Email marketing is a tricky thing. Mainly, you don’t want to pay for email marketing if it doesn’t pay off for you. When you’re starting out, you’re going to have a small list doing small numbers. It doesn’t make sense to invest in an email marketing tool if you’re firing off emails to say, 20 people.
Back even just a decade ago, there was a growing push to build your email list. Why wouldn’t there be? With social media increasingly becoming hostile to its own users and downgrading “self-promo” posts for businesses, pushing them towards paying for ads, an email marketing list is not only essential, it’s good for business. Reach customers on your terms, not Meta’s.
The problem is that sending emails to hundreds of people at once can land you in hot water with services like Gmail. Plus, it’s hard to know what’s allowed to send across multiple email services. Some might support custom fonts, some may not.
Email marketing tools like Mailchimp, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, and others emerged to help bridge these gaps. First, they worked so you could easily send hundreds or thousands of emails at once, schedule them to send out, and also helped hone in on what you could send. No, you can’t attach music to the background of your email, but there’s at least 5 or 6 different fonts to play with. This helped bring consistency to emails as well as keep from sending unreadable/unusable emails to customers.
The problem is, in the past few years, as with anything else, the rug has been pulled. Free accounts that were generous, great, and felt they offered a lot for the small business owner now only offer bare minimums, with those minimums always and continually being restricted. Paid accounts balloon in monthly costs for even starter-level tiers, with many useful features locked in even higher priced tiers.
So I’m on the hunt now to find the best free email marketing tool.
It all started with Mailchimp
As a Mailchimp certified Agency, I have been working with and inside Mailchimp for perhaps longer than a decade. Mailchimp has been my go-to for email marketing for many, many years, especially prior to their acquisition by Intuit in 2021. That means I have a handful of older, “legacy” accounts that have been holding on to many features that are no longer available to new users.
My email marketing list for my illustrative freelance work is around 300 people. I don’t urge people to sign up (or specifically ask that they do), but I created this list as a means to keep people informed who were not on social media, or who often missed my posts. I don’t use it super often, usually only about once a month.
One of the biggest things I wanted to use my email marketing list for was showing off new artworks when I made them. Often times these works get totally missed during social posts, or even taken down if the platform decides it’s too “bloody” or don’t like that the character has a butt, or any of the above. I want control over who gets to see these so I can show people what I’m up to – friends and family, mostly. This seems fair, doesn’t it? Historically, I have used Mailchimp to do this for me. Even better, I hooked it into my RSS feed so any time I updated my website, an email sequence with that artwork in it would trigger to be sent the next morning. This saves work on my end of drafting and scheduling emails.
I’ve often used this RSS integration for a lot of things, and it’s quite useful. I’ve used it to send out product updates, when new products land in a shop. I’ve used it to send out blog posts. It’s valuable to me and it just functions, which is fantastic.
As Mailchimp dialed in their free plans (1,500 subscribers became 500 subscribers, automations like RSS integration became “Journeys” and later the more clearer “Automations”, etc) to give away a whole lot less, those of us on legacy plans knew the day was coming. Mailchimp officially killed off the classic (free) RSS automation in July of 2025… Supposedly*. I also lost some classic automations that allowed me to reward signups sent in on special forms with downloads, which is something I was using for mockup templates.
The price for a 4-step automation would be $13/month for up to 500 contacts, $20/mo for up to 200-step automations and 500 contacts. Yet, there were still many email companies I had not looked at recently given Mailchimp was “good enough”… Up until that point.
This was the straw to get me to start looking.
Taking my ball and going home
Now, I’m not saying Mailchimp’s email marketing tools aren’t worth it (they are). For the purpose I had, with so few contacts, many of which never interacted with my emails and needed to be purged, it felt like it wasn’t worth $156. So, I started looking around.
First, I needed to find an email company that would support RSS integration, and those are few and far between. Here’s a few I found:
- Mailchimp
- MailerLite
- Campaign Monitor
- ActiveCampaign
- Zoho
But, I started thinking. WordPress is pretty robust. I wonder if I could bring the email building inside of WordPress, and then just worry about the send part?
Turns out, I could do just that.
Newsletter Plugin lets me control my emails
I found this little plugin called Newsletter, and decided to give it a whirl. One thing it offered in a paid license ($99/year for use in up to 3 sites) was automated sending, which I thought was exactly what I needed.
Turns out I was right. I pulled an export of my contacts from Mailchimp, imported into Newsletter, set up my appropriate lists and forms, marked people as subscribed/unsubscribed/whatnot, and then started testing emailing.
I managed to get everything back onto my own site, including hosting images and files, and got it hooked into my Gmail account to send through.
Then I sent an email.
Modern email providers won’t let you really use it this way
It was working!
But sending a single email reminded me what was wrong with this approach. Modern email providers like Gmail don’t really like you sending mass emails, and it can get you in big trouble. Since my list was pretty small, I figured it was probably okay, but then I saw 300 emails in my sent folder and thought, hmm, probably not so much. While you can still absolutely do this, I realized it’s probably in the best interest of my sanity to see if I could send it through another provider.
MailerLite provides a service called MailerSend. It was suggested inside of the Newsletter plugin as a free add-on. Since I had already worked in MailerLite before, I decided to give it a go.
After finagling hooking it up, I got it sending again, and appropriately. What was nice was that something about MailerSend or Newsletter took my emails from out of Gmail’s “promotions” folder, and dropped it into people’s inboxes instead. “Promotions” is basically a shadowrealm for email marketing, so I was thrilled with this side effect.
MailerSend changes terms December 2nd, 2025 for “Hobby” plans
If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true, so they say. In this case it was actually true, but only for a short period of time.
Today I received an email saying my free account was going to be limited more come December 2nd, 2025. The changes are comparatively:
- Up to 500 emails a month – Down from formerly 3,000 emails a month
- Up to 100 emails sent per day – Down from 1,000 emails per day
But, I could pay $7/mo to go back to these things.
Even with my tiny list, this is going to be an issue for me, so now I’m back to looking.
Newsletter also provides add-ons for PostMark, Amazon SES, SMTP2Go, Mailgun, SendGrid, Mailjet, ElasticEmail, and SparkPost, so I’ve got a few starting points to look at come end of November. The good news is the RSS portion is now on my side, so I don’t have to worry about support for that, it’s just the email send request, which can be pushed through email accounts via SMTP, if it comes down to it.
If worst comes to worst, I’ll create some sort of blind distribution list (yes, they’re still things) and have Newsletter send one email there to distribute to everyone else.
For now, I’m good until December 2nd, which means I have a full month and a half to continue using MailerSend the way it is. I’ll let you know and keep you updated when I start looking around and publish my findings with where I end up.
* I say “supposedly” because the ones already set up seem to continue to work. Foundation’s automated posts haven’t stopped emailing, and they’re all set up via RSS. So I’m not sure if it’s only stopping creation of new ones and not interfering with old classic automations. Not sure, but will be sure to update if this changes.