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Updated October 9, 2026 · EmailOctopus's pricing page read October 9, 2026; Mailchimp's US pricing page re-read October 7; Kit re-read October 7; MailerLite read September 21, re-verified through October 7; GetResponse read October 1, re-verified October 3; Klaviyo read September 24, re-checked October 1; Omnisend's rate table read October 4; Brevo read September 29; ActiveCampaign read from its own checkout September 20 · Affiliate disclosure
We read EmailOctopus's pricing page on October 9, 2026. Two things distinguish it from most of the category. First, the page keeps its pricing honest by its own construction: rather than a slider that renders one figure at a time, the plan data behind the page carries the whole Pro ladder — 44 subscriber bands, each with a monthly rate and an annual total, from $10 a month at 0–500 subscribers to $1,478 at 480,001–500,000, with the annual bills running $108 to $15,960. Second, the free plan is a real tier of the ladder, not a marketing afterthought: Starter covers 0–2,500 subscribers with 10,000 emails a month at $0, the second-highest free subscriber ceiling in the category after Kit's 10,000.
The bands themselves: $10, $13.50, $20, $31.50, $38, $44.50, $60, $78, $94.50, $112, $128, $145, $162, $178 a month through the first 50,000 subscribers, then $195, $212, $228, $245, $262, $278, $295, $312, $328 and $345 through 100,000, stepping in wider bands after that to $1,478 at the top published band. A card at the top of the page advertises $9 a month billed yearly, "Save $12" — which is the 0–500 band on annual billing, nothing more. Above 500,000 subscribers the page switches to a quote: "contact us for a quote." Feature-wise, Pro buys the branding removed (the free plan sends with EmailOctopus branding on every campaign), reports kept forever instead of 30 days, unlimited landing pages and forms instead of one of each, unlimited users instead of one, and priority chat and email support. A 20% lifetime discount applies to nonprofits.
Monthly price first, with the annual-billing bill in parentheses where the vendor publishes one. Blank cells are ones the vendor does not publish — we leave them empty rather than estimate them.
| Tool | 500 subscribers | 2,500 subscribers | 10,000 subscribers |
|---|---|---|---|
| EmailOctopus Pro | $10 ($108 a year; card: $9/mo billed yearly) | $20 ($216 a year; $18/mo billed yearly) | $44.50 ($480 a year; $40/mo billed yearly) |
| EmailOctopus Free | $0 — free plan covers 0–2,500 subscribers, 10,000 emails a month | — | |
| Mailchimp | Essentials $13 · Standard $20 ($156 · $240 a year) | Not published — calculator only | Premium $350 ($4,200 a year; $3,570 with the 15% twelve-month offer) |
| Kit | $0 at all three — free plan to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited sends, one seat (paid plans from $33/mo billed yearly, $390 a year, above the ceiling) | ||
| Brevo | Starter $9 ($96.96 prepaid) | Starter $9 ($96.96 prepaid) | Starter $9 ($96.96 prepaid) |
| MailerLite | Comfort $12 ($129.60 yearly) | Comfort $33 ($356.40 yearly) | Comfort $89 ($961.20 yearly) |
| GetResponse | No plan under 1,000 subscribers | Starter $29 ($285.36 prepaid) | Starter $79 ($777.36 prepaid) |
| Klaviyo | $20 | $60 | $150 ($1,800 a year; no annual rate published) |
| Omnisend | Standard $16 | Standard $44 | Standard $132 (no annual rate published) |
| ActiveCampaign | Publishes four prices at the 1,000-contact band only — Starter $15, Plus $49, Pro $79, Enterprise $145, all billed yearly; no figures at any other size | ||
Read the footnotes before the table. At exactly 2,500 subscribers EmailOctopus's free plan still applies — the first Pro bill arrives at subscriber 2,501. Brevo's $9 holds at all three sizes because it bills email volume, not contacts, and automation waits for its $18 Standard plan. GetResponse's empty first cell is ladder design — its cheapest paid band is 1,000 subscribers. And EmailOctopus's $9 card price is the annually billed monthly equivalent of its 0–500 band: $9 × 12 is $108, which is exactly what the plan data prints.
The free tier is where EmailOctopus's ladder is most generous. Starter's 2,500-subscriber ceiling is ten times Mailchimp's, MailerLite's and Klaviyo's 250-contact caps, and its 10,000-email allowance supports exactly four sends to a full 2,500-name list every month — enough for a weekly newsletter with a sending to spare. The trade is on the account, not the ceiling: EmailOctopus branding rides on every campaign, reports are retained for 30 days instead of forever, the account holds one user, and building is capped at one landing page and one form.
