The shortlist is Kit for the largest free subscriber ceiling at 10,000 subscribers, Nitrosend because contacts are unlimited on every tier including the free one and the billing follows the send, and MailerLite for the least friction importing, tagging and segmenting a list. Our users sent a billion emails to 72 million subscribers in the last year, so most of what follows is about what happens to a list at size.
The short version
- The biggest free ceiling. Kit, free up to 10,000 subscribers.
- You never want to pay for holding contacts. Nitrosend. Contacts are unlimited on every tier, including the free one, and billing follows the send.
- The cleanest list management. MailerLite. Segments, forms and imports with the least friction.
- A huge list you mail occasionally. Brevo. Priced on emails sent, with no contact cap on the free plan.
- You already run it. Mailchimp, which bills on total contacts and keeps billing for unsubscribed ones until you archive them by hand.
If what you are really choosing is where the campaign goes out from rather than where the list lives, the email blast platform rankings cover the sending side, and the newsletter platform rankings cover a list that is an audience.
The two things called a mailing list provider
Search this term and you get two industries in one result page. One half is email marketing platforms holding subscribers who opted in. The other half is data providers selling direct mail lists, consumer records and B2B prospect databases, priced by the record.
They are not substitutes, and the second one is not an input to the first.
A purchased or rented list is not a mailing list in the sense any platform here means. Sending marketing email to it is a different legal question, covered on the email marketing laws page, and it is a different technical question too. Even a genuine business can torch a shared sending IP with a list that is stale or was never consent-collected, and once that happens it affects the mail your customers actually asked for. Cold outreach runs on separate domains, separate mailboxes and separate volumes for exactly this reason. Nitrosend does not do cold outbound at all, so if a bought list is the plan, none of the five platforms below is the right tool, ours included.
The second thing worth knowing before you pick a provider is that your list is smaller than the number in your dashboard. On a recent export from our own platform of 197,745 contacts, 174,515 were mailable and 23,230 were not: 15,483 with no email address on file, 5,556 bounced, 1,155 on hard-bounce suppression, 839 soft-bounce, 191 complaints and 6 unsubscribed. That is just under 12% of a list, about one contact in nine, that a per-contact platform would have been billing for. Ask what a provider counts before you ask what it charges.
How they compare
Scores are out of 10 against criteria whose weights add to 100. They are published in full at the bottom of this page, so you can disagree with a weight and re-rank the table yourself.
A note on vocabulary, because it decides whether a segment is billable and whether it can be sent to at all. A list, a segment and a saved view are three different objects. We grouped our own glossary by where terms appear in the dashboard for that reason, and it says plainly that a saved view is only a filter on the contacts table and cannot be sent to. Most support tickets about "my segment did not send" are this distinction.
We make Nitrosend. It moved to first on this list in September 2026, and the criterion that moved it is the founding-team one, on which it scores highest of the five platforms here. That criterion is scored on the same four questions for every vendor, the workings are published at the bottom of this page, and if you weight it at zero the platform at the top of this table is Kit.
Mailing list providers compared
Checked| Platform | Rank | Best for | Pricing model | Free tier | From | At 10k contacts | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nitrosend Agent-native | 1 | Unlimited contacts | per send | 8,000 emails to start, then 500 a month | $20/mo | n/a | 9.2 |
| Kit | 2 | Free to 10,000 | per contact | Free up to 10,000 subscribers | $33/mo | n/a | 8.1 |
| Brevo | 3 | Huge list, rare sends | per send | 300 emails a day, unlimited contacts | $9/mo | n/a | 7.7 |
| MailerLite | 4 | Cleanest management | per contact | 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month | $12/mo | $89/mo (Comfort) | 7.2 |
| Mailchimp | 5 | Familiar, costly | per contact | 250 contacts, max 500 emails/mo or 250/day | $13/mo | $135/mo (Standard) | 6.6 |
1. Nitrosend
Best for: anyone whose list is large, old, or mailed rarely, and who wants an agent to manage it.
Contacts are unlimited on every tier including the free one, so the cost of holding a list is zero and the bill follows what you send. For the reader on this page that is usually the whole argument. A list of 80,000 lapsed customers costs nothing to keep and nothing to segment, and you pay only when you mail some of them.
Management is built to be driven by software. You connect Claude, Codex or Cursor over MCP and ask for the import, the segment, the suppression or the export. The MCP server exposes 28 nitro_* tools, and API, MCP and CLI access are on every plan including the free one. Lists carry their counts where you select them, so you can see what you are about to send to before you send it.
