beehiiv Alternatives in 2026: 9 Options with Verified Pricing

TL;DR

beehiiv's free Launch plan holds 2,500 subscribers and sends unlimited email, so price alone is a weak reason to leave. Two questions get filed under "beehiiv alternative." If you want a different sender: Kit, MailerLite, Ghost(Pro), Substack, Mailchimp, Curated.co. If you want to stop spending Sunday picking the links and would happily stay on beehiiv: HeyNews, Curated.co again, a DIY n8n or Zapier stack, and Writesy (ours, not an email service). Every price below came off the vendor's live page on September 10, 2026.

---

We make Writesy, which competes with a few of the products below, so read this the way you'd read any vendor's comparison page. We're not neutral. Every price links to the page it came from, and where a vendor's page doesn't say something we write "not stated" rather than inferring a no.

The two questions hiding inside "beehiiv alternative"

The first is about sending: you want the list somewhere else, maybe for the pricing curve above 2,500 subscribers, maybe to own the domain. Kit, MailerLite, Ghost, Substack, Mailchimp and Curated.co answer that, and most lists for this query stop there.

The second is quieter and it's the one the Reddit threads are about. beehiiv is fine. What isn't fine is the four hours before the send. Two people put it this way on Reddit during our September 8 sweep, quoted verbatim with usernames left off. They describe the problem, not our product:

"Every sunday I have spent 3 to 4 hours scanning 30+ RSS feeds, X accounts, podcasts, arxiv papers, etc. picking, summarizing, digesting into my issue, and formatting markdown." — weekly tech newsletter, around 4,000 subscribers

"Curation was 71% of it." — on where the hours in an issue actually go

Switching ESP does nothing for that, so the second half of this article is a different list.

Verified pricing, all 9 options plus the beehiiv baseline (checked 2026-09-10)

Option	Entry price	Free tier	Worth knowing	Source
beehiiv (baseline)	$43/mo Scale, "$517 billed annually"	"$0/month", "Up to 2,500 subscribers", "Unlimited Email Sends"	"Send API" and "RSS to Send" are Max only, "$96/month"	beehiiv
Kit	$33/mo Creator, "$390 billed yearly"	"$0/mo", "up to 10,000 subscribers"	"RSS Campaigns" on Creator; sponsorships on Pro	kit.com
MailerLite	"Starting $12/month" Comfort	"Up to 250" subscribers, "2,500 monthly emails"	"RSS campaigns" only on Power, "$25/month"	mailerlite.com
Ghost(Pro)	"$18 USD / mo Billed yearly"	No	1,000 members; sending domain from "$29 USD / mo"	ghost.org
Substack	$0	"Free to start", "free to leave"	"90% goes to you"; no publish API	substack.com
Mailchimp	Priced by contact count	"$0 /month", 250 contacts, "Max of 500/mo or 250/day"	Free: "Email scheduling: Not included"	mailchimp.com
Curated.co	"$39" at 1,501–2,500 subscribers	"0 – 1,500: Free"	"up to 31 sends every month"; unlimited publications	curated.co
HeyNews	"$39/mo" Hobbyist	Trial only, "14 days or 5 generated issues"	Drafts issues, does not send	heynews.co
DIY stack	~$20/mo for the chat plan	n8n templates listed "Free"	Zapier: "up to 5 emails per day" free	n8n.io
Writesy (ours)	$19/mo Solo	One lifetime brief, 5 feeds	Not an email service; pushes into your provider	writesy.ai

Mailchimp's page showed a "Save 50% … for 12 months" banner that day, Essentials at "$8.07/mo for 12 months." Promo, not list price.

If you want a different sender

Kit

The most generous number here: "$0/mo" for "up to 10,000 subscribers" (kit.com/pricing). Paid starts at Creator, "$33/mo" or "$390 billed yearly", metered from 1,000 subscribers, and that's where "Kit MCP" and "RSS Campaigns" appear — in Kit's words, "automatically create and send emails when you publish new blog content and your RSS feed updates." Pro at "$66/mo" adds "Newsletter sponsorships" ("Get matched with top brands, approve every ad…").