Crossing the ceiling is the first bill of the ladder, and it lands hard: subscriber 2,501 moves the account to the 2,501–5,000 band, $31.50 a month on monthly billing or $336 a year billed annually — from $0 to $336 in one step. That is the steepest possible percentage increase a ladder can produce, and it is worth pricing against the alternative: the same 2,500-name list on MailerLite's yearly rate already costs $356.40, so the free-plan buyer who outgrows EmailOctopus lands within $20.40 a year of the rival bill they were avoiding. For a list that will sit at 2,500 or below, though, the $0 ceiling is the strongest in the category this side of Kit — and our free-plan guide prices how the two compare cap by cap.
The billing toggle advertises "Save 10%," and the printed totals mostly honor it with rounding drift: the annual bill runs from 10.0% to 11.1% below twelve monthly payments depending on the band, because EmailOctopus rounds its annual price points to clean figures. At the 0–500 band the arithmetic is exact — $10 monthly bills $120 a year against $108 on annual, the "Save $12" on the card. At 501–1,000 the saving is $18 a year ($162 against $144, 11.1%); at 1,001–2,500 it is $24 ($240 against $216); at 2,501–5,000 it is $42 ($378 against $336); at 7,501–10,000 it is $54 ($534 against $480, 10.1%). The top band saves $1,776 a year ($17,736 against $15,960), back to an exact 10%.
Two mechanical notes. First, the annual bill is charged as one lump sum — $108 at the bottom band, $216 at 2,500, $480 at 10,000 — so the cash-flow hit arrives in month one, not spread across the year. Second, the saving sits inside the billing cycle rather than behind a promotion: there is no first-term teaser to re-price at month thirteen, and no published expiry, which puts EmailOctopus's discount in the structural camp alongside AWeber's ten-payments arithmetic rather than Mailchimp's twelve-month offer or GetResponse's first-term 30%. Our annual-vs-monthly guide prices the whole category's prepay spread, which runs 0% to 18%.
EmailOctopus's plan data attaches an email allowance to every band, and it follows a simple rule: roughly 10× the subscriber count, floored at 10,000 a month — 10,000 emails at 0–500 and again at 501–1,000, 25,000 at 1,001–2,500, 50,000 at 2,501–5,000, 100,000 at 7,501–10,000, and 5,000,000 at the top published band. AWeber prints its 10×/12× multiplier in a rate-table column; EmailOctopus embeds the same idea in its plan data. The consequence is the same on both ladders: the price and the sending ceiling move together. A 2,500-subscriber account on the free plan holds 10,000 emails — four full-list sends. A daily-sending habit against that list needs 75,000 a month, which prices at the 7,501–10,000 band regardless of the subscriber count. Check your actual monthly volume against the allowance before picking a band, not after; a list that sends weekly costs a third of a daily-sending list of the same size.
EmailOctopus's own FAQ is unusually direct about the mechanism: "If your list grows beyond your current plan, we'll move you up to the plan that fits your new contact size. We'll send you an email when this happens, so nothing comes as a surprise." Nothing comes as a surprise, in other words, because the vendor announces the step — but the step itself still bills. The printed ladder makes each one checkable: subscriber 501 takes the bill from $10 to $13.50 a month (+35%), subscriber 1,001 from $13.50 to $20 (+48%), subscriber 2,501 from $20 to $31.50 (+57.5%, the steepest step on the ladder), subscriber 5,001 from $31.50 to $38 (+20.6%), subscriber 7,501 from $38 to $44.50 (+17.1%), and subscriber 10,001 from $44.50 to $60 (+35%, $648 a year). The steps then soften as the bands widen — $78 at 15,000, $94.50 at 20,000, about +19% at 25,000 — until they flatten to roughly 4% per band near 500,000.
The unit economics fall faster than most ladders we have read: $20.00 per thousand subscribers at the 0–500 band, $8.00 at 2,500, $4.45 at 10,000 and $2.96 at the top band. That is the reward for tolerating the small-band steps — and the reason the bill at 10,000 subscribers, $44.50 a month, undercuts every paid contact-band ladder we have verified at that size: MailerLite $89, GetResponse $79, Klaviyo $150, Omnisend $132, AWeber $100, Mailchimp Premium $350. Where your list sits between band lines determines how much of that advantage you actually collect, which is the same arithmetic we walk through at the 1,000-subscriber mark — the one size where every contact-band vendor publishes a figure.
