Answers that do not mention MailerLite

For a small ecommerce store where low monthly cost + simple segmentation are the priorities, I’d start with Omnisend.

My shortlist

Why Omnisend: It is specifically built around ecommerce, with prebuilt segments and automations based on things like purchase history, email/SMS engagement, tags, and customer behavior. Its current paid plans start around $16/month, and it combines email and SMS rather than requiring you to bolt together separate systems. www.omnisend.com

For example, you could easily create segments like:

• First-time customers
• Repeat customers
• Bought in the last 30 days
• Haven't purchased in 90 days
• Spent $100+
• Clicked but didn't buy
• SMS subscribers vs. email-only

That's about the level of segmentation I'd recommend for a small store—useful without turning marketing into a full-time data-management job.

Brevo is worth considering if your email volume is relatively low and keeping the bill as close to zero as possible matters more than having ecommerce-specific features. Its pricing is largely send-based rather than contact-based, which can be advantageous for stores with lots of contacts but relatively few monthly sends. www.omnisend.com

I'd skip Klaviyo initially unless you know you'll need sophisticated behavioral/predictive segmentation. It's excellent, but pricing rises considerably faster; for example, current pricing puts 5,000 contacts at roughly $100/month for email before adding SMS. www.omnisend.com

Bottom line:
👉 Omnisend if you want cheap + simple + ecommerce-focused + email/SMS in one place.
👉 Brevo if absolute minimum cost is the overriding concern.
👉 Klaviyo if you're expecting to build a sophisticated lifecycle-marketing operation.

If you tell me your ecommerce platform (Shopify/WooCommerce/etc.), approximate customer count, and roughly how many emails/SMS you send per month, I can work out which one is actually cheapest for your store.

For a freelance marketer managing several small clients, I’d prioritize multi-client management, client separation, white-label reporting/branding, and predictable costs over raw email features. The best fit depends on whether you need clients to see your brand (true white-label) or just want to manage their accounts efficiently.

My shortlist for a solo freelance marketer

1. Best overall value: brevo.com

Use this if:

• Your clients are small businesses
• You manage newsletters, promotions, simple automations
• You don’t need clients logging into a branded portal

Pros:

• Low cost
• Simple onboarding
• Good for many small lists

Cons:

• Not a true white-label agency platform

2. Best “agency-lite” option: campaignmonitor.com

Use this if:

• You want a professional client-facing workflow
• You need approvals, reporting, and multiple brands

Pros:

• Built with agencies in mind
• Better client presentation

Cons:

• Can become expensive as lists grow

3. Best if you want to sell email marketing as your own service: igsendmail.com

Use this if:

• You want clients to think “your agency” runs the platform
• You plan to charge a monthly management fee

Pros:

• White-labeled dashboard
• Client sub-accounts
• Reseller positioning

Cons:

• Agency pricing makes more sense after you have several paying clients IGSendMail

4. Cheapest “own the stack” route: acellemail.com

Use this if:

• You are comfortable with hosting/DNS/email deliverability
• You want maximum margin

Pros:

• One-time software approach
• Full branding control

Cons:

• More technical responsibility AcelleMail

A practical setup for a freelance marketer

A common low-cost path:

• 1–5 clients: Brevo or Campaign Monitor
• 5–20 clients: Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign, or an agency-focused platform
• 20+ clients / recurring retainers: Move to true white-label like IGSendMail or a self-hosted solution

If your goal is “I want clients to pay me $200–$500/month and never see the underlying email software,” I’d lean toward a true white-label platform. If your goal is “I just need to manage campaigns efficiently for clients,” I’d start cheaper with Brevo or Campaign Monitor.

For a tiny budget + limited tech skills, I’d narrow it to three choices:

www.beehiiv.comwww.sasanova.com

My recommendation:

Start with Substack if:

• you just want to publish quickly
• you don’t have a website
• you’re mainly writing (essays, updates, commentary, personal newsletter)
• you don’t want to learn marketing tools

It’s probably the least intimidating first step. The tradeoff is that if you later charge for subscriptions, Substack takes a percentage of paid subscription revenue. newslettercalc.com

Start with beehiiv if:

• you think this could become a serious newsletter business
• you care about growth features, referrals, analytics, or monetization later
• you want more “newsletter company” tools from day one

Its free tier is designed for small newsletters and includes more growth-oriented features than many traditional email tools. www.beehiiv.comwww.sasanova.com

Start with Kit if:

• your newsletter supports a business, course, coaching service, or digital product
• you want to eventually build email sequences and automations

Kit’s free plan is generous for creators, though some advanced automation features require paid plans. www.beehiiv.comwww.sasanova.com

I’d avoid starting with Mailchimp for this specific situation. It’s familiar, but its free tier is relatively limited compared with newsletter-focused tools. www.beehiiv.com

A simple path:

1. Pick Substack if your priority is “send my first newsletter this week.”
2. Pick beehiiv if your priority is “build an audience and maybe make money later.”
3. Pick Kit if your newsletter is part of a broader creator/business plan.

