MailerLite free plan limits in 2026: what 250 subscribers actually gets you

MailerLite's free plan in 2026 caps you at 250 active subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, with two seats, three automations, three forms, one landing page and one website of up to five pages. Cross 250 subscribers and campaign sending plus automation sending pauses until you upgrade or remove people.

Those numbers shrank in June 2026. MailerLite cut the free subscriber ceiling from 500 to 250, cut monthly sending from 12,000 to 2,500, and lifted seats from one to two while unlocking custom templates, blogs and pop-ups. The official free plan FAQ dates the change to June 16, 2026.

MailerLite Help, "Free plan update: What you need to know" (June 16, 2026): the free subscriber limit dropped from 500 to 250 active subscribers, the sending limit from 12,000 to 2,500 monthly emails, seats rose from 1 to 2, and feature limits are now 3 automations, 3 forms, 1 digital product, 1 landing page and 1 website.

What MailerLite's free plan includes in 2026

Every free-plan number that matters, taken from the live pricing page in October 2026:

• 250 active subscribers, counted cumulatively inside each billing cycle
• 2,500 monthly emails, shared across campaigns and automations
• 2 user seats
• 3 active automations, each capped at 5 steps
• 3 active forms and 1 landing page
• 1 website of up to 5 pages, plus 1 digital product or booking
• Limited templates, subject line generator, API, MCP server and webhooks
• No credit card required, and no automatic charge when you pass a limit

What happens when you hit the 250 subscriber cap?

Sending stops, not the account. MailerLite's own guidance is that once active subscribers pass 250, campaigns, automations and new subscriber adds all pause, whether people arrive manually, through the API or through an integration. You either upgrade or cut the list back under 250 to send again.

The send cap behaves differently. Cross 2,500 emails inside a month and campaign plus automation sending pauses until the counter resets on your registration date. Nothing is lost, but a launch that lands on the 28th can sit dead for three days.

Feature caps are the third wall. At three active automations the account enters a restricted state: you can still draft, but you cannot activate or edit anything new in that feature until you deactivate something or upgrade.

One detail worth knowing before you plan around it: free accounts are never charged automatically. Only paid tiers auto-bump to the next subscriber tier and charge the card on file.

Which limit do you hit first?

Sends per subscriber is the number MailerLite does not print. Divide the monthly email cap by the subscriber cap and you get your mailing headroom: 2,500 divided by 250 is 10. A full free plan can mail every subscriber ten times a month, about twice a week, before the send cap bites.

That ratio decides which wall you reach first:

• 100 subscribers on one weekly newsletter: about 430 sends a month, so the subscriber cap arrives long before sending becomes the constraint.
• 250 subscribers on a weekly newsletter: about 1,075 sends, still inside the cap with roughly 1,400 to spare.
• 250 subscribers mailed twice a week: about 2,150 sends, close enough that one extra campaign tips you over.
• 100 subscribers mailed daily: 3,000 sends in a 30-day month, so you run out of emails before you run out of list.

Most solo founders hit 250 subscribers first, because the send cap allows a comfortable two mails a week. The exception is anyone running launch sequences, cart flows or a daily digest to a smaller list, where the 2,500 email ceiling arrives first.

How does MailerLite count subscribers for billing?

Billing counts active subscribers, not total records. Unsubscribed and bounced addresses do not count, and duplicate addresses inside segments count once. Two details catch people: the count is cumulative inside a billing cycle, and it resets monthly on your billing anniversary rather than the day you clean the list.

MailerLite's pricing FAQ: any address that was active at any point during the cycle counts toward your limit, even if it is deleted later.

The practical consequence: deleting 60 dead contacts on the first of the month does not free a slot until your billing anniversary. If you are 20 subscribers over the cap, wait for the reset rather than trimming twice.

The cleanup that does help is the one built into the app. The Clean up inactive tab in the Subscribers section filters people who stopped opening. On a 250 person ceiling every inactive contact costs a real slot, and a slot is the scarcest thing on the free plan.

What does MailerLite cost when you outgrow free?

