Substack is the easiest place to start a newsletter and one of the harder places to leave. It takes a flat 10% of your subscription revenue forever, and while you can export a CSV of your emails, your paid subscribers live inside Substack's Stripe account — not yours. Migrate away and free subscribers move cleanly, but paid ones must re-enter their card details on the new platform, and most creators lose 15–25% of them in the process. That's the difference between renting an audience and owning one.
If owning your list matters to you, four platforms dominate the 2026 conversation: Beehiiv, Kit (formerly ConvertKit), Ghost, and MailerLite. All four let you export and truly own your subscribers, keep 100% of subscription revenue (minus Stripe's cut), and leave whenever you want. They are not interchangeable, though. Here's the honest bottom line.
The honest bottom line
- Just starting, want $0 and real ownership? Kit's free plan is the most generous in the category — up to 10,000 subscribers before you pay a cent.
- Serious about growing and monetizing a newsletter? Beehiiv has the best growth and monetization toolkit, but you'll pay for it.
- Want to own the whole publication — site, blog, memberships — and lowest long-term fees? Ghost, especially self-hosted, keeps 0% of your revenue.
- Classic email marketing on a budget (automations, e-commerce, forms)? MailerLite is the cheapest capable option.
At a glance (2026)
| Beehiiv | Kit | Ghost | MailerLite | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,500 subs, unlimited sends, no automations | 10,000 subs, unlimited sends, 1 automation | Self-hosted only (software is free) | 250 subs, 2,500 emails/mo |
| Entry paid price | ~$43/mo (Scale, annual) | $39/mo (Creator, 1k subs) | $18/mo (Ghost Pro Starter) | $12/mo (Comfort, 500 subs) |
| Revenue cut | 0% platform fee | 0% | 0% (Stripe only) | 0% |
| Key strength | Growth + monetization engine | Automations + creator ecosystem | Own the full stack, lowest fees | Cheapest all-round marketing |
| Best for | Newsletter-first creators scaling to income | Solo creators, coaches, course sellers | Publishers who want a real website | SMBs and e-commerce senders |
Beehiiv's paid-subscription and ad tools require the Scale plan or higher; there's no per-transaction platform fee, but monetization is gated behind the paid tiers.
Prices below are current as of August 2026 and change often — always confirm on each vendor's page before you commit.
Beehiiv — the growth machine
Beehiiv was built by former Morning Brew operators, and it shows: it's the most newsletter-native platform here, with the strongest tools for growing a list rather than just sending to one. The free Launch plan covers up to 2,500 active subscribers with unlimited sends — genuinely usable — and you own and can export your list from day one.
The catch is that the free tier is a shop window. It forces Beehiiv branding on every email, gives you only basic analytics, and locks you out of automations entirely. The features that make Beehiiv special — the recommendation network, Boosts (paid subscriber acquisition), the ad network, paid subscriptions, and automated welcome sequences — all live on the Scale plan, which runs from about $43/mo on annual billing at low volume and climbs with your subscriber count toward roughly $290/mo near 100,000 subs. The Max plan (from ~$96–109/mo) adds more advanced features and team seats.
Real weakness: it gets expensive as you grow, and the most valuable tools are paywalled above the free tier. If your newsletter isn't (yet) a business, you're paying business prices. It's also newsletter-first — weaker than Ghost as a general website/CMS.
Pick Beehiiv if you treat your newsletter as a growth-and-revenue engine and want acquisition tools baked in.
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) — the creator's default
Kit rebranded from ConvertKit and remains the go-to for solo creators, coaches, and course sellers. Its headline feature is the free Newsletter plan: up to 10,000 subscribers, unlimited emails, unlimited forms and landing pages — by far the most generous free ceiling in this comparison. You can build a real audience for years without paying, and export it anytime.