If you tell me what kind of newsletter it is (personal, local news, business, paid subscription, hobby, etc.) and your expected first-year subscriber count, I can recommend one more precisely.

For an early-stage SaaS with a tight runway, I’d avoid tools that price aggressively by contacts/subscribers (many become painful once you have a few thousand users). I’d prioritize:

• onboarding/event-triggered sequences
• product analytics or conversion tracking
• API/webhooks for signup + activation events
• predictable pricing

Here are the best fits:

My shortlist by stage

0–5k users / pre-PMF

1. Sequenzy — probably the closest match if you want SaaS onboarding without paying enterprise lifecycle-tool prices. Sequenzy
2. Loops — great if your flows are mostly: - Day 0 welcome
3. Day 1 “complete setup”
4. Day 3 “try feature X”
5. Day 7 conversion nudge

Technical team comfortable wiring events

• FlowingMail + a low-cost sending provider can keep costs very low because you avoid contact-based pricing. FlowingMail FlowingMail

Growing beyond ~10k active users

• Consider Customer.io once you need sophisticated segmentation like: - “admins who invited nobody”
• “users who hit feature A but not feature B”
• “trial users with high intent but no conversion” Email Platform Review

What I’d avoid right now

• Enterprise marketing suites (HubSpot Marketing Hub, Braze, Iterable) unless marketing automation is already a major growth channel.
• Subscriber-priced tools where every dormant trial account counts against you.
• Newsletter-first platforms if your main goal is activation rather than broadcasts.

For a lean SaaS, I’d start with Sequenzy or Loops, instrument 3–5 activation events, and only upgrade when your onboarding logic—not your subscriber count—becomes the bottleneck. Sequenzy Email Platform Review

If you’re a content creator with a small paid newsletter list and you specifically want both email + SMS, I’d narrow it to Brevo vs. beehiiv + a separate SMS provider.

My pick: Brevo if SMS is genuinely important

Brevo is probably the best low-cost all-in-one option. Its free plan supports up to 100,000 stored contacts, 300 emails/day, and includes both email and SMS campaigns; paid plans start around $9/month. help.brevo.com

The catch: Brevo isn't really a paid-newsletter platform. You'd generally use Stripe/another checkout for subscriptions and connect it to Brevo rather than having the newsletter/paywall experience native to the platform.

If paid subscriptions are your core business: beehiiv

beehiiv is what I'd choose if you're primarily building a paid media/newsletter business and SMS is secondary.

• Free up to 2,500 subscribers
• Unlimited email sends
• Paid subscriptions built in
• 0% platform fee on paid subscription revenue
• Scale starts at $43/month billed annually
• Strong newsletter-specific growth tools, referrals, ads, analytics, etc. www.beehiiv.comwww.beehiiv.com

You'd add SMS separately, rather than forcing your entire operation into a generic email/SMS marketing platform.

One other serious contender: Kit

Kit has become unusually attractive in 2026. Its new Newsletter plan allows up to 10,000 subscribers free, unlimited sends, digital products/subscriptions, landing pages, and one basic automation. help.kit.com

For a creator starting small, that's arguably the best free email platform. But, like beehiiv, SMS isn't its strength.

For your particular description, I'd lean beehiiv + a separate SMS service if the paid newsletter is the primary revenue source. The reason is that SMS is usually an engagement channel, while your email platform is effectively the infrastructure for your paid publication. beehiiv's 0% subscription take becomes increasingly valuable as paid revenue grows. www.beehiiv.com

If you tell me roughly how many subscribers you have (e.g. 500 / 1,000 / 5,000), what you charge per month, and how many SMS messages you'd send per month, I can calculate the actual monthly cost of Brevo vs. beehiiv + SMS vs. Kit and tell you which is cheapest.

For a tiny ecommerce brand testing both email + SMS, I’d shortlist these:

• omnisend.com — best ecommerce-focused value. Its free tier supports 250 contacts/500 emails, and the paid plans combine email + SMS. The current Pro tier starts around $41/month for 2,500 contacts, with SMS charged separately. Omnisend
• brevo.com — cheapest paid entry. Starter is $9/month, includes email + SMS capability, and uses send-based rather than contact-based pricing. SMS credits are purchased separately. Brevo Brevo Help
• klaviyo.com — best if you expect to scale. Excellent ecommerce automation, but pricier: roughly $35/month at the low end for Email + SMS, versus cheaper alternatives. Omnisend

My pick

Start with Omnisend if you're Shopify/ecommerce-first and want abandoned-cart, post-purchase, welcome, etc. without building everything yourself.

