MailerLite Review: the free plan cut, and the rule in its terms

Quick verdict

Figures from mailerlite.com/pricing, MailerLite's plan and billing help documentation, and its Terms of Service, all read in September 2026. MailerLite's price at each subscriber tier did not render to us; see what we could not verify.

The free plan most reviews describe is gone

MailerLite's free plan is the reason it gets recommended to beginners, and it changed materially this year. MailerLite's own update page states that "On June 16, 2026, MailerLite's Free plan was updated to open up access to more tools" — and in the same change, cut the capacity.

First two rows quoted from MailerLite's free plan update page: "Subscriber limit was reduced from 500 to 250 active subscribers" and "Sending limit was reduced from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails." The third row is our arithmetic (12,000 ÷ 500 and 2,500 ÷ 250) and the percentages are ours.

The trade was real: MailerLite unlocked previously paid features on the free tier at the same time — custom templates, blogs, the HTML editor, promotional pop-ups — and raised seats from one to two. Free accounts also get up to 3 automations, 3 forms, 1 landing page, 1 website of up to 5 pages, and 1 digital product.

But read the third row, because it survives the excuse that the list simply got smaller. Even per subscriber, the free plan is 58% less generous than it was. A free MailerLite contact used to be worth 24 emails a month; now they are worth 10. That is a different product, not a smaller version of the same one, and MailerLite applied it across the board — its update page says "All accounts on Free plans are affected by these changes."

The practical consequence is what happens at the ceiling, and it is not what paid users experience. MailerLite states plainly that on free, "Exceeding your feature use limits will not trigger an automatic upgrade." Instead: cross 250 subscribers and "sending campaigns, running automations, and adding subscribers to MailerLite (manually, via API, or through integrations) will be paused"; cross 2,500 emails and "sending campaigns and automation emails will be paused." A free account that outgrows itself stops working until you upgrade or shrink.

How fast you get there depends far more on how often you write than on how many people you have: 2,500 emails is ten sends to a full 250-person list. We work that frequency arithmetic across the beginner tools in our best email marketing tools for beginners comparison.

The affiliate rule is in the terms, not the FAQ

This is the part of a MailerLite review that matters most to anyone building an affiliate site, and it is almost never covered. MailerLite's Terms of Service address it directly, under its own heading:

Quoted verbatim from mailerlite.com/legal/terms-of-service, read twice in September 2026. MailerLite's separate list of prohibited content also names pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing, "get rich quick" schemes, forex and loan services, gambling and weight loss material.

Read carefully, that is a narrower prohibition than the summaries suggest, and the distinction is a useful one. The banned thing is a business model: a mailing whose purpose is to push referral links from several companies in order to earn commission. The permitted thing is a practice: linking out, disclosed, from content that is yours.

Our reading of the wording above applied to common list-building patterns, not a MailerLite-published classification. Borderline cases are MailerLite's call, not ours — ask their support before building a model that depends on the answer.

So the honest answer for most readers of this site is yes: you can run an affiliate content site on MailerLite, because what those sites actually send is original content that links out. What you cannot do is run the list as the affiliate business, where the emails exist to move referral links rather than to say something. If that is the plan, pick a platform that permits it rather than one whose terms name your model — our affiliate marketing basics guide covers the content-first version that stays inside rules like this one.

None of this is unusual, and MailerLite is not being unreasonable — most reputable platforms carry a similar clause to protect deliverability on shared infrastructure. What is unusual is how legibly MailerLite states it, so you can read the line before you commit. We since read the equivalent clause at five other platforms and MailerLite is the clearest of them: Kit is the only one that publishes a ratio, Mailchimp lists affiliate marketing among businesses it may not allow, and GetResponse publishes no affiliate restriction at all. The side-by-side is in which email tools actually allow affiliate links.

You are approved before you can send

MailerLite reviews new accounts before letting them send campaigns. Its terms state: "If you comply with our rules then we will approve your account and you'll receive an email notification. If something looks suspicious then you might receive a disapproval email."

The order of operations is what to notice. Approval sits between signing up and sending, not between signing up and building — so it is entirely possible to design a form, write a lead magnet, build a landing page and draft a welcome sequence, and only then find you cannot mail any of it. Get approved first, then build. Signing up and completing the profile costs nothing on day one.

Two things reportedly affect the outcome, neither confirmable on a MailerLite page: sending from your own domain rather than free webmail, and being able to explain where your list came from. MailerLite's account-creation help notes that a Gmail or other free-domain address carries limitations without stating a hard requirement, and asks that "all subscribers added to your account have willingly signed up to your email list." Rejections are widely reported among senders with imported lists or thin profiles; we have not measured that and state no rate.

How the bill actually moves

MailerLite prices on subscribers, not sends, and three mechanics in its billing documentation change what that costs in practice. None appears on the pricing page.