The free plan includes only a single automation, which is the main upgrade trigger. Paid Creator starts at $39/mo for 1,000 subscribers, $59/mo at 3,000, and $89/mo at 5,000 (25% off with annual billing). Creator Pro ($79–$279 across that range) adds advanced reporting, subscriber scoring, and a newsletter referral system. Kit's visual automation builder and tag-based subscriber model are excellent for selling digital products and running behavioral sequences, and its Creator Network helps with recommendations-based growth.
Real weakness: Kit raised prices meaningfully in September 2025 (Creator jumped from $29 to $39/mo at 1,000 subs, a 34% hike), so it's no longer the bargain it once was once you're paying. Its email templates are also plainer than Beehiiv's or MailerLite's — Kit's aesthetic is deliberately minimal, which some find limiting.
Pick Kit if you want the safest free runway to 10k subscribers, or you sell courses/products and live in automations.
Ghost — own the entire stack
Ghost is the one true independent option: open-source software you can self-host for free under an MIT license. Do that and you pay 0% to anyone — only your server (a $4–6/mo VPS handles most small publications) and an email-sending provider like Mailgun ($15–90/mo depending on volume). Ghost is a full publishing platform — website, blog, newsletter, and paid memberships — not just an email tool, so it's the best pick if you want a real home on the web that you control end to end.
If you'd rather not manage servers, Ghost(Pro) is the official managed hosting. The Starter tier is about $18/mo but notably removed paid subscriptions in a 2025 pricing change — you need the Publisher plan (~$29/mo) to enable paid memberships and custom themes. Across all plans Ghost charges a 0% platform fee on subscription revenue; you only pay Stripe's ~2.9%. Over a large paid list, that 0% versus Substack's 10% is enormous.
Real weakness: it's the most technical option by a wide margin. Self-hosting means you're the sysadmin — updates, backups, deliverability, and email configuration are on you. Even Ghost(Pro) has a steeper learning curve than Kit or MailerLite, and its marketing-automation features are thin compared to the others.
Pick Ghost if you want to own your website and audience outright, keep every dollar of subscription revenue, and you're comfortable with (or willing to learn) a more hands-on setup.
MailerLite — the value all-rounder
MailerLite is the most traditional email-marketing tool of the four, and the cheapest capable one. It shines for small businesses and e-commerce: a clean drag-and-drop builder, solid automations, forms, landing pages, a basic website builder, and e-commerce integrations — all at a low price.
Its free plan has shrunk, though. As of July 1, 2026 it covers just 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails/month (down from 500/12,000 the year before), plus 3 automations, 1 landing page, and 1 website. It's fine for testing, not for building. Paid Comfort (formerly Growing Business) starts at about $12/mo for 500 subscribers and removes branding; Power (formerly Advanced) starts around $25/mo with more automation triggers and advanced features. Even at scale, MailerLite is consistently cheaper than Beehiiv or Kit at the same list size.
Real weakness: it's a general email tool, not a newsletter-growth or creator-monetization platform. There's no recommendation network, no ad network, and paid-newsletter/membership features are far less developed than Beehiiv's or Ghost's. The free tier is now too small to be a serious starting point, and its manual account-approval process can trip up new users.
Pick MailerLite if you're a small business or store that wants dependable email marketing and automations at the lowest price — and monetizing a paid newsletter isn't your main goal.
The verdict
There's no single winner — there's a right tool per situation:
- Pick [Kit](https://kit.com) if you're starting out and want the longest free runway with true list ownership (10,000 subscribers free), or you sell courses and products.
- Pick [Beehiiv](https://www.beehiiv.com) if newsletter growth and monetization are the point and you'll invest in tools that compound your list.
- Pick Ghost if you want to own your whole publication and keep 100% of revenue — and you'll trade convenience for control.
- Pick [MailerLite](https://www.mailerlite.com) if you want capable, affordable email marketing for a business rather than a creator-monetization engine.
Whichever you choose, you've already won the most important battle: on all four, the list is yours. Export it, move it, and never hand a platform 10% of your income for the privilege of emailing people who signed up for you.