Start with Brevo if your overriding goal is spend as little as possible while testing the channels. Its $9 entry point is hard to beat, particularly if your list grows faster than your sending volume. Brevo

If you tell me roughly how many subscribers you have (e.g. 200 / 1,000 / 5,000) and how many emails/SMS you expect to send per month, I can tell you which is actually cheapest for your volume.

For a tiny ecommerce brand testing both email + SMS, I’d shortlist these:

• klaviyo.com — best for ecommerce testing. Its free plan supports both email and SMS: up to 250 profiles, 500 emails/month, and $5/month of mobile messages. That makes it unusually good for validating whether SMS actually works for you before paying. Klaviyo
• brevo.com — cheapest paid entry. The free plan includes email + SMS campaigns, while Starter starts at $9/month; SMS credits are purchased separately. Brevo Help Brevo
• omnisend.com — good ecommerce alternative, but currently pricier for SMS. The Standard plan starts at $16/month, but new subscribers since May 4, 2026 need Pro ($59/month) to access SMS, with SMS charged separately. Omnisend Help Center

My pick

Start with Klaviyo if you're under ~250 customers/contacts. You can genuinely test the two-channel workflow for $0, including automations and segmentation, rather than committing to a paid platform. Klaviyo

If you expect to exceed 250 contacts quickly and want the lowest predictable monthly software cost, I'd look harder at Brevo.

If you tell me roughly how many contacts you have and how many emails/SMS you expect to send per month, I can calculate the cheapest option for your actual volume.

For a small ecommerce store, omnisend.com is probably the best fit for what you described.

Omnisend specifically includes prebuilt abandoned-cart automations, shopping-behavior segmentation, and automatically generated/synchronized discount coupon codes. Omnisend Omnisend Help Center

The Free plan gives you the same core feature set but limits you to 250 contacts and 500 emails/month. The Standard plan starts at $16/month and scales with your contact count. Omnisend Help Center

Why I'd pick it over the alternatives

• Klaviyo: excellent, particularly if you need extremely sophisticated segmentation, but it's generally harder to justify for a tiny store.
• Brevo: cheaper starting price (from $9/month) and good general-purpose email marketing, but Omnisend is more purpose-built around ecommerce workflows. Brevo Help
• Mailchimp: easy to start with, but ecommerce automation and coupon/segmentation workflows can become less attractive as your store grows.

Bottom line: If your priority is “I want abandoned carts + discount codes + useful segments without stitching together several apps,” I'd start with Omnisend. Its ecommerce features are native enough that you shouldn't need costly third-party automation just to get the basics running.

omnisend.com

For a small online store, I’d prioritize built-in ecommerce features over the cheapest newsletter tool. You want:

• Discount-code automation
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Customer segmentation
• Store integration without paying for Zapier/extra connectors

My shortlist:

Omnisend SMB Compare## My recommendation for a small store: Omnisend

Omnisend is usually the best fit if you want revenue-focused email without building a complicated tech stack. It is designed around ecommerce workflows, so you can typically connect your store directly and create:

• Welcome series with first-order discount codes
• Abandoned cart sequences
• Post-purchase follow-ups
• Customer segments (VIP buyers, repeat customers, inactive shoppers, etc.)
• Product-based campaigns

It is generally positioned as a lower-cost alternative to Klaviyo while keeping ecommerce automation features. Omnisend Chase Dimond

When I’d choose Klaviyo instead

Pick Klaviyo if you already have meaningful sales volume and want very detailed segments, such as:

• “Customers who bought product A but never product B”
• “High spenders who haven’t purchased in 90 days”
• “Browsed twice but didn’t buy”

Klaviyo’s segmentation and customer data tools are stronger, but the pricing can become harder to justify for a small shop. SMB Compare Choose My Stack

When Mailchimp makes sense

Mailchimp is fine if your main goal is:

• Occasional newsletters
• Basic promotions
• Simple customer emails

For a product store that depends heavily on abandoned-cart recovery and targeted offers, it is usually less specialized than Omnisend or Klaviyo. Omnisend

A simple setup I’d use for a small store

1. Omnisend
2. Connect your store directly (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.)
3. Create: - Welcome email → 10% discount code
4. Abandoned cart flow → 2–3 emails
5. Post-purchase thank-you → review request
6. VIP segment → exclusive offers
7. Win-back flow → “we miss you” discount

That gives you most of the email revenue opportunities without stacking expensive integrations.

If you tell me your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, Squarespace, Wix, etc.) and approximate list size, I can narrow it down to the cheapest option that still covers everything.