Email Marketing Platform Pricing Benchmark 2026: 7 Tools Compared

For a 5,000-contact list in 2026, the same job costs anywhere from 0 to 100 USD a month before you touch a premium tier, and the spread is driven almost entirely by which pricing model a vendor picks, not by how good the product is. That is the headline: across the seven platforms in this benchmark, entry prices run from a free tier all the way to Customer.io's 100 USD floor, and the real differentiator for a lean founder is not the sticker price but whether the meter runs on contacts stored, profiles active, or emails sent. This study pulls the live published pricing for ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Brevo, Klaviyo, Customer.io, Loops and Resend as of June 2026, lays out the cost by list size, and tells you where the money actually goes once you climb past the entry rung.