Free alternatives to Kit

MailerLite is the like-for-like swap for a creator. It sells paid newsletter subscriptions and digital products through Stripe, builds landing pages and forms, and has the best-designed editor in the budget tier, with templates that look right before you touch them. The free plan is where it loses badly: 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with 3 signup forms, 3 active automations and 1 landing page (as of July 2026). Comfort is $12 a month for 500 subscribers, Power $25.

• Free plan, paid from $12/month (as of July 2026)
• Lithuania

Best for:

Creators who will pay a small amount for a nicer tool with integrations included

The catch:

250 free subscribers against Kit's 10,000 is not a comparison so much as a different plan type. Treat MailerLite's free tier as a trial and budget $12 a month.

Sender fixes Kit's sharpest free-plan gap. Its Free Forever plan includes automation workflows, landing pages, signup forms and popups rather than reserving them, on 2,500 subscribers and up to 15,000 emails a month spendable as a pool (as of July 2026). If the reason you are looking is that one non-branching automation is not enough to run a welcome series properly, this is the cheapest fix on the list, which is to say free. Paid Standard starts around $7 a month.

• Free plan, paid from $7/month (as of July 2026)
• Lithuania

Best for:

Creators who need a proper welcome sequence running without paying $39 a month

The catch:

2,500 subscribers is a quarter of Kit's free allowance and the send pool is finite, so a daily emailer empties it around the middle of the month. Free is also single-seat.

Buttondown is the option for a writer who read the recommendation-slot clause and did not like it. You draft in Markdown, send from your own domain with no vendor badge, and get a hosted archive. It bills on active subscribers rather than every address you hold. Free covers your first 100 subscribers at about one email a day to your full list (as of July 2026), and paid subscriptions are available as a $9 a month add-on. Registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits get 50% off.

• Free plan (as of July 2026)
• United States

Best for:

Solo writers who want a quiet tool and no vendor placements in their newsletter

The catch:

100 free subscribers against Kit's 10,000 is the largest gap on this list, and Buttondown unbundles: analytics, segmentation and paid subscriptions are $9 a month each and automations $29, so a familiar setup stacks up.

EmailOctopus is a deliberately small newsletter tool from a bootstrapped London company, and its free plan gives you campaigns, automation, landing pages and signup forms on 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month (as of July 2026), without holding integrations back. Its distinctive trick is EmailOctopus Connect, which routes sending through your own Amazon SES account at near-wholesale rates. Pro starts at $9 a month billed annually.

• Free plan, paid from $9/month (as of July 2026)
• United Kingdom

Best for:

Newsletter writers who want a plain tool with nothing withheld from the free tier

The catch:

Subscribers and monthly sends are counted separately, so a daily email to a full list hits the 10,000 cap while sitting inside the subscriber limit, and there are no paid-subscription or membership features at any price.

Brevo is the answer when your list has grown past what Kit will hold for nothing. It stores up to 100,000 contacts for free and charges only for emails sent, so list growth never raises your bill by itself. The free plan includes the drag-and-drop builder, signup forms, basic automation, a CRM and transactional sending, at 300 emails a day, about 9,000 a month. Paid Starter begins at $9 a month for 5,000 emails (as of July 2026).

• Free plan, paid from $9/month (as of July 2026)
• France

Best for:

Creators whose list passed 10,000 and who send to it infrequently

The catch:

The sending model inverts Kit's completely: Kit does not meter sends at all, Brevo caps you at 300 a day, so one issue to 10,000 readers is not possible on free. Brevo also has no paid-subscription or digital product features.

If your list is past 10,000 and you would rather not start paying, listmonk is the honest alternative. It is a self-hosted AGPL-3.0 mailing list manager in a single Go binary against Postgres, with no subscriber cap and no send cap, and it is fast enough that the project documents a seven million email campaign on under one CPU core. Nobody puts a badge on your emails and nobody takes a recommendation slot.

• Completely free (as of July 2026)
• India
• Open source (AGPL-3.0)

Best for:

Technical creators with a big list who want no caps and no vendor in the middle

The catch:

listmonk does not deliver mail. You supply and pay an SMTP provider such as Amazon SES, Postmark or Mailgun, plus a small server, and SPF, DKIM, bounces and blocklists become your job. There are also no landing pages and no way to sell a digital product.

Mailchimp is on this list for completeness rather than as a saving. It is the most complete platform in the category, with mature reporting, a very large integration catalogue and genuinely good customer journeys, and it is the obvious move if your creator business has turned into a shop. On the free question it goes the wrong way: 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, capped at 250 a day (as of July 2026), against Kit's 10,000 subscribers and unmetered sending. Essentials starts at $13 a month.

• Free plan, paid from $13/month (as of July 2026)
• United States

Best for:

Creators whose business is now ecommerce and who need store integrations

The catch:

You pay for every contact, unsubscribed and inactive included, unless you archive them, and the free plan has been cut from 2,000 to 500 to 250, so almost nobody leaves Kit for Mailchimp to save money.