Beehiiv
Newsletter platform with a free tier up to 2,500 subscribers, plus an ad network, referrals and paid subscriptions on the paid plans.
Who it's for
Builders who want to write in public to an email list they own, and eventually make money from it without stitching together three tools.
Standout details
- The Launch plan is free up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends, unlimited posts and 3 publications
- Paid prices scale with list size, so Scale is $43/mo at 1,000 subscribers but $96/mo at 10,000
- Scale takes a 0% cut of paid subscriptions and unlocks the ad network, automations, polls and referrals
- Max at $96/mo and up removes beehiiv branding and adds RSS to Send, the Send API and up to 10 publications
- Human support is a paid feature, so the free plan gets no direct help
What it is
Beehiiv is a newsletter platform that also gives you a hosted website, a subscribe flow, a link-in-bio page, campaign analytics and a podcast feed. The pitch is that everything a newsletter business needs sits in one account instead of four subscriptions.
The monetisation stack is the real product: an ad network that matches sponsors to your list, paid subscriptions, digital products, a referral programme and cross-promotion recommendations with other publishers.
Who should use it
People building an audience in public who want to own the list rather than rent an algorithm. It suits writers who intend to sell something eventually, because the free tier costs nothing until you have 2,500 subscribers.
What stands out
The free plan’s exclusions matter more than its inclusions. Launch gives you unlimited sends, unlimited posts, three publications, custom domains, segments and the recommendation network. What it withholds is every automation, plus polls, A/B testing, the referral programme, paid subscriptions, custom HTML and human support. In practice you stay free until the day you want a welcome sequence, and that day puts you on Scale.
The headline prices are both quoted at their cheapest rung, which is the single most useful thing to know before you commit. Scale is $43 a month up to 1,000 subscribers, $61 at 2,500, $96 at 10,000 and $149 at 25,000. Max runs $96, $131, $193 and $254 across those same tiers. Annual billing saves roughly two months on either.
Plan against the list size you are aiming for. At 10,000 subscribers, Scale costs what Max costs at 1,000.
The verdict
I would put a new newsletter on beehiiv without much thought. Nothing else gives you this much for nothing, and once sponsors or paid subscriptions are running, the 0% take rate on Scale usually covers the fee by itself.
Where I would slow down is deliverability. EmailToolTester excludes beehiiv from its deliverability benchmarks, which means the delivery rate beehiiv publishes is self-reported and there is no independent figure to check it against. For a platform whose whole job is getting email into an inbox, that is the one gap I would want closed before moving a large list across.
Skip beehiiv if your newsletter is a designed artefact and the layout matters more than the words. Custom HTML is a paid feature and the builder is where your layout control stops.
Honest verdict
The best free tier in newsletters, and the paid plans start paying for themselves the moment you run sponsors or paid subscriptions, because Scale takes 0% of subscription revenue. Two catches worth knowing first. The price tracks your list size, so the $43 you sign up at is $96 by 10,000 subscribers. And the free plan has no automations of any kind and no custom HTML, so a welcome sequence or a hand-built layout is the thing that pushes you onto a paid plan. Under 2,500 subscribers with nothing to sell, stay free and revisit this when that changes.
Published 29 Aug 2026