Buttondown is free until your hundred and first reader

40 is the bottom of our Limited band, and the arithmetic is not subtle: generosity scores 22 and feature depth 30, because 100 subscribers is a tenth of what Loops gives away and a twenty-fifth of Sender's allowance, and most of what this category bundles is sold here as an extra.

What lifts the total off the floor is freedom at 68, the best of the small tools in this file. You send from your own domain on free, so there is no vendor footer on your emails, and the paid rate counts active subscribers rather than every dead address you have collected, which is the opposite of the model people leave Mailchimp over. The one string attached is pricing you cannot see in advance, and the pillar reasoning below covers why that costs points.

Free stops in two places (as of July 2026):

• 100 subscribers. After that you are on a paid base rate. This is the constraint, and it is a low one.
• About one email a day to your full list. That assumption sits under every published Buttondown price, free and paid alike. Send more often and Buttondown quotes you usage-based pricing instead, so a product launch week needs a conversation first.

The second set of limits is not a cap at all, it is the pricing model, and it catches people out more often than the subscriber count does. Analytics, tagging and segmentation, paid subscriptions, comments and surveys, RSS-to-email, sponsorships and email attachments are $9 a month each. Archives on a custom domain, multiple newsletters and automations are $29 a month each. Whitelabeling and teams are $79 a month each. Analytics plus segmentation plus automations, which is a setup most tools call standard, is $47 a month on top of your base rate before you have sent anything.

Also absent at any price: landing pages, popups, a visual drag-and-drop builder, and any real ecommerce integration.

Buttondown does not publish a flat per-subscriber rate, so we do not quote one. That is not an oversight on our part: our sourcing rule is that a number has to be verifiable first-party or it does not appear, and the only way to find out what your list costs is to run your own subscriber count through Buttondown's pricing page.

What we can describe is the shape. The base rate scales with active subscribers, meaning the people actually receiving your emails rather than every address in the database, so the addresses that quietly stopped opening in 2023 are not billed. That is the single most reader-friendly pricing decision in this category and it is worth saying loudly, because it is the exact mechanism that makes Mailchimp and Kit expensive.

Then the add-ons stack. The $9, $29 and $79 figures are per feature per month, not plan tiers, and they add together in whatever combination you switch on. If you only write and send, you pay for almost nothing. If you want what a mid-tier plan elsewhere includes by default, do the sum before you compare against anyone else's headline price. Registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits get 50% off.

The thing people pay for first is simply passing 100 subscribers.

No, and our answer is taster. A newsletter tool whose free plan ends at 100 readers exists to let you find out whether you enjoy writing a newsletter, not to run one. That is a legitimate thing for it to be, and Buttondown is honest about it, but it is not a free plan you settle into.

Who genuinely lives here: someone launching a personal newsletter to friends and a few readers, a developer sending release notes to a small audience, anyone testing whether the Markdown-and-custom-domain approach suits them before committing. That first hundred is a real product with no vendor branding, which is more than most tasters give you.

Who cannot: anyone with an audience already, since the ceiling arrives in weeks. Anyone who needs analytics or segmentation, both of which are paid extras rather than free features. Anyone sending more than about once a day. And any team, because teams are a $79 a month add-on.

If you want the same writer-first feel with room to grow, EmailOctopus's free plan is 2,500 subscribers of the same basic job, and Sender's free plan adds automation for nothing. Free Buttondown alternatives ranks them, and the best free email marketing tools covers the whole category.