What happens to the bill when the list crosses 10,000 subscribers?

It depends entirely on the vendor's ladder. MailerLite has no band between 10,000 and 15,000, so subscriber 10,001 moves Comfort from $89 to $129 a month — $480 a year more. GetResponse has no band between 10,000 and 25,000, so its Starter bill jumps from $79 to $174 — $1,140 a year more. Klaviyo steps at 10,500 profiles, from $150 to $175 — $300 a year more. Kit's free plan ends at 10,000, and the price of the first paid step at that list size is not published on a static page.

Why don't Mailchimp and Brevo publish a 10,000-subscriber price?

Both keep contact-band pricing out of their static pages, in different ways. Mailchimp's US page renders one plan at a time inside a selector, and its own footnote restricts annual billing at 10,000-plus contacts to plans bought through sales. Brevo prices by monthly email volume and keeps its contact-by-volume matrix inside an on-page calculator, so no contact-band figure exists in its page source. We leave those cells blank rather than estimate them.

Updated October 3, 2026 · Prices read from vendor pricing pages: MailerLite September 21, 2026 (nightly re-checks through October 3), Klaviyo September 24, 2026 (re-checked October 1), GetResponse October 1, 2026 (re-verified October 3), Kit October 2, 2026, Mailchimp and Brevo October 1, 2026 · Affiliate disclosure

What Email Marketing Costs at 10,000 Subscribers

Q: How much does email marketing cost at 10,000 subscribers?

Among the vendors that publish a figure at that size, the monthly bill runs from $0 (Kit's free plan, which covers up to 10,000 subscribers) to $150 (Klaviyo's Email plan at 10,000 active profiles). GetResponse Starter bills $79 a month and MailerLite Comfort $89 a month at the same size. Over a year that spans $0 to $1,800, and the two largest platforms by brand recognition — Mailchimp and Brevo — publish no per-band price at 10,000 at all.

Q: Is annual billing worth it at 10,000 subscribers?

Where it exists, yes. MailerLite's yearly rate takes Comfort from $89 to $80.10 a month — $961.20 against $1,068 over a year, 10 percent off. GetResponse's 12-month prepay lands at exactly 82 percent of twelve monthly payments — $777.36 a year at 10,000 subscribers. Klaviyo publishes no annual rate at any size, so its year is twelve monthly payments. Mailchimp's own footnote limits annual plans at 10,000-plus contacts to Premium or Standard bought through sales.

TL;DR: At 10,000 subscribers, the published bills span $0 to $150 a month. Kit's free plan still costs nothing at that size — its paid ladder only starts at subscriber 10,001. GetResponse Starter bills $79, MailerLite Comfort $89 ($961.20 on its yearly rate), Klaviyo $150 ($1,800 a year, because no annual rate exists). Mailchimp and Brevo don't print a 10,000-subscriber price anywhere you can read before checkout. And the step past 10,000 is where ladders bite hardest: GetResponse has no band between 10,000 and 25,000, so subscriber 10,001 adds $1,140 a year.

Why 10,000 is the number to price

Ten thousand subscribers is where email marketing stops being a hobby budget. It is also the size where every vendor's pricing page stops being equally readable: some print the figure, some bury it in a widget, and two of the biggest names never show it at all. So we priced one list — 10,000 subscribers, monthly billing unless stated — at every platform we cover, using only each vendor's own page, and then priced the same list at 10,001 to see what crossing the line costs.

A note on what we did not do: where a vendor doesn't publish the figure, we say so. No calculator scraping of our own, no interpolations between bands, no "estimated" cells dressed up as data.

The bill at 10,000, vendor by vendor

Platform	Monthly bill at 10,000	Annual bill	What the page actually shows
Kit	$0 — free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers	$0	Printed on the page. The first paid step past 10,000 is not: it lives in an on-page slider
GetResponse (Starter)	$79, unlimited sends	$777.36 prepaid (exactly 82% of twelve monthly payments)	Hidden in its own checkout links — 21 prices, none of them on the page itself
MailerLite (Comfort)	$89, 100,000 emails a month	$961.20 billed yearly ($80.10 a month, 10% off)	Fully printed — the only vendor in this comparison with the whole ladder on the page
Klaviyo (Email)	$150, 100,000 sends a month	$1,800 — arithmetic only; no annual rate is published at any size	Printed, but on the smallest rung that covers your count — and no rung exists between 6,500 and 10,000
ActiveCampaign (Starter)	Not published above 1,000 contacts	—	The official page lists four prices, all at 1,000 contacts. A third-party re-check of ActiveCampaign's own calculator (August 2026) put the 10,000-contact Starter band near $149 — we treat that as unverified until the vendor prints it
Mailchimp (Standard)	Not published	Annual plans at 10,000+ contacts only, through sales	The US page renders one band at a time; its own footnote sends 10,000-contact annual billing to the sales team
Brevo	Not published by contact count	—	Brevo bills monthly email volume, not contacts — its contact-by-volume matrix exists only inside an on-page calculator

Two things stand out. First, the spread: the same 10,000-person list costs $0 on one platform and $1,800 a year on another, with no difference in the core job of sending email. Second, the two vendors buyers hear about most — Mailchimp and Brevo — are the ones that make you work hardest to see the number, each for a different structural reason. If the free end of that table is what you're shopping from, our read of every free plan we can verify prices the first paid year at 500, 2,500 and 10,000 subscribers.