The protection is deliberate and some people will find it annoying. A list upload above roughly 20,000 subscribers and a first campaign of 20,000 recipients or more are held for a person to look at rather than going straight out. You can still press send. Somebody just checks the send before it leaves.
Where it loses: the free plan sends only to 100 / 500 / 5,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Free Probation / Standard / Trusted, which is a real limit on a big list, and paid starts at $20 a month for 20,000 emails, checked 7 September 2026. There are no on-site popups and no browse abandonment, which a store gets from a dedicated e-commerce platform. There is no inbound email parsing over REST. And we do not sell or supply lists, so this is a place to keep the list you built. Against the platform most large lists arrive from, we keep a Nitrosend and Mailchimp comparison.
- Nitrosend at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- anyone whose list is large, old or mailed rarely, and who wants an agent to manage it
- Pricing model
- per send
- Free tier
- 8,000 emails to start, then 500 a month
- Entry paid plan
- $20/mo (20,000 emails a month, 5 brands, 3 domains, up to 1,000 / 10,000 / 100,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Pro Probation / Standard / Trusted)
- At 100,000 emails a month
- $100/mo (Ultra)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- yes
- First-party MCP server
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Support
- Help center: docs.nitrosend.com
- Developer docs
- API documentation: docs.nitrosend.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing
- Founding team
- George Hartley and Kam Low ran SmartrMail, an email and SMS platform whose buyer Relay Commerce still operates it and publicly lists more than 8,000 brands on it. Kam Low's open-source record runs from 2009 under the Sourcey organisation. All three founders are in post.
- Founding team score
- 9.25 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- First-party MCP server, a listed app in the ChatGPT app marketplace, and Brand Kit (automatic on-brand email design generation from a scraped brand) -- all three verified.
- AI-native score
- 10 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Free plan sends to only 100 / 500 / 5,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Free Probation / Standard / Trusted
- Uploads and first sends above roughly 20,000 are held for review
- No on-site popups or browse-abandonment tracking
- No inbound email parsing over REST
- Facts checked
2. Kit
Best for: a writer or creator who wants somewhere free to keep a list that is still growing.
Free up to 10,000 subscribers, which is the largest free ceiling on this page by a wide margin, with tagging and automation that hold up as the list grows. If the list is an audience rather than a customer database, this is the natural place to keep it and the cheapest place to keep it for a long time.
Not built for store data, no SMS, and the paid Creator plan is priced from 1,000 subscribers, which overlaps confusingly with the free ceiling. Read the live plan page before you assume where the free tier ends.
- Kit at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- a writer or creator who wants somewhere free to keep a list that is still growing
- Pricing model
- per contact
- Free tier
- Free up to 10,000 subscribers
- Entry paid plan
- $33/mo (1,000 email subscribers, $390 billed yearly)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- no
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Owner
- Kit (formerly ConvertKit)
- Support
- Help center: help.kit.com
- Developer docs
- API documentation: developers.kit.com
- Status page
- System status: status.kit.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: kit.com/pricing
- Founding team
- Nathan Barry founded Kit in 2013, took no venture capital and is still chief executive. No engineering reputation attached to a named person.
- Founding team score
- 6.25 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- Not independently assessed for MCP/agent access, on-brand design generation, or ChatGPT marketplace listing in this comparison.
- AI-native score
- 2 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Not built for store data
- No SMS
- The paid plan is priced from 1,000 subscribers, overlapping the free ceiling
- Facts checked
3. Brevo
Best for: a very large list mailed once or twice a month.
Brevo prices on emails sent rather than contacts stored, and its free plan puts no cap on contacts at all, allowing 300 emails a day. For a business holding a decade of records, that model is the right way round and the bill is a fraction of a per-contact platform at the same list size.
The trade is enforcement. Brevo publishes hard bounce and complaint thresholds, acts on them quickly, and the account reporting goes away with the account, which takes the diagnostics you would need to work out which addresses were the problem. The Brevo alternatives page has the detail.
- Brevo at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- a very large list mailed once or twice a month
- Pricing model
- per send
- Free tier
- 300 emails a day, unlimited contacts
- Entry paid plan
- $9/mo (from 5,000 emails a month)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- yes
- First-party MCP server
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- yes
- Owner
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue, independent)
- Support
- Help center: help.brevo.com
- Developer docs
- API documentation: developers.brevo.com
- Status page
- System status: status.brevo.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: brevo.com/pricing
- Founding team
- Armand Thiberge founded Brevo in 2012 and is still chief executive, though ownership is now heavily institutional after the December 2025 round.