RSS Campaigns republishes your feed as email, which isn't curation across thirty sources, and Kit's pages say nothing about remembering what you sent.

MailerLite

Free is "Up to 250" subscribers, "2,500 monthly emails", "3 automations." Comfort at "Starting $12/month" gives "50 automations" and lets you "Remove MailerLite logo." Power at "Starting $25/month" adds "Unlimited monthly emails", and RSS campaigns are Power-only (mailerlite.com/pricing). Yearly is 10% off. If you plan to drive it from another tool: "Email sending via the API and MCP server is available on paid plans."

Ghost(Pro)

Open source with a hosted tier. Starter "$18 USD / mo Billed yearly" for 1,000 members and 1 newsletter, Publisher "$29 USD / mo Billed yearly" for 3 newsletters and a custom sending domain, Business "$199 USD / mo Billed yearly" for 10,000 members (ghost.org/pricing). Email sends are "Unlimited" on every plan. Monthly prices weren't rendered on the page we fetched, so every Ghost figure here is billed-yearly. You get a website out of it, the point or the overhead depending on you.

Substack

"Free to start", "free to leave", "No platform fees, no tiers, no contracts." The economics sit on revenue instead: "Writers keep 90% of their revenue minus credit card fees" (substack.com/about).

One constraint decides things for anyone building a workflow around it. There is no Substack publish API. A tool claiming a Substack integration is describing a clipboard.

Mailchimp

Free is "$0 /month" for 250 contacts with a "Max of 500/mo or 250/day" cap, and the Free column reads "Email scheduling: Not included" (mailchimp.com/pricing). Essentials, Standard and Premium are priced by contact count; "Remove Mailchimp branding" appears only on Standard and Premium. It also exposes per-link click data through its API, one of the two sources our click learning reads.

Curated.co

Curated answers both questions, which we'll say once. Pricing bands on total subscribers across all your publications: "0 – 1,500: Free", then "$39" to 2,500, "$69" to 5,000, "$129" to 10,000, up to "$399" at 25,001–50,000 (curated.co/pages/pricing). Free includes "up to 31 sends every month", "Make as many publications as you would like to" and "Invite your whole team."

It's purpose-built for link roundups and sends the email itself. Its features page says you can "see who read what, where and how they read it, and which links were most popular overall" — on the free tier. Ingestion is manual capture through a bookmarklet, Chrome extension or secret email address, with no RSS ingestion stated.

If you want the curation to stop eating your Sunday

These four don't replace your sender; three of them assume you keep one. Curated.co appears again because it covers both halves, though its pages describe no memory of what you already sent, no dedup, and no anchor to your last issue.

HeyNews

Hobbyist "$39/mo", Starter "$99/mo", Pro "$299/mo", Team "$499/mo" (heynews.co/pricing). No free tier, just a "free trial that ends after 14 days or 5 generated issues, whichever comes first." Tiers differ on "AI chat revisions, newsletter issues, publications, integrations, and add-ons", with no per-tier caps listed.

It ingests more than feeds: "RSS feeds, blogs, social profiles, Reddit, and saved articles via Chrome extension" (heynews.co, checked 2026-09-08). It also claims to train on your archive so drafts come out in your voice — their claim, untested by us. No sponsorship tooling is stated. It drafts issues and you send them elsewhere, our shape too, at the same $39.

The DIY stack

n8n lists "12,149 workflow automation templates" and the RSS-to-AI-to-newsletter ones are marked "Free" (n8n.io/workflows). Zapier's RSS-to-email path caps you: "Send up to 5 emails per day on Free or Trial Zapier plans, or up to 10 emails per hour on paid Zapier plans" (zapier.com). Add a $20/mo chat plan for the summaries and you have most of a system for about $20 a month.

This is the real incumbent, and it does everything, because you built it. What it doesn't do is remember. Each run is the last seven days from scratch unless you build the state layer yourself: what you already sent, a fingerprint so one story from four feeds collapses into one row, a rule that a skipped source stops crowding the top.

The curation answer that is not an email service: Writesy (yes, ours)

Ours, so discount accordingly. The pricing page is there to check.

