PolyPromote Guide
Kit’s free plan holds 10,000 subscribers. Mailchimp’s holds 250. Brevo doesn’t cap your list at all — but won’t send more than 300 emails a day. Same word, six different meanings.
Before you pick one: an email list is the only audience you own. Everything else is rented, and the rent keeps going up.
Return per $1 spent
Third-party benchmarks (Litmus, DMA, Omnisend, 2026). Self-reported and survey-based — treat the range as an order of magnitude, not a promise.
Reach works the same way. An organic post reaches 2–8% of the people who already follow you, depending on the platform. An email reaches about 21% of the people on your list, and you decide when it goes.
So the question isn’t whether to start a list. It’s which tool to start it on — and that turns on one number you already know: how many people are on it. These six draw the line between free and paid in six different places.
Compare these six
Six email tools. Pick any three — everything updates live.
| Measure | KKit (ConvertKit) | MMailerLite | OOmnisend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry Score | 84/100 | 93/100 | 83/100 |
| Starting Price | Free / $39/mo | $12/mo | Free / $16/mo |
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free plan limit | Up to 10,000 subscribers | Up to 250 subscribers · 2,500 emails/mo | Up to 250 contacts · 500 emails/mo |
| Primary use | Creator newsletter | General email marketing | Ecommerce email + SMS |
| SMS / multichannel | — | — | Yes |
| Landing pages & forms | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Paid subscriptions | Yes (Commerce) | Yes | — |
| Built-in CRM | — | — | — |
| Deliverability tools | — | Yes (Dedicated IP) | — |
| Go to tool | Try Kit (ConvertKit) | Try MailerLite | Try Omnisend |
Entry Score measures how easy a tool is to try before you pay — free access, entry price and pricing transparency. It is not a quality rating: a low score can still be an excellent tool. The formula is published.
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Drag to your subscriber count. The line between free and paid moves by 40×.
At 2,500 subscribers, 2 of 6 are still free. The rest want money before you send anything.
Paid prices are the entry tier. On every tool except Brevo the price also rises with list size, so read “from $X” as a floor. Some links below are affiliate links; we earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
A free plan can cap you on one of two axes. Most of these tools cap the size of your list. Brevo caps how fast you can send and lets the list grow without limit. ActiveCampaign does neither, because it has no free plan at all.
That distinction matters more than the number. Two tools can both say “free” and be useful to completely different people.
MailerLite, Omnisend and Mailchimp all stop at 250. MailerLite allows 2,500 emails a month on top of that; Omnisend and Mailchimp allow 500. For a landing page that is collecting its first signups, 250 is a few weeks of work. It is a trial, not a plan.
Kit’s free tier holds 10,000 subscribers with unlimited broadcasts, landing pages and forms. That is forty times the 250 club, and it covers most newsletters for their first year or two.
The catch arrives later rather than sooner: the first paid plan is $39/mo, and its price scales with subscriber count. You stay free for a long time, then the step up is larger than anyone else’s.
Brevo puts no limit on contacts and caps you at 300 emails a day instead. Three hundred a day is about 9,000 a month, so a list of 2,000 people emailed twice a month — 4,000 sends — sits comfortably inside the free plan.
The same 2,000 people emailed all at once does not. At 300 a day, that send takes a week to clear. Brevo’s free plan is generous to lists that email rarely and useless to lists that email on a schedule.
Ranked by the cheapest paid tier: Brevo $9, MailerLite $12, Mailchimp $13, ActiveCampaign $15, Omnisend $16, Kit $39.
That ranking is misleading on its own, and Omnisend shows why. Its $16 plan covers 500 contacts. The next tier up, at $59, covers 2,500. So the real cost of crossing 500 contacts on Omnisend is not $16 — it is $59, and there is nothing in between.
There is no winner here, only a match between how your list behaves and where each tool draws its line.
A list that is growing and emails often gets the most out of Kit — free to 10,000, then a real bill. A large list that emails rarely can stay on Brevo’s free plan indefinitely. A small list that wants the gentlest paid step is best served by MailerLite at $12. And if you are already past 500 contacts, Omnisend’s ladder is the steepest of the six — budget $59, not $16.
Prices and plan limits were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-09-01 and are shown with the date we checked them. Entry Score measures how easy a tool is to try before paying, not how good it is — the formula is published. Some of the links on this page are affiliate links.
Search 100 promotion tools by name, purpose or keyword. Narrow by category, by the stage you're at, and by how they charge. Every list comes back ranked.
100 tools across 8 categories. Each one gets pros, cons, who it's for — and who it isn't. Scored the same way, so the numbers mean the same thing across all 100.
Pick a category, then compare up to 3 tools. Same dimensions every time, so the answer is comparable. 28 head-to-head pages already built.
| Entry Score | 84 | 93 | 83 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $39/mo | $12/mo | $16/mo |
| Free plan limit | Up to 10,000 subscribers | Up to 250 subscribers · 2,500 emails/mo | Up to 250 contacts · 500 emails/mo |