- Founding team score
- 5.75 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- Has a first-party MCP server for agent-callable access, but no verified on-brand automatic design generation (Brand Kit-style) or ChatGPT app marketplace listing.
- AI-native score
- 4 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Suspends fast on published thresholds and the reporting goes with the account
- Automation depth is limited
- Support is thin at the bottom tiers
- Facts checked
4. MailerLite
Best for: managing a modest list cleanly, with forms and landing pages included.
The least friction of anything here for importing, tagging and segmenting a list under about 10,000 subscribers, with signup forms and landing pages included so the list can grow without a website behind it.
Two limits. The free plan is 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, cut from 500 and 12,000, and sending locks once active subscribers pass 250. And the free plan excludes API and MCP sending, which its own pricing page states, so a free account cannot be managed by software end to end.
- MailerLite at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- managing a modest list cleanly, with forms and landing pages included
- Pricing model
- per contact
- Free tier
- 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month
- Entry paid plan
- $12/mo (up to 500 subscribers, 5,000 monthly emails, 3 user seats, 24/7 email support)
- At 10,000 contacts
- $89/mo (Comfort)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- no
- First-party MCP server
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Support
- Help center: mailerlite.com/help
- Developer docs
- API documentation: developers.mailerlite.com
- Status page
- System status: status.mailerlite.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: mailerlite.com/pricing
- Founding team
- No founder is named on any first-party source. Vercom S.A., listed in Warsaw, acquired MailerLite in 2022 for 90 million dollars.
- Founding team score
- 2.75 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- Not independently assessed for MCP/agent access, on-brand design generation, or ChatGPT marketplace listing in this comparison.
- AI-native score
- 2 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Free plan stops at 250 subscribers and locks sending above it
- API and MCP sending are paid-plan only
- Automation branches stay shallow
- Facts checked
5. Mailchimp
Best for: a list that is already there and a team that does not want to move it.
The largest template library and the widest integration list in email marketing, and a product most people have already used. If the list is small and someone in the business runs it competently, staying put is defensible.
The billing is not. Mailchimp charges on total contacts, including unsubscribed contacts until they are manually archived, so a list that is mostly dormant costs the same as one that is fully engaged. A six-figure list emailed once a month is the worst case for that model. If that is the shape of your bill, the Mailchimp alternatives page is the specific version of this one.
- Mailchimp at a glance
- Verified on the vendor's own pages
- Best for
- a list that is already there and a team that does not want to move it
- Pricing model
- per contact
- Free tier
- 250 contacts, max 500 emails/mo or 250/day
- Entry paid plan
- $13/mo (0-500 contacts, monthly email sends 10x contacts, 3 seats, 3 audiences, up to 4 flow steps)
- At 10,000 contacts
- $135/mo (Standard)
- Transactional API
- yes
- Marketing campaigns
- yes
- Automation flows
- yes
- SMS
- yes
- Inbound email parsing
- no
- Owner
- Intuit
- Support
- Help center: mailchimp.com/help
- Developer docs
- API documentation: mailchimp.com/developer
- Status page
- System status: status.mailchimp.com
- Pricing page
- Current pricing: mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing
- Founding team
- Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius bootstrapped Mailchimp from 2001 to a twelve billion dollar sale to Intuit in 2021. Chestnut stepped down in 2022 and an Intuit senior vice president runs it.
- Founding team score
- 4.25 of 10 on the founding-team criterion
- AI-native capability
- Not independently verified for MCP/agent access in this comparison; no on-brand automatic design generation or ChatGPT app marketplace listing found in a light spot-check.
- AI-native score
- 2 of 10 on the AI-native criterion
- Limitations
- Bills on total contacts, including unsubscribed ones until archived
- Free plan is 250 contacts and 500 emails a month
- Dormant contacts cost the same as engaged ones
- Facts checked
Should I buy a mailing list?
No, if the plan is to send marketing email to it. Bought and rented lists are sold by data providers for direct mail and for sales prospecting, and those are different activities under different rules. Sending campaign email to people who never gave you permission produces complaints, and complaints follow your domain rather than the list, so the damage lands on the mail your real customers asked for. If the goal is B2B prospecting, that belongs in dedicated outbound infrastructure on separate domains, which is not what any platform on this page is for and not something we offer.
How many contacts am I actually paying for?
Fewer than you think you have, and more than you should be. Per-contact platforms bill on stored records, which includes people who bounced, complained, or have no valid address at all. The export above, from our own platform, showed 23,230 of 197,745 records unmailable, and on a per-contact plan every one of those was billable. Before you compare prices, export your list, count what is genuinely mailable, and check whether unsubscribed contacts still count on your current plan. Then run the email blacklist checker over what is left.
