Beehiiv is Free But You’ll Need To Pay For It – Here’s Why…

Is Beehiiv Free? Yes. But You’ll Need To Pay For A Plan

Beehiiv offers a free plan with support for up to 2,500 subscribers, which is great—that’s 1,500 more than you get with ConvertKit. But to actually run your newsletter properly, you’re going to need at least the Scale plan ($39 per month).

That’s not something an aspiring creator wants to hear, but it’s the truth: you can use the Beehiiv free plan, but you’ll struggle—not just with growth but also with setting things up the way you want them.

Free vs Scale Plan – What You Get & Why You’ll Need It

Here is a comparison table between the Launch (Free) and Scale plans

The Launch (Free) plan is a solid option if you’re just starting out, offering unlimited email sends, posts, and up to 2,500 subscribers. It includes basic features like web hosting, subscription forms, and standard support.

And here’s an overview of Beehiiv’s pricing across all of its plans:

The Scale plan, on the other hand, offers significantly more advanced features, including 100,000 subscribers, advanced email capture, custom domains, A/B testing, Beehiiv AI, and monetization features like ad networks and premium subscriptions. It’s tailored for more serious creators looking to grow and monetize their newsletters.

There’s a bunch of tools and features every newsletter needs (including mine; it’s this one if you’re interested) that Beehiiv has cleverly locked inside its paid plans:

• Custom sub-domains
• A/B Testing
• Additional Team Members
• Custom Templates
• Monetization Features

Not that I blame them—you’d pay way more for the same features with most other newsletter platforms like ConvertKit or Mailchimp, so don’t think this is a negative—it’s not.

If You’re Switching To Beehiiv, Just Get The Scale Plan – It’s What You’ll End Up Using Anyway

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And the first tier of its paid plans, Scale, only costs $39 a month, and for most people, this will be all you need to get your newsletter off the ground and profitable.

What’s Included In Beehiiv’s (Cheapest) Scale Plan?

With Scale, you’re good for 100,000 subscribers (a huge number but massively profitable if you can get there), and you can make your newsletter look more professional by having a custom subdomain, not the [yourbrand].beehiiv.com one.

On top of this, you get things like advanced email capture (and, trust me, you will need this), custom HTML (again, essential), and Surveys and Polls.

Initially, when switching, I thought I might be able to get away with just running the free plan. I only had about 2,000 subscribers, and I didn’t think I’d need or want Beehiiv’s monetization features, but as I set about designing the newsletter, I kept finding more and more things I needed:

• Polls
• Surveys
• Custom HTML
• 3D Analytics
• Publish To Segments

And wouldn’t you know it? They’re all locked behind the Scale plan.

Now, this isn’t a bad thing. I get it—Beehiiv’s a business, and it has to make money. The free version is great, but let’s be real: it’s a lead magnet designed to showcase Beehiiv’s potential, how easy it is to set up and use, and how much better it is than your current, clunky old autoresponder provider.

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And it works too. I’m subscribed to a lot of newsletters, and nearly all of the best ones run on Beehiiv. This was the main motivation behind my switch from ConvertKit to Beehiiv. With the free plan up and running, I started designing my new newsletter’s home. It was simple, as promised, and it was easy to get it looking good.

But when it came to sending that first email, I realized I needed the paid features. I wanted my partner to be able to work on the email with me (that’s a paid feature), I needed custom HTML for graphics and charts (another paid feature), and I wanted to set it up on a custom subdomain (another paid feature).

Beehiiv creates a backlog of all your newsletters too and houses them inside a blog of sorts, so my plan is to run my newsletter on a subdomain off my main site (not this one you’re on now; it’s another one in a different niche). 

That way, when some one is on my site, I can link to my subdomained Beehiiv platform and potential subscribers can see all past editions of my newsletter and this will hopefully persuade them to subscribe for future ones. 

And another added benefit? Because Beehiiv saves your past newsletters as web articles, they will rank on Google and other search engines which is great for growing your audience and monetising your newsletter. 

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The Milk Road has A LOT of subscribers. But you know how I found out about them? Googling stuff about crypto. I kept seeing them pop up. I loved the design of their pages and their style, and I eventually subscribed.

We connected with Tyler in November and it just seemed like he was going to build the product best suited for what we wanted to do- build a newsletter the scale and size of Morning Brew, with the features that Morning Brew wanted, including analytics and tools for scaling.

Milk Road Founder

The Milk Road could not have done this with another platform like ConvertKit or Mail Chimp. And that is another huge win for Beehiiv in my book. 

Why Paying For Beehiiv Is Worth It

And this, really, is the moral of the story: free is fine for a look, but to actually run your newsletter like a business and grow it, you’ll need to use Scale.

And for me, it worked out cheaper than my ConvertKit plan anyway, so it was a no-brainer.

Can you get away with the free version for your newsletter? Probably. But it’ll be a struggle, and you won’t be able to make your newsletter—or the platform it runs on—look bespoke to your brand.

You’ll miss out on things like Surveys and Polls, which are instrumental tools in growing and understanding your audience, and you won’t be able to run any custom HTML inside your newsletters, which is essential for interactive charts and data.

And for me, that’s a big problem, so I opted to cancel my ConvertKit subscription, move my subscribers over, and pay $39 a month for Beehiiv’s Scale plan. On a side note, if you had 100,000 subscribers on ConvertKit, you’d be paying anywhere from $679 to $879 per month, depending on the plan you’re on.

All of a sudden, 39 bucks doesn’t look too bad, does it?