beehiiv alternatives after the October 2026 price rise: choose by list size, not by feature list

If you publish a newsletter, the beehiiv alternatives worth your time depend on two things: how big your list is and how it earns. beehiiv repriced its plans on October 1, 2026, and existing publishers only feel it at their first renewal on or after November 1 - so most people reading this still have one billing cycle to decide.

Here is what we checked for this post: beehiiv's own pricing page and the pricing pages of five platforms people move to, all read on October 23, 2026, plus the reporting on what changed and who complained. Prices below are list prices at the subscriber bucket we name, in US dollars, and every one of them can change.

What beehiiv costs now, and when the new price hits you

beehiiv renamed its self-serve plans on October 1: Launch became Free, Scale became Lite, and Max became Pro, with Enterprise unchanged, as PPC Land reported on October 8. At the 1,000-subscriber bucket, beehiiv's pricing page shows Lite at $59 a month, or $49 a month billed yearly, and Pro at $109 a month, or $95 billed yearly. Free still covers up to 2,500 subscribers with one seat and one publication.

The increase is steeper further up the list. At 10,000 subscribers, The Verge put Lite at $139 a month, up from $109, and Pro at $239, up from $219 - figures PPC Land carried alongside beehiiv's own page, which showed $119 and $199 at that size with yearly billing switched on. PPC Land notes that beehiiv's page does not show old prices and that the gap between the two sets of figures is unexplained; our reading is that it is a monthly-versus-yearly difference. Either way, price your own bucket on beehiiv's page with the yearly toggle in both positions before you conclude anything about your bill.

Timing matters more than the headline number:

• New customers pay the new rates from October 1, 2026.
• Existing customers keep their current rate until their first renewal on or after November 1, 2026, with at least 30 days' notice for monthly payers.
• Annual subscribers are locked in until the end of their current term.
• An account that grew past its subscriber tier moves to the matching tier, billed from that first renewal on or after November 1.

If you are starting out, the free tier is in our view where beehiiv is hardest to beat: its page lists unlimited posts and unlimited email sends on Free, with one sender address, a basic site builder without a custom domain, and podcast downloads capped at 5,000 a month. A newsletter below 2,500 subscribers has no bill to compare, and the switching question only arrives with the custom domain, the second seat or the ad network.

Two things moved in publishers' favor. beehiiv's top self-serve plan now reaches 250,000 subscribers rather than stopping at 100,000, per the same PPC Land summary, and the ad network is included on Lite, Pro and Enterprise. Seat counts went the other way: beehiiv's page lists 2 seats on Lite and 10 on Pro.

In our view the publishers with a real decision to make are the ones under roughly 10,000 subscribers who do not sell paid subscriptions and do not earn meaningfully from sponsorships. They are paying a bundle price for a newsletter, a website, a podcast host and an ad marketplace while using one of them. The named complaints in PPC Land's piece run the same way: one journalist wrote on Bluesky that "the sponsor choices and ad rates have tanked," and another said the rise landed before the growth features he was waiting on.

beehiiv alternatives at a glance

Upfynd lists 140 products in Email & Newsletters as of October 2026, so this is a shortlist, not a survey. We picked these five because each one answers a different reason to leave beehiiv.

Kit's free plan covers 10,000 subscribers, with real restrictions

Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is free up to 10,000 subscribers, according to its pricing page - the number we would start from, because it covers the list size where beehiiv's Lite plan now costs $139 a month by The Verge's figures. The catch is real: the free plan allows one user and excludes visual automations, email sequences and RSS campaigns, keeps Kit branding on your emails, and limits A/B testing to two subject lines.

Kit's page shows Creator at $33 a month on the yearly rate at 1,000 subscribers ($390 billed yearly) and Pro at $50 a month for the first year, discounted from $66 and renewing at the standard rate. If you sell digital products or paid subscriptions through Kit, its page lists a 3.5% + 30¢ transaction fee inclusive of card processing.

Skip it if your newsletter depends on automated sequences and you cannot pay for Creator: sequences are precisely what the free plan withholds.

