Free Email Marketing Software: What Each Free Plan Allows

The most generous free email marketing software we found is Sender, whose free plan covers 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month; EmailOctopus matches the 2,500-subscriber cap with 10,000 emails. Both put their branding on your emails, and both are good enough to run a small business's email properly — they are free plans, not trials.

Everything on this page was read on each vendor's pricing page on 22 September 2026. Free plans pay us nothing when you sign up, and several of the tools below pay nothing even if you later upgrade. We list them because for a small list, free is often the right answer.

The free plans side by side

Five marketing platforms we looked at offer a free plan, and they differ most in the two numbers that matter: how many contacts you may keep and how many emails you may send each month.

• Sender Free Forever: up to 2,500 subscribers and 15,000 emails a month, one seat, Sender branding. Automation, landing pages, forms and popups are included.
• EmailOctopus Free: 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, EmailOctopus branding, reports kept for 30 days, one landing page and one form, one user.
• Benchmark Free: up to 500 contacts and 2,500 sends a month, one user, one domain.
• MailerLite Free: up to 250 subscribers and 2,500 monthly emails, two seats, three automations. We compare its limits but do not review or link it here.
• Brevo Free: up to 300 emails a day once Brevo approves the account for sending. Brevo sizes plans by emails sent, so the cap is on sending rather than on list size.

Mailchimp also has a free plan. On 22 September 2026 its pricing page gave two different contact limits for it in two places, so we print neither; read the page on the day you sign up.

Which free plan fits which business

Match the free plan to your list size first and your sending rhythm second. A 2,000-person list emailed twice a month needs 4,000 sends, which fits Sender and EmailOctopus, and Brevo if each campaign can trickle out over seven days at 300 a day — but not Benchmark or MailerLite, whose free plans stop at 500 and 250 contacts.

• Up to 250 contacts: any of the five.
• 250 to 500 contacts: Sender, EmailOctopus, Benchmark or Brevo.
• 500 to 2,500 contacts: Sender or EmailOctopus, or Brevo if your sends fit its daily cap.
• More than 2,500 contacts: only Brevo, whose free plan is sized by daily sends rather than list size — confirm its current contact terms when you sign up. Everyone else wants a paid plan.

Brevo's daily cap is the one to model carefully. At 300 emails a day, a single campaign to 1,500 people takes five days to go out in full.

What "free" costs you

Every free plan here is paid for in something other than money, and it is worth knowing which currency. The four most common are branding, seats, report history and capped extras.

Branding. Sender, EmailOctopus and MailerLite put their name in your email footer on the free plan. For a local shop that rarely matters; for a consultancy sending proposals to buyers, it can.

Seats. Most free plans give one login. If a colleague needs access, you share a password (which you should not) or upgrade.

Report history. EmailOctopus keeps free-plan reports for 30 days; Pro keeps them indefinitely. If you want to compare this December with last December, you need the paid plan or your own spreadsheet.

Limits on the extras. EmailOctopus Free allows one landing page and one form; MailerLite Free three automations. Check that the one feature you rely on is not the capped one.

Platforms with a trial instead of a free plan

Three well-known platforms show no free plan on their pricing pages, only a trial. That is not a mark against them — it just means the first month is an evaluation, not a way of running your email.

• GetResponse: 14-day trial, no card required. Our top pick for most small businesses when they are ready to pay.
• AWeber: 14-day trial; the pricing page's plan cards show no free tier.
• Moosend: 30-day trial, no card required, the longest of the three.

When to stop using a free plan

Upgrade when a limit starts to shape your marketing rather than the other way round. Three signals are reliable: you are about to cross the contact cap, you are rationing campaigns to stay under the send cap, or you need a feature the free plan withholds.

When you get there, the jump is not large. On 22 September 2026, Sender's Standard plan cost $9 a month for 500 subscribers and $15 for 1,000 on monthly billing, and EmailOctopus Pro cost $10 and $13.50. At 5,000 subscribers they were $39 and $31.50. For the full comparison across seven platforms, see the best email marketing software, ranked and priced.

Free sending for receipts and app mail

If what you need to send is order confirmations, password resets or alerts rather than campaigns, you want a transactional service, and some of those have free tiers too. MailerSend's free plan allows 500 emails a month through its email API and SMTP relay, and Brevo includes transactional sending on every plan, the free one included.

Do not route marketing campaigns through a transactional free tier to dodge a marketing plan's limits: you lose unsubscribe handling, which the law requires. Our comparison of an ESP versus an SMTP relay explains the split.

Setting up a free plan properly

A free plan deserves the same setup as a paid one, because the receiving mail services do not know what you pay. Send from your own domain, add the SPF and DKIM records your platform gives you, and keep the unsubscribe link in every campaign.

Google's published sender guidelines ask every sender to Gmail addresses to authenticate with SPF or DKIM and to keep the spam rate reported in its Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Postmaster Tools is free and pays us nothing. In the US, CAN-SPAM's rules — a postal address, a working opt-out, opt-outs honoured within 10 business days — apply to a free-plan email exactly as to any other.

Our free-plan picks

For most small businesses starting from zero, Sender's free plan is the one to try first: the highest email allowance of the five, with automation included. EmailOctopus is the close alternative if you prefer its editor or plan to grow into its Pro plan, which was the cheapest monthly bill in our price table at every list size we checked. Brevo is the free option for a large list you email rarely, and Benchmark suits a very small list that only needs one-off campaigns.

If your list is already beyond free territory, the guide to email marketing for small business covers what to set up on a paid plan.