The pricing page carries a line most comparisons miss: "Looking for our Amazon SES product? Switch to our EmailOctopus Connect pricing." Connect is a second product line with its own pricing page and its own copy of the same 44 subscriber bands — $9 to $645 a month on monthly billing, $96 to $6,960 a year on annual, plus the same free tier to 2,500 subscribers. The discount against the main ladder widens with size: 10% below at 500 subscribers ($9 against $10), 15% at 2,500 ($17 against $20), 24.7% at 10,000 ($33.50 against $44.50), 43.8% at 50,000 ($100 against $178) and 56.4% at the top band ($645 against $1,478).
Cheap is not the same as interchangeable. Connect is the product EmailOctopus built on Amazon SES for a different sending profile, and the choice between the two ladders is a product decision, not a discount decision: a buyer who compares the main page's $44.50 against a rival without noticing the $33.50 next door is pricing the wrong product for their needs, and a buyer who moves to Connect for the savings without matching its feature set to how they send will price that mistake later. We treat the two ladders as the vendor publishes them — printed in full, both cycles — and leave the product match to the buyer's own sending pattern. The broader lesson recurs across this category: the charges that arrive after checkout are rarely on the sticker, and here the divergence is not a fee at all but a second price list most buyers never scroll to.
Who it does fit: price-sensitive SMBs with a list between 2,501 and 100,000 subscribers that sends weekly rather than daily — at every one of those sizes the bill undercuts every paid contact-band ladder we have verified — and nonprofits, whose 20% lifetime discount compounds with the cheapest ladder in the set.
Every EmailOctopus figure in this piece comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read October 9, 2026: the 44-band Pro ladder with both billing cycles, the free-plan terms, the send allowances attached to each band, the Connect ladder on its own pricing page, and the FAQ's automatic-upgrade language. The rivals in the table carry their own verification dates, listed at the top of this page; where a vendor publishes no figure — Mailchimp above 500 contacts on Essentials and Standard, ActiveCampaign beyond 1,000 contacts — we leave the cell empty rather than estimate it. How we read ladders instead of stickers is on the record at our pricing methodology page. The cross-vendor material sits in our verified bills against Mailchimp at the same three sizes, and the list-size cost calculator prices your own subscriber count from 500 to 30,000 across the ladders we have read, leaving unpublished bands blank. MailerLite, the second-cheapest fully published ladder at most sizes, is read band by band in our MailerLite pricing guide.
The Pro plan bills $10 a month on monthly billing, or $108 a year on annual billing — $9 a month equivalent, which is the band the page's $9 card price describes. The free Starter plan still costs $0 up to 2,500 subscribers, so a 500-subscriber list can pay nothing. Pro's send allowance at that band is 10,000 emails a month.
The toggle advertises Save 10%, and the printed totals run 10.0–11.1% off twelve monthly payments depending on the band: $12 a year at the 500 band ($120 against $108), $24 at 2,500 ($240 against $216), $54 at 10,000 ($534 against $480). The annual bill is charged as one lump sum, and the discount is structural — no first-term teaser, no published expiry.
Yes, at every published band. At 10,000 subscribers EmailOctopus Pro bills $44.50 a month ($480 a year) against MailerLite Comfort's $89 ($961.20 yearly), GetResponse Starter's $79 ($777.36 prepaid), Klaviyo's $150 and Mailchimp Premium's $350 ($4,200 a year) — the cheapest paid contact-band bill we have verified at that size. At 2,500 subscribers it is still free; Mailchimp publishes no per-band figure above 500 contacts.
Yes — Starter is free up to 2,500 subscribers with 10,000 emails a month (four full-list sends), the second-highest free ceiling in the category after Kit's 10,000. It carries EmailOctopus branding, 30-day reports, one user and one landing page and form. There is no free trial; the FAQ points evaluators at the free plan. The first bill arrives at subscriber 2,501: $31.50 a month monthly, or $336 a year billed annually.
The vendor's own FAQ says the account is moved up automatically, with an email notification. The printed steps are steepest at the small bands: +35% at subscriber 501 ($10 to $13.50), +48% at 1,001 ($13.50 to $20), +57.5% at 2,501 ($20 to $31.50), +35% at 10,001 ($44.50 to $60), flattening to about 4% per band near 500,000.
Connect is EmailOctopus's second product line, built on Amazon SES, with the same 44 bands priced lower: $9 to $645 a month on monthly billing against the main ladder's $10 to $1,478 — 24.7% below at 10,000 subscribers ($33.50 against $44.50) and 56.4% below at the top band ($645 against $1,478). It is a different product, not a discount on the same one: match what each line includes to how you send before comparing on price.