Should I send from my own domain?
Yes, and it is worth the extra step even for a small list. Sending from your own domain rather than a shared platform domain improves deliverability and makes the mail read as being from you rather than from a tool. It also means the sending reputation you build belongs to you, so changing providers later costs you a warm-up rather than a reset. Most providers support a custom sending domain on their paid plans. The email authentication page has the records you need.
Moving a mailing list between providers
- Export contacts and engagement history together. Addresses alone leave you unable to tell who is safe to mail first.
- Reconcile the counts before you import. Suppression lists, bounced addresses and unsubscribes do not always travel, and re-mailing someone who unsubscribed is the fastest complaint you will ever generate.
- Clean what is left. The email blacklist checker tells you what you are carrying.
- Rebuild segments rather than trusting an import. Email segmentation covers the cuts worth having.
- Warm up on the most engaged people first, then widen. How to warm up an email domain has the ramp.
FAQ
What is a mailing list provider?
Two different things share the name. An email marketing platform stores the subscribers you collected, manages segments and unsubscribes, and sends to them. A data provider sells or rents lists of people you have no relationship with, for direct mail or sales prospecting. This page ranks the first kind, because the second kind is not a source of subscribers for email marketing.
Which provider is cheapest for a large mailing list?
It depends on whether the provider charges for holding the list or for sending to it. Kit is free to 10,000 subscribers. Nitrosend places no limit on contacts on any tier and charges for sends, from $20 a month for 20,000 emails. Brevo also charges on sends. MailerLite and Mailchimp charge on contacts held, so a large dormant list is billed every month whether you mail it or not. Checked 7 September 2026.
Can I keep unlimited contacts on a free plan?
Brevo's free plan has no contact cap and allows 300 emails a day. Nitrosend's free plan has unlimited contacts, an 8,000-email starting budget and then 500 emails a month, with a limit of 100 / 500 / 5,000 recipients per rolling 24 hours for Free Probation / Standard / Trusted and full API, MCP and CLI access. Kit is free to 10,000 subscribers. Mailchimp and MailerLite both stop at 250 contacts on their free plans.
What is the difference between a list, a segment and a saved view?
A list is a container of contacts you send to. A segment is a rule that selects contacts and can be sent to. A saved view is a filter on the contacts table for looking at, and cannot be sent to. Getting this wrong is the most common cause of a campaign going to the wrong number of people, which is why our glossary is organised around where each term appears in the dashboard.
Do mailing list providers protect me from a bad import?
Some do. Nitrosend holds a list upload above roughly 20,000 subscribers and a first campaign of 20,000 recipients or more for a person to review before it sends, and pauses an account above a 2% bounce rate so somebody can investigate. Most platforms enforce after the fact instead, which is the version where the account closes and the reporting closes with it.
Can an AI agent manage my mailing list?
Yes. Nitrosend, MailerLite and Brevo publish first-party MCP servers, so an agent can import, segment, suppress and export without a browser. What it cannot do is give you permission you never collected, so the consent record is still yours to keep.
How this list is ranked
Six criteria, weighted, adding to 100. Every price in the table below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 7 September 2026.
- Cost of holding the list, 26%. What you pay per month for contacts you are not emailing this month.
- List management, 21%. Imports, segments, suppression, and whether the counts in front of you are the counts that get billed.
- Deliverability protection, 17%. Whether the platform stops a bad import before it becomes a bad send.
- Ownership and export, 13%. Whether the list and its engagement history leave with you.
- Agent and API surface, 8%. Whether software can manage the list rather than a person clicking.
- Founding team and track record, 15%. Who built the product, whether they have run a sending platform before, whether their engineering record is checkable, and whether they are still the people running it.
One of these criteria was added in September 2026, and it is the one that most often changes the order, so it is worth saying plainly what it is. Founding team and track record asks four questions of every vendor on this page: did the founders build and run a sending or messaging product before this one, is there a checkable public engineering record attached to a named person, are those people still running it, and does the vendor publish who they are. Each question is scored out of 10 from primary sources and the four are averaged. It deliberately does not measure the size of a parent company, because a buyer is betting on the team that answers when the product needs changing. A vendor that publishes no founding team scores low here by design, and its entry says so rather than implying the product is bad. Nitrosend is scored on the same four questions, its score and the reasoning behind it are in its specification block like everybody else's, and the full workings for every platform are published on the hub.