Paid plans were renamed and repriced in 2026, so comparisons written before July are wrong. Current entry points from the pricing page:

• Comfort: from $12 a month at the 500 subscriber tier, or $129.60 a year on annual billing, with 5,000 monthly emails, 3 seats, 50 automations, 10 forms and 10 websites or landing pages
• Comfort's sending rule: 10 times the top of your subscriber tier, so the up-to-1,000 tier gives 10,000 monthly emails whether you have 200 subscribers or 900
• Power: from $25 a month, or $22.50 on annual billing, then unlimited sends, automations, forms, seats and sites
• Enterprise: custom pricing for accounts past 200,000 subscribers
• Free to Comfort at 500 subscribers works out at 2.4 cents per subscriber per month, which is the cheapest number in the ladder

The upgrade trap sits in the tier boundaries. Comfort's send allowance is ten times the top of your subscriber tier, so moving from the 250 allowance to the 500 tier gives 5,000 emails, but moving to the 1,000 tier gives 10,000 regardless of whether you have 401 subscribers or 999. If you are three weeks from a launch that will add 300 signups, jump a tier higher than the count suggests and skip the mid-campaign bump.

Independent testing lands close to the same place. EmailToolTester's August 2026 review confirms the 250 subscriber and 2,500 email caps, and Audienceful's July 2026 write-up reports paid tiers moving up 10% to 30% across the 2026 repricing. Budget for the tier above what a calculator shows if your list grows during a campaign.

Free plans compared: MailerLite vs Brevo, EmailOctopus and Kit

Sending headroom per subscriber is the fairest comparison, because a large subscriber allowance with a tight send cap still blocks a newsletter that mails weekly.

• MailerLite: 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails, so 10 sends per subscriber per month, with a website, landing pages and automations in the same account.
• Brevo: 300 emails a day with up to 100,000 contacts stored, roughly 9,000 sends a month. The daily cap punishes big lists, since 100,000 contacts cannot be mailed even once in a day.
• EmailOctopus: 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, so 4 sends per subscriber, with paid plans from $9 a month on annual billing.
• Kit: up to 10,000 subscribers and unlimited broadcasts on the free plan, the widest subscriber ceiling of the four, with automation kept to a single sequence.

If list size is your bottleneck, Kit and EmailOctopus buy you room. If sends are the bottleneck, Brevo's daily ceiling is generous for a 300 person list and useless for a 10,000 person one. If you want the website, landing pages and automations in one account, MailerLite's free tier still has the widest toolkit, and its deliverability limits are documented well enough to plan against.

When upgrading beats switching

Run the checks in this order before you migrate anything.

• Trim first if more than 20% of the list has not opened in 90 days. Moving a dead list to a cheaper platform only moves the dead weight.
• Upgrade if you use MailerLite's website, landing pages or booking products. Rebuilding those elsewhere costs more hours than $12 a month.
• Switch if the list is small and sending volume is high, or if you need a subscriber ceiling above 2,500 without paying. EmailOctopus and Kit win that case.
• Compare on the tier you will sit on in three months, not today. One launch sequence can double a list inside a month, and paid tiers auto-bump with a charge.

The MailerLite alternatives breakdown covers per-tool fit in more detail, including the free plans that scale past 250 subscribers without a rebuild.

Migration cost is the part comparison posts skip. Moving platforms means rebuilding automations by hand, re-verifying your sending domain, warming a new IP reputation, and re-embedding every signup form, which is two focused afternoons and a week of deliverability risk. A $12 monthly upgrade is one click. Only cross that line when the savings clear a few hundred dollars a year, or when a hard limit blocks revenue you cannot rebuild.

How to check your headroom before the lock

A five minute monthly check beats discovering a paused campaign on launch day.

1. Open the Subscribers section and note the active count next to the cycle reset date.
2. Add up campaign and automation sends for the month from the campaign report, not from memory of what you scheduled.
3. Divide remaining sends by list size to see how many more mails fit before the cap.
4. If the answer is under two, pause the extra campaign or upgrade before it ships.

On a marketing agent setup the same audit runs itself. Pull subscriber count and send volume through the API, compare them against the cap, and have the agent post a weekly line before you write the next campaign. The free plan only gets limited API and MCP access, so this is one of the cases where $12 a month buys back a morning.

The same logic applies to capture. An agent watching signup volume against the 250 ceiling will flag the problem weeks before a signup form starts rejecting subscribers.

The short version

MailerLite's free plan is a 250 subscriber, 2,500 email allowance with a genuine toolkit attached, and it fails politely: sending pauses instead of a card getting charged. Plan the upgrade at roughly 200 subscribers rather than 250, keep the send math in view if you mail more than twice a week, and treat annual Comfort at $129.60 as the default next step.

Related reading: free to paid conversion for the upgrade message that works, and marketing automation for solo founders for the workflows worth keeping inside three automations.