Subscriber 10,001: the step nobody advertises

The bill at 10,000 matters less than the bill at 10,001, because that is where contact-band pricing does its real work. Every vendor here sizes you by the top of the band you land in, and the bands are not evenly spaced. At this mark the ladders diverge sharply:

GetResponse: +$1,140 a year. Its Starter ladder runs $19, $29, $54, $79, then $174 at 25,000 — there is no band between 10,000 and 25,000. A list of 10,001 subscribers bills the 25,000 band. That is a 120% jump for one name, the steepest step we have found on any ladder at this size. The full grid, including the Marketer and Creator columns, is in our GetResponse pricing deep-dive.
MailerLite: +$480 a year. No band between 10,000 and 15,000 — subscriber 10,001 moves Comfort from $89 to $129 a month, a 45% jump. The ladder, and the cumulative counting rule that decides when you actually cross it, is in our MailerLite pricing guide.
Klaviyo: +$300 a year. The gentlest of the three, and still steep: the next rung after 10,000 profiles is 10,500 at $175 — $25 a month for one profile over the line. How that rung compares with the 49 others is in our Klaviyo pricing guide, alongside the wider 6,500-to-10,000 gap where thousands of extra profiles cost almost nothing.
Kit: a step with no printed price. The free plan ends at exactly 10,000 subscribers, and the paid bill that replaces $0 at that list size appears only in the pricing page's interactive slider. We won't quote a number the page doesn't state.
Mailchimp: an unpublished band on top of unpublished bands. The 10,001–15,000 contact band's price is not rendered on any static page we could read.

The pattern to take away: the published 10,000 price is the discount. Vendors print the round number because it reads well, and let the bands around it do the billing. If your list is sitting just under a boundary, price the boundary, not your count.

Is annual billing worth it at this size?

At 10,000 subscribers the annual discount is real money, where it exists. MailerLite takes 10% off every annual bill — $961.20 against $1,068 for Comfort. GetResponse's 12-month prepay lands at exactly 82% of twelve monthly payments — $777.36, saving $170.64. Klaviyo publishes no annual rate at any size, so its $1,800 year is twelve monthly payments by arithmetic, and nothing you can opt into. Mailchimp's own footnote restricts annual plans at 10,000-plus contacts to Premium or Standard bought through its sales team — an option, but not a price. The head-to-head where this gap is widest is in our Klaviyo vs MailerLite comparison, which prices both ladders at every band.

Who should not switch

Kit users under the 10,000 ceiling. If your list is at 6,000 or 8,000 and Kit's feature set fits, leaving means buying a bill you do not currently have. The time to compare is when you are about to cross 10,000 — not before.
Store owners on Klaviyo. Klaviyo is the most expensive published bill at this size, but its revenue dashboards, profile timelines and flows are wired into the store's data. If email drives a measurable share of revenue, price the switch in lost attribution, not just the monthly delta.
Anyone mid-cycle on a cumulative counter. MailerLite counts any address active during the cycle until the billing anniversary, deleted or not. Moving platforms does not reset the old bill, and importing your full list to a new contact-band vendor can land you in a higher band on day one. Clean first, then move.
Mailchimp accounts that live inside its commerce stack. Product sync, abandoned-cart flows and revenue reporting that already work are worth real money to replace. For such teams the honest comparison is Mailchimp's actual invoice against the alternative's bill plus the migration cost.

How we keep these numbers honest

Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checkout links or plan documentation, with the reading date attached. Where a band price is not published, the cell stays empty — for ActiveCampaign above 1,000 contacts, for Mailchimp's contact ladder, for Brevo's contact-by-volume matrix, and for Kit's first paid step past 10,000. If you would rather price your own list size, the cost calculator shows the published bill at every band from 500 to 30,000 subscribers and leaves the gaps blank. And where a vendor's transparency itself is the story, our ActiveCampaign pricing guide shows what a price list of four numbers looks like from the buyer's side.

Frequently asked questions

How much does email marketing cost at 10,000 subscribers?

From $0 to $150 a month among the vendors that publish the figure: Kit's free plan carries 10,000 subscribers at no cost, GetResponse Starter bills $79, MailerLite Comfort $89 ($961.20 billed yearly), and Klaviyo $150 ($1,800 a year, no annual rate published). Over a year the spread is $0 to $1,800. Mailchimp and Brevo publish no per-band price at 10,000 at all.

What happens when I cross 10,000 subscribers?

The three ladders that publish this step jump hard: GetResponse has no band between 10,000 and 25,000, so the Starter bill goes from $79 to $174 a month — $1,140 a year more. MailerLite jumps from $89 to $129 at the 15,000 band — $480 a year more. Klaviyo steps at 10,500 profiles from $150 to $175 — $300 a year more. Kit's free plan simply ends at 10,000, with the first paid price visible only in its slider.

Why don't Mailchimp and Brevo show a 10,000-subscriber price?

Different mechanisms, same result. Mailchimp's US page renders one contact band at a time inside a plan selector, and its footnote routes 10,000-plus-contact annual billing through sales. Brevo prices by monthly email volume and keeps the contact-by-volume matrix inside an on-page calculator, so no contact-band figure exists in the page source. We leave both blank rather than estimate.

Is annual billing worth it at 10,000 subscribers?

Where it is published, yes: MailerLite's yearly rate saves 10% ($961.20 against $1,068), and GetResponse's 12-month prepay costs exactly 82% of twelve monthly payments ($777.36, saving $170.64). Klaviyo offers no annual rate at any size. Mailchimp restricts annual plans at this size to sales-assisted Premium or Standard purchases.

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