MailerLite vs Constant Contact: a free tier and loose caps against a paid-only platform

Starting prices, from each pricing page

Both vendors publish a "starting at" price per plan and move it with list size. These readouts were taken on 7 October 2026. MailerLite's are for a 500-subscriber tier; Constant Contact's page does not print the contact count behind its starting figures, saying only that your exact price is based on the number of contacts on your list.

The annual discount works out differently. Constant Contact's annual prepay saves $1.80 a month on Lite, $5.25 on Standard and $12 on Premium; its page advertises savings up to 15%. MailerLite's yearly option takes $1.20 off Comfort and $2.50 off Power. Taken together, the closest pairing by feature is Constant Contact Standard, which adds automation and A/B testing, against MailerLite Power at $25: that is $10 a month more on monthly billing, $120 a year, before any list growth.

How send frequency meets the caps

The send cap is the real constraint in this pairing, and a list of 8,000 contacts shows why. Constant Contact multiplies your contact count: Lite allows 80,000 sends a month (10 times 8,000), Standard 96,000 and Premium 192,000. A weekly newsletter uses 32,000 of that. A product-update list mailed every working day, around 22 sends, uses 176,000, which fits only Premium. At 25 sends a month the same list needs 200,000 and breaks even Premium's 192,000.

MailerLite's rule is similar on Comfort, whose allowance is 10 times the subscriber-tier ceiling, but Power removes it. Its Comfort prices by size on the pricing page were $19 at 1,000 subscribers, $49 at 5,000, $89 at 10,000 and $179 at 25,000, with Power at $39, $69, $129 and $239. Over a year of monthly billing, that is Comfort at $228, $588, $1,068 and $2,148 and Power at $468, $828, $1,548 and $2,868. Constant Contact does not print a comparable ladder, so use its selector for your own number, and compare to the row above.

Free plan and trial terms

MailerLite offers a Free plan with a 250-subscriber ceiling, 2,500 monthly emails and two seats, and a 14-day trial of paid features with no card needed. Constant Contact's page offers a free trial without a card, a 14-day button in its header, and a 30-day money-back guarantee on each paid plan. For a pre-launch SaaS with a few hundred waitlist emails, MailerLite's free tier can run indefinitely; Constant Contact will need a card after the trial.

Reacting to what happens in your product

MailerLite documents its webhooks in full: subscriber.created, subscriber.updated, subscriber.unsubscribed, subscriber.added_to_group, subscriber.removed_from_group, subscriber.bounced, subscriber.spam_reported and the campaign events. A failed delivery is retried three more times, after 10, 100 and 1,000 seconds. Its default automation triggers include Joins a group and Updated field, so a handler that receives Stripe's invoice.payment_failed or Paddle's transaction.payment_failed can move a subscriber into a "payment failed" group and start the dunning automation from there. Stripe is also connected for selling products from MailerLite pages, with an Action after checkout that adds buyers to a group, on Comfort or Power.

Constant Contact's V3 developer documentation describes webhooks for technology partners only, with four billing-and-account topics: tier.increase, tier.decrease, account.cancel and account.disable. None covers a contact joining or leaving a list, so on that evidence a SaaS that needs its own app to hear about unsubscribes has to poll. Its integration list names Zapier, Shopify and Eventbrite among 300 apps; Stripe and Paddle are not named there, so billing events would reach it through your own handler or an automation service.

Leaving Constant Contact for MailerLite

1. Export contacts with their lists and custom fields, plus the unsubscribed and bounced addresses as a separate file.
2. Import the active contacts into MailerLite groups first, then load the suppressed addresses as unsubscribed so no one is re-mailed.
3. Authenticate your sending domain in MailerLite before the first send, and keep Constant Contact live for a billing cycle if you prepaid annually.
4. Rebuild the welcome series and run it against a small group before cutting the old one, since Constant Contact's Lite plan lists a single automation template and Standard lists three.

Choosing between them

• MailerLite Free or Comfort for a startup list under 10,000 where cost and webhooks matter.
• MailerLite Power for any list mailed more than 10 times a month.
• Constant Contact Standard for a small business that also posts to social channels, runs events and values onboarding calls with live support, and mails modestly.
• Constant Contact Premium when 24 times your list is enough headroom and you want 500 SMS a month included.

Related reading: Mailchimp vs Constant Contact, Brevo vs Constant Contact, Constant Contact vs Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp vs MailerLite and the full comparison index.