I've looked over MailChimp of course. They have a severely limited free trial, and the price is way too high after that. I know there are plugins that allow you to create a free newsletter. I just don't know which one is the best, and I'm worried about bloating and compatibility issues. All my plugins are essential but I feel like I have too many.
Just curious, why do you want to have a newsletter inside your WordPress dashboard?
Brevo and Mailerlite could be a good choice.
I bought LTD for “vBout” and it works fine for my small use case.
All of them includes “designing newsletter”.
I hear you—MailChimp can get pricey, and adding another plugin can feel like overloading your site. For a free newsletter option that’s lightweight, check out MailPoet. It integrates directly with WordPress and lets you send newsletters without leaving your dashboard. It’s pretty solid in terms of performance, and you won’t have to worry too much about compatibility issues.
That said, it’s always a good idea to audit your plugins and make sure each one is truly necessary. Keeping your site lean will help with speed and avoid potential conflicts.
The free options will include their ads in the emails and are often overly restrictive. If the budget is that tight, I would just throw a dart in it i.e. pick randomly.
If you do it well, you’ll be changing it and going through the pain of changing it after 6 months as you’ll need better options, flexibility and choice
Acymailing + Postmark would set you back $15 USD/month for up to 10,000 sent emails per month.
Begin with a basic, free newsletter plugin for WordPress, and see if you need to upgrade as you go along.
I’m using the free plugin called “Newsletter” and it’s working great. A few months ago, I paid for Noptin and it was a buggy disaster.
https://emailoctopus.com/
I use sendfox. Has saved me piles of money.
Out of interest, if you’re doing things with Mailchimp that goes above their free tier; how are you not monetising enough to pay for Mailchimp? What is it you’re doing?
I don’t mean to be a dick about it, but if you’ve got that many subscribers, you should be making enough to pay for it?
keep in mind they serve two separate purposes; the website is for content and MailChimp, etc are for emails. most web hosts aren’t ok with a large number of outgoing emails, and there’s a lot of work to get them showing up in the inbox and not spam.
if MC is too expensive, look at something like Buttondown.
I always hear people talking about beehiiv. I personally don’t know anything about it. Seems to be the buzz word for newsletters lately though.
Check out Convertkit.com. We used to use MailChimp until they reduced the number of mailings per month to 12. Convertkit will let you have 1,000 subscriberson their free account, and dozens of mailings per month. And you can embed images. Very nice platform. We use it for our communities newsletter and email alerts, and free as a bird, so far :).
Consider looking outside of WordPress plugins. You might find a more fully featured stand-alone option.
I understand you want a Subscribe button/form. You can build that form with any forms plugin, that collects Name, Email, etc. Export the form submissions to a CSV file and import into your chosen newsletter service. That probably sounds like a hassle, but come on, you have ZERO budget, you may have to put some extra time/effort into a process that’s not ideal.
Dedicated newsletter services provide some features that you may be undervaluing, such as deliverability of emails (staying out of people’s spam folders) and email-friendly content builders/templates. Bulk sending email with the IP address associated with your server and business could be risky in ways you haven’t considered. You could potentially end up in black lists that affect your business email.
Designing content that looks good across many email software clients and webmail services is also not as easy as you might think. The tools and templates from newsletter services make this much easier.
Anyway, I don’t have a specific service to offer, just suggesting that you might widen the net you’re casting to services that don’t have a WordPress plugin option.
Substack is free
This comes down to what business you’re in. MC is dead and trying to play catchup. There are many others out there, but some are geared more towards eCommerce. Some aren’t.
Don’t.
I recommend Mailerlite. You get a free account for up to 1000 subscribers with unlimited emails, while also having access to great features like segmenting and automation. I’ve been using it for more than 5 years now and, especially for new projects, it’s my go-to platform.
Mautic is a complete marketing solution totally free an open source.
Have you checked **Brevo**? They offer a generous free plan with a decent number of emails and features. It’s a popular choice for small businesses and bloggers. Plus, they have a user-friendly interface and integrate well with most platforms.
[Here are some of the other options](https://www.pickupwp.com/blog/free-email-marketing-services/) if you want them to check out.
Try Sender, they have a free plan for 2,500 email subscribers, free integrations to wordpress/woocommerce, free analytics report with heatmap and clicks, free HTML and video block, and free newsletter templates.
I use Sender (dot) net. It gives free subs list without ads up to 2500.