Writesy does not send email, does not host your list and has no design editor. It sits before the send. On a schedule you pick it builds a brief anchored to when you last shipped an issue, not the last seven days. Stories carried by more than one source collapse into one row via a story fingerprint. Anything you used or skipped doesn't come back; the memory is the last 500 decisions. Ranking is arithmetic (weight × recency × pillar × novelty × engagement), no embeddings, and it never picks for you: you click Use or Skip. Every row keeps the source link and a verbatim quote from the page, plus a take box that starts empty and stays empty until you write in it.

Sources: RSS and Atom, any site URL with feed discovery, YouTube channels, subreddits, Google News topics, Apple Podcasts, a Google Alerts feed you already made, a per-newsletter inbox address you forward newsletters to, and a Chrome clipper that is an unpacked extension you load yourself, not a Web Store install. Feeds refresh every six hours and stats sync nightly, so none of it is real time. Our RSS feed finder says which of your sites publish a feed.

Picks become a draft issue in one click, then it goes out on your provider: Mailchimp, beehiiv, Kit, Ghost or MailerLite by API, or clean HTML you paste into Substack. You connect the provider in Settings and the key is validated first. Scheduling is opt-in per newsletter, and where a plan can't schedule (Mailchimp Free) it saves a draft and emails you a reminder instead of pretending it sent.

The fact that matters most to a beehiiv reader: beehiiv only accepts posts from outside tools on plans that include its Send API, which is Max, "$96/month." On Launch or Scale nothing external can push an issue in, ours included. The read direction works on a paid beehiiv plan: we pull per-link clicks back from beehiiv or Mailchimp and attribute each to the source that produced it, which nudges the next brief's ranking. Those two are the only platforms we read clicks from, counts are aggregate rather than per-subscriber, and with no click data the ranking is unchanged.

Sponsorship is a rate card with four placement types, placements booked against specific issues, a public media-kit page you can switch on, and a "Sponsored" block in the issue. No marketplace, so you find the sponsor.

Free is one brief for life plus 5 feeds. Solo is $19/mo for unlimited briefs, 15 feeds, issue creation and HTML export. Professional is $39/mo and adds the provider push, click stats, sponsorship tools and 25 feeds. The loop is on the curated newsletter page.

The curation half, as a capability table

From the vendor pages named above. "Not stated" means the page doesn't say it, which is not the same as no.

Capability	HeyNews	Curated.co	DIY stack	Writesy
Sends the email itself	No	Yes	Via your ESP	No
Sources beyond RSS	Yes, incl. Chrome extension	Manual capture only	Anything you wire	Yes, incl. inbox and clipper
Remembers what you already sent	Not stated	Not stated	Only if you build it	Yes, last 500 decisions
Dedup across sources	Not stated	Not stated	Only if you build it	Yes, story fingerprint
Per-link click reporting	Not stated	Yes, free tier	Only if you build it	Read from Mailchimp and beehiiv
Sponsorship tooling	Not stated	Not stated	Only if you build it	Yes, no marketplace

In the pages we checked, no product other than ours described a since-last-issue anchor, operator-side dedup, or skip memory that changes the next ranking.

What beehiiv does that none of these do

The free tier is unusually good: "Up to 2,500 subscribers" with "Unlimited Email Sends", plus "API Access (excluding Send API)" and "beehiiv MCP (Read Access)", at "$0/month" (beehiiv.com/pricing). Nothing else here gives you that much sending for nothing.

Scale at "$43/month" or "$517 billed annually" carries up to 100,000 subscribers, "beehiiv MCP (Write Access)" and the "Ad Network", which matches your newsletter with advertisers, a marketplace that brings you demand. Kit lists a matching network of its own on Pro; nobody else here does. Running your own direct sponsors is a different job with different economics; the sponsorship calculator shows which your numbers favour. beehiiv also exposes per-link click data through its API, which is why our click learning works against it at all. Max at "$96/month" adds "Send API", "RSS to Send" and "Remove beehiiv Branding."

If the Ad Network or the free 2,500 is why you're there, don't leave. Solve the curation half separately and stay.