MailerLite suits you if the newsletter is one of several emails you send

MailerLite prices on subscribers and send volume, starting at $12 a month for Comfort and $25 for Power, with yearly billing saving 10%, per its pricing page. Comfort's monthly email allowance is 10× the ceiling of your subscriber tier, which is generous for a weekly newsletter and tight for daily sends to a large list.

The free plan is much smaller than beehiiv's or Kit's: 250 subscribers, 2,500 emails a month, two seats, three active automations of five steps each, and knowledge-base support only. MailerLite's draw is breadth - forms, landing pages, a website builder and automations in the same account - so it fits a small business whose newsletter sits beside onboarding and campaign email.

Skip it if you want sponsorship revenue: MailerLite's pricing page lists no ad marketplace of the kind beehiiv bundles.

Ghost takes 0% of paid subscription revenue

Ghost takes 0% of paid subscription revenue on every plan, with payment processor fees still applying, as its pricing page states. Ghost(Pro) Starter is $18 a month billed yearly for 1,000 members and one staff user, Publisher is $29 a month with three staff users, and Business is $199 a month.

Do the arithmetic at your own revenue: 300 paying members at $8 a month is $2,400 in monthly subscription revenue, and a 10% platform cut on that is $240 - far more than the gap between $18 and $59 of hosting. In our view that makes it the clearest switch in this list for anyone charging for subscriptions.

Skip it if you want a newsletter and nothing else. Ghost is a publication platform, and its member and site features are the reason to pay for it.

Buttondown charges for add-ons instead of tiers

Buttondown is free for your first 100 subscribers, and its paid-subscription support is a $9-a-month add-on rather than a plan tier, per its pricing page. Other capabilities - analytics, comments and surveys, RSS-to-email, segmentation - are also $9 each, with sponsorships, custom-domain archives and multiple newsletters at $29 and whitelabeling and teams at $79. Pricing above the free tier scales with subscriber count, which the page does not publish as a table.

That à la carte model is the point. A writer under 100 subscribers who wants sending and a signup page pays nothing; a publisher who needs six add-ons should price the whole stack, because $9 charges add up quickly.

Substack is the trade you may have already rejected once

Substack is free to publish and makes its money as a percentage of paid subscriptions. Worth remembering before you treat it as the obvious landing spot: creators told The Verge they moved to beehiiv in the first place to avoid Substack's 10% cut, in the reporting PPC Land summarized. If you are not charging for subscriptions, that cut costs you nothing, and in our view Substack's network and recommendations are the strongest distribution argument in this list. If you are charging, run the percentage against a flat monthly fee at your revenue before switching.

When we would stay on beehiiv

Three cases where we would not move. First, if the ad network pays you more than the plan costs, the plan is not an expense. Second, if you are on an annual plan, you are locked at your old rate until the term ends, so you have months to watch rather than days. Third, if your publication genuinely uses the bundle - newsletter plus website plus podcast hosting plus paid tiers - the alternatives above cover it only by combining two or three tools, and two subscriptions plus a migration is rarely cheaper than one.

Migration also has a cost nobody quotes. Expect to re-warm a sending domain, rebuild automations, redirect your archive and leave open-rate history behind. We would treat anything under about $30 a month of savings as not worth that work, and anything that also costs you sponsorship income as not worth it at all.

How to move a newsletter without losing the list

1. Export your subscribers first. beehiiv offers Quick and Full CSV exports under Settings → Export Data, and the download links are valid for 24 hours, per its support documentation - request the export when you can download it immediately.
2. Check your renewal date against November 1, 2026, and work out the new price for your actual subscriber bucket on beehiiv's pricing page, with the yearly toggle both on and off.
3. Price the alternative at the same list size, not at its headline tier, and add any add-ons you need.
4. Import a test segment of a few hundred subscribers to the new platform, send one issue, and compare delivery before moving the rest.
5. Keep the beehiiv archive live, or redirect it, until the new site holds your indexed posts.

If a price rise at renewal is the pattern you are dealing with across your stack, our write-up of the Notion price increase and who loses a discount at renewal applies the same arithmetic to a different bill. And if you make a newsletter tool yourself, you can list it free on Upfynd and be in the comparison next time.