1. Only Active contacts are billable. MailerLite states that the subscriber limit is based on "the number of unique subscribers with the Active status in your account" and that "Unsubscribed and Bounced contacts don't count toward your limit." An unconfirmed signup is not billable either, because "a subscriber's status does not become Active until they have confirmed their subscription" — so running double opt-in keeps unconfirmed addresses off the invoice as well as off the send.

2. The count is cumulative, so cleaning your list is always a next-cycle saving. This is the mechanic most likely to surprise you: "any email address that was Active at any point during the cycle counts toward your subscriber limit, even if it is deleted later." MailerLite's own example is that subscribers deleted on April 1, with an April 5 billing date, keep counting until April 4. Your bill tracks the high-water mark of the cycle, not where you finished it. Prune before the cycle starts, not when the invoice appears.

3. Overage behaves in opposite directions depending on which plan you are on.

Both rows from MailerLite's plan and billing documentation: on paid plans "the system will calculate a pro-rated amount based on the new monthly cost and the time remaining in the current billing cycle"; on free, "exceeding your feature use limits will not trigger an automatic upgrade."

Neither behaviour is wrong, but they are opposite failure modes and it is worth knowing which one you are exposed to. A viral post on a paid plan quietly raises next month's bill; the same post on free stops your welcome automation mid-sequence. And the two mechanics interact on the way back down: downgrading to free requires getting under 250 active subscribers, which — because the count is cumulative — you cannot do by deleting contacts in the cycle you want to downgrade.

On price itself, MailerLite publishes Comfort "starting $12/month" and Power "starting $25/month", with annual billing marked "Save 10%" — by our arithmetic $129.60 a year, or $10.80 a month, for Comfort at its floor. Enterprise is custom above 200,000 subscribers. Comfort's send allowance is described as "10× the ceiling of your subscriber tier each month" and Power as "unlimited monthly emails, subject to our fair use policy," which makes Power the plan for anyone mailing daily rather than a tier you grow into.

Who it fits

Use MailerLite if you have a small list, you want automation early without paying creator-platform prices, and what you send is your own content. The $12 entry point is roughly a third of Kit's $39, and for a beginner who needs a welcome sequence on day one that gap is the whole argument.

Look elsewhere if any of three things is true. You mail daily — that is a Power plan from the start, not a Comfort plan later. You want the free tier to hold a large list while you grow — 250 is not that, and Kit's free plan holds 10,000. Or your model is a deals digest built on other companies' referral links, which its terms name directly.

One category MailerLite does not compete in at all is charging readers directly; for paid subscriptions the economics are a different question, costed out in Substack vs beehiiv vs Ghost. And if the list does not exist yet, the platform is the least important decision in front of you — though it is not true, as this page previously said, that nothing binds on an empty account. Google's sender guidelines put authentication and a 0.3% spam rate limit in the list headed "Requirements for all senders", with no volume qualifier, and MailerLite states that emails sent from free domains cannot be authenticated at all. The setup work therefore precedes the first subscriber: the sender rules that bind a small list covers what to do before you send anything.

What we could not verify

• The price at your subscriber count. MailerLite's ladder sits behind an interactive control that has not rendered to us across four separate attempts on two URLs. It gave us "starting $12/month" for Comfort and "starting $25/month" for Power, and those are floors, not the price at 5,000 subscribers. Third parties report Comfort at $12, $19, $33 and $49 for 500, 1,000, 2,500 and 5,000 subscribers, which is consistent with the floor we did verify — but we did not read it at source and do not state it as fact.
• The earlier free plan reduction. MailerLite's own page documents the 500 to 250 step. The step before it — reportedly 1,000 to 500 in late 2025 — comes from third-party reporting only, so the table above starts at the 500 we can source. Reports also describe the June 16 date applying to new signups with existing free accounts moved on July 1; MailerLite's page gives one date and says all free accounts are affected, so we have used that.
• How long approval takes, and how often it fails. MailerLite documents that approval exists and what triggers a disapproval email, but publishes no timeline we could find and no rejection rate. Third parties commonly quote up to a day. Treat the rejection reports in this review as reports.
• Whether a custom sending domain is mandatory. Largely resolved, September 2026. MailerLite's domain authentication help states that "it is required to authenticate your domain if you are using a custom domain for sending", that "new MailerLite accounts can send their first campaigns without authenticating a domain during the 14 day trial period only", and — the operative sentence — that "emails sent from free domains can't be authenticated, which can significantly affect your email deliverability and sender reputation". MailerLite still never writes that you must own a domain, so the word mandatory remains ours rather than theirs; but since Google's all-senders requirements include SPF or DKIM on the sending domain, a gmail.com sending address cannot satisfy them. Treat a domain you own as a prerequisite. Working shown in the sender rules that bind a small list.

Everything here is a September 2026 snapshot of pages that change without announcement. The free plan allowances and the affiliate clause in the Terms of Service are the load-bearing facts — a change to either moves the conclusion, not just a number. Verify both on MailerLite's own pages before you commit.

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