce handling are code you own.

Managed senders sit between SES and a sequence tool. Postmark's pricing page lists Basic, Pro and Platform at $15, $16.50 and $18 for 10,000 emails a month, $55, $60.50 and $66 at 50,000, and $115, $126.50 and $138 at 125,000, with a free plan of 100 emails a month. Resend's transactional ladder is Pro at $20 for 50,000 emails and $35 for 100,000, then Scale at $90 for 100,000 and $160 for 200,000. Both deliver your own application's mail well and neither stands in for a tool that remembers which step each contact is on, except Resend's separate marketing tab.

Build against buy comes down to the same division as before: the monthly price gap to a managed tool, divided by the value of your hour, is the number of hours of upkeep you can afford. If one deliverability problem or one change of trigger logic eats more than that, the managed plan was cheaper. The sender-only route is right when your application already decides who gets which email and when, and what you need from the vendor is delivery, suppression handling and logs.

When to stop being cheap: six triggers that justify the next price step

Being cheap is a method, not a goal, and it stops paying at specific moments. Each trigger below is a condition you can check, not a feeling, and each carries the arithmetic that tells you whether the step is worth it.

1. The forecast crosses the cap. Next month's sends are new sign-ups times emails per path, plus broadcasts, plus receipts if they share the account. If that total passes the plan's cap, such as Loops' 4,000 in any rolling 30 days or MailerLite's 2,500 a month, upgrade before the month starts rather than in the middle of it.
2. The list passes a lock. A hard lock is a decision made for you: MailerLite stops sending above 250 active subscribers and Loops mails only the newest 1,000. When the contact count is a few dozen short of a lock, treat the upgrade as due, because crossing it either halts sending (MailerLite) or changes who is mailed (Loops) from that moment.
3. One customer pays for the step. Divide the price step by the monthly revenue of one customer. For a product at $30 a month, the step from a free plan to $48 is 48 / 30 = 1.6, so two extra customers a month cover it, and the further step from $48 to $99 is $51, which is 51 / 30 = 1.7 and again two customers. If a sequence plausibly converts or retains that many, the step has paid for itself.
4. You build the third workaround. One manual step is a task, two is a habit, and three is a missing feature. When you maintain a third script or spreadsheet to compensate for a cap, price the hours with the formula in the section above and compare them with the next tier.
5. Customer-facing mail needs the footer gone. Brevo's Starter shows a "Sent by Brevo" logo until a $9-a-month add-on removes it. Mailchimp's badge disappears on its paid plans. Kit lists branding removal from Creator, which is $33 at 1,000 subscribers. For a paid product, a third party's logo on a billing or cancellation email is a reason to upgrade by itself.
6. You need a person, not a knowledge base. Mailchimp's Free plan includes email support for the first 30 days, and Kit lists 24/7 email and chat support from Creator. If an outage of your onboarding path costs more than the price step, support is the thing you are buying.

The opposite check is just as useful. If none of the six is true, the next tier is not yet worth its price, and money moved into content or into the product is a better use of the same dollars. A team that is two months from any trigger on this list can afford to wait for it.

Upgrade path: the next price steps from each free start

The cheapest upgrade is the one that keeps your sequences where they are. The table follows the ladder each free start climbs, using only readouts the vendors publish, and the last column marks where the ladder bends upward. Look at the second and third steps before you build anything on the free plan, because they are the bills you will actually meet.

Above every ladder in the table sit the tools built for teams that outgrow a cheap plan. Customer.io Essentials is $100 for 5,000 profiles and 1 million emails a month, $145 at 10,000 profiles and $505 or more at 50,000, and its page lists a year free through the Startup Program for companies that raised under $10M. ActiveCampaign Plus reads $189 at 10,000 contacts, billed annually, and Drip reads $154 at 10,000 people. Customer.io's comparison table marks managed deliverability as not included on Essentials, so the cheap end of that ladder still leaves reputation monitoring to you.

Upgrade in place, or move

Stay with the same vendor while the next step on its own ladder is cheaper than rebuilding. A move means recreating every path, re-authenticating the sending domain and importing suppressions as well as contacts; price it with the hand-work formula from earlier and add the weeks in which two tools run side by side. Kit's pricing page lists free migrations for people arriving from another tool, and Drip's lists free migration at its 25,000-person tier, so a vendor-paid move is sometimes an argument for choosing the destination first. The migration guide has the checklist, and the Brevo alternatives page shows what people usually switch to from an entry plan.

If the upgrade is driven by product stage and not by the monthly bill, the startup stage guide covers pre-revenue, early revenue, growth and scale; for founders running without a team, bootstrapped founders covers the same problem from the other side. For the sender layer on its own, see Resend vs Postmark, and for the whole directory of tools, email sequence tools by job.

Stack totals: add the receipts sender before you test the ceiling

A sequence tool is rarely the whole email bill. Receipts, password resets and sign-in links are transactional mail, and some plans include them while others leave them to a second vendor. The table totals the monthly cost of complete stacks for a product that sends its own receipts, so you can check each one against the ceiling.

Two things change the picture. First, the MailerLite stack tops the ceiling once the sender is added, even though MailerLite alone is under it. Second, a free sender has a daily limit, and Resend's is 100 emails a day: a day with 150 password resets stops at 100, so the free route suits a product with a small, steady flow of receipts and not one with bursts. Before you pick a stack, find your busiest single day of receipts and resets in the last quarter and compare it with 100.

Band edges: the counting rules that push a list over a ceiling

Plans step up where the vendor's count crosses a band edge, so the cheapest hour of work on this page is checking how close your list sits to one. The rules are different for every vendor, which is why a clean-up helps on some plans and does nothing on others.

• Mailchimp bands are wide and steep. Its pricing page puts 2,501 to 5,000 contacts at $100 and 5,001 to 10,000 at $135, so a list of 5,001 costs $35 more a month than a list of 5,000. Removing 1 contact at that edge is worth $35 a month.
• Drip bands are narrower. Its slider reads $39 for 1 to 2,500 people and $49 for 2,501 to 3,000, so 2,501 people cost $10 more than 2,500. Drip counts active people and the volume of email you send in the month.
• Customer.io counts the whole month. Its billing documentation says a profile that exists at any point in the billing period counts toward that month's bill even if you delete it, so a clean-up has to happen before the period starts, not after.
• Brevo counts emails, not people. Its help article says the email volume you select sets the tier, and each tier carries a contact-storage band, so a leaner send plan moves you down a tier, while the contact band only matters once your list outgrows it.
• MailerLite counts active subscribers. Its pricing page says price scales with active subscribers, and the free plan's lock applies at 250 active subscribers, so on that plan the count and the cap are the same number.
• Loops and Kit price by subscribers. Loops' slider and Kit's selector both move in steps, and the readouts on this page are the stops I could read, not every step. Check the exact stop for your list before you budget.

The practical rule: before each billing month, look up the nearest band edge above your current list on the vendor's own page. If you are within a few hundred contacts of an edge and a clean-up of unengaged or bounced addresses would take you under it, do the clean-up first. If you are far from the edge, the clean-up saves nothing on that plan.

Frequently asked questions