The costs nobody puts in the table

Your sending domain follows you, badly. Moving senders means re-doing SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new sending domain, and two issues in the spam folder cost more than any price difference above. Run the domain through our SPF/DKIM/DMARC checker before the first send. Ghost puts a custom sending domain on Publisher at "$29 USD / mo Billed yearly", not on Starter.

What the free tier meters. Curated caps sends at "up to 31 sends every month" rather than metering subscribers. Mailchimp Free caps at "Max of 500/mo or 250/day" and switches scheduling off. Zapier stops at "up to 5 emails per day."

API access is a tier, not a feature. MailerLite: "available on paid plans." beehiiv: Send API on Max. Substack: none at all. If you intend to drive the ESP from anything else, check this before price.

How to choose in three questions

1. Which half of the problem actually hurts? If it's the send or the money above 2,500 subscribers, you're shopping ESPs: Kit for the free ceiling, Ghost if you want a site attached, Substack if you'd rather trade 10% than pay monthly. If it's the four hours before the send, none of those change anything.

2. Can the new tool talk to the old one? Staying on beehiiv, this is decided by the Send API being Max-only at $96/mo. On Launch or Scale you'll be exporting HTML and pasting, whatever the other tool promises. Mailchimp, Kit, Ghost and MailerLite accept an API push; MailerLite says so only for paid plans, and Mailchimp Free takes a draft but not a schedule.

3. Is a lifetime of maintenance cheaper than $19–39/mo? The DIY stack works and n8n's templates are free. The trade is rebuilding it whenever a feed changes shape, and the memory layer is the piece nobody's template includes.

FAQ

Is there a free beehiiv alternative?

Several, with different meanings of free. Kit runs to 10,000 subscribers, Curated.co to 1,500 with up to 31 sends a month, MailerLite to 250 subscribers, Mailchimp to 250 contacts with a 500/month cap and no scheduling. beehiiv's own Launch tier at 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends competes with all of them, which is why price alone is a weak reason to move.

What is the best beehiiv alternative for a curated link newsletter?

Curated.co is purpose-built for that format and sends the email too, free to 1,500 subscribers. HeyNews at $39/mo drafts issues from a wider set of sources and hands them to your ESP. Writesy at $19–39/mo does the picking half only and pushes into your existing provider. Which fits depends on whether you want to change senders.

Can I keep beehiiv and use a different tool to build the issue?

Only partly, and the limit is beehiiv's. External tools post in through its Send API, listed on the Max plan at "$96/month". On Launch or Scale you can build the issue elsewhere and paste the HTML in, but nothing will push it for you. Reading data back out is easier: beehiiv's API exposes per-link clicks on paid plans.

Does moving off beehiiv hurt deliverability?

It changes the sending infrastructure your subscribers' inboxes have learned to trust, so expect a dip while the new domain warms up. Set SPF, DKIM and DMARC before the first send and check them with our email domain checker. Ghost only offers a custom sending domain from Publisher at "$29 USD / mo Billed yearly", so that one is a plan decision.

Which beehiiv alternatives let me sell my own sponsorships?

Kit lists "Newsletter sponsorships" on Pro at "$66/mo", a matching network. Writesy's Professional tier at $39/mo gives you a rate card, per-issue placement booking and a public media-kit page with no marketplace attached — you bring the sponsor. beehiiv's Ad Network on Scale and above is a marketplace, a different arrangement from selling direct.

How this article was verified

Every price and capability above was read off the vendor's own live pricing or product page on September 10, 2026, except the HeyNews source-ingestion line and the Curated.co feature details, from a competitor sweep run on September 8, 2026 and dated where they appear. Where a page didn't answer a question we wrote "not stated" rather than "no", because treating those as the same thing is how comparison tables end up lying. No review-site ratings or user counts appear here; we couldn't verify them. We didn't test any competitor's product, and capability rows describe what vendors publish about themselves.

beehiiv, Kit, MailerLite, Ghost, Substack, Mailchimp, Curated.co, HeyNews, n8n and Zapier are trademarks of their respective owners. They are named here only to identify the products being compared, and none of these companies is affiliated with or endorses Writesy.

If a number has gone stale, the pricing links are the fastest correction. Related reading: what to put in a newsletter and the AI SEO tools comparison.