How we work, in enough detail to argue with

Every pricing row stores the provider’s own pricing page as its source URL and the date the figure was captured. Both are shown next to the price, everywhere the price appears. Nothing on this site is priced from a press release, a third-party review, or another comparison site.

Each row then carries one of three verification states:

• Verified: a person opened the source URL and confirmed these exact numbers, band by band.
• Needs review: captured from the published plan structure but not yet confirmed band by band.
• Due a recheck: verified once, but longer ago than 45 days, which is roughly the cadence at which this market re-prices.

The middle state exists because of a real limitation. Several providers, MailerLite, Moosend, Brevo and ActiveCampaign among them, publish their rate card only through an interactive slider: the plan structure is public, but the full band table is not readable as a document. We seed those from the structure that IS published and label them, rather than presenting an inferred figure with the same confidence as a read one. An unmarked wrong price looks exactly like a right price, which is what makes it worse than a marked uncertain one.

Right now 8 of our pricing rows are marked “needs review”. You can see the whole dataset, state by state, on the pricing page.

Ranking is by price and only by price. Plans are sorted by the effective monthly cost on your chosen billing cycle. Our editorial scores do not reorder the list; they break exact ties and decide one of the four awards, and that is the most influence an opinion is allowed to have on a page whose job is to report prices.

A plan appears in your results only if all three are true:

• Its subscriber ceiling covers your list, or it does not cap contacts.
• Its monthly send allowance covers your volume, or it does not cap sending.
• It includes every feature you ticked.

We show one row per provider, the cheapest plan that clears all three. Listing every qualifying band would fill the table with the same brand five times, and the more expensive bands are never the answer to “what is the least this costs me”.

Currency

Providers do not all quote in the same currency, so ranking happens in pounds. Converted at USD 1 = GBP 0.7374, EUR 1 = GBP 0.8597 (rates as of 2026-09-10). The rates are configuration, not a live feed, deliberately: a ranking that reshuffles between two page loads because a rate moved 0.3% is not one you could check or cite. The provider’s own price in its own currency is always shown alongside the converted figure, and we never write a converted number back as though the provider had quoted it.

Each qualifying plan gets a capability score between 0 and 1, weighted as follows. These are the actual constants the code uses:

The four scores on each provider page (automation, ease of use, deliverability and support) are opinions on a 0 to 10 scale. Each has a written justification underneath it on the provider’s own page; a number with no stated reason is decoration, not evidence.

Deliverability scores are not measured inbox rates. We do not run seed-list inbox placement tests. Those scores reflect published sending infrastructure, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and dedicated IP options, documented policy on cold and purchased lists, and (where we lean on published third-party placement studies) we say so on the provider page. Anyone presenting a single inbox percentage per provider without describing their seed list and test period is telling you less than they appear to.

We also do not fold negotiated or unpublished discounts into any ranking. A rate you have to ask for is not a price we can verify, and including it would make our comparison cheaper than your invoice.

We do not generate a page for every possible pairing. Twelve providers produce 66 combinations; publishing all of them would take an afternoon and would be a permanent liability, because nobody maintains 66 sets of prices. Ten pairings exist because we had something specific to say about each one.

All ten are indexed. We still hold each page to an internal completeness standard, and our editing tools flag any page that falls short of it:

• An original quick verdict of at least 280 characters.
• All 9 editorial sections written, each at least 80 characters.
• At least 3 use-case verdicts.
• At least two alternatives.
• Pricing verified within 45 days.
• Both providers holding at least one verified, in-date pricing tier.

Two of the ten currently rest on a provider whose per-band pricing sits behind an interactive slider and has not been confirmed figure by figure. That does not hide the page, but it does not hide the caveat either: those prices carry a needs review label everywhere they appear, exactly as they would anywhere else on the site. Indexing policy and pricing honesty are separate things here, and only the first is a judgement call.

Reverse-order URLs redirect rather than duplicating: request /compare/moosend-vs-mailerlite and you are permanently redirected to /compare/mailerlite-vs-moosend.

Email King earns affiliate commission on some outbound links. Every link to a provider we have no relationship with points at that provider’s own signup page and earns us nothing. We do not list the current partners here, because a hand-maintained list goes stale: the disclosure page prints the live status of all twelve, read from our own records.

It does not change the rankings. Ordering is computed from published prices by a function whose inputs are prices, allowances, features and our editorial scores. Affiliate status is not among them. The disclosure page proves this rather than asserting it: it runs the real calculator at a representative list size and shows exactly where the providers we earn from land, including when one of them ranks first and why. What commission does affect is which links carry tracking, and that is disclosed on every page that has one. The full disclosure is here.

If a price here is wrong, it is wrong, the source link next to it is there so you can check. Every figure carries the date we last looked, so you can also see whether it is simply old. Prices change without notice and you should always confirm on the provider’s own site before buying.