ConvertKit bills per subscriber. Every new sign-up is both a win and a small, permanent increase in your monthly costs. We price on software — the plan is the plan, and the list can do whatever it likes.
It is a clean, fair model and ConvertKit are entirely upfront about it. It is also a ratchet. Your list grows — and it should, that is the job — and the bill grows with it, whether or not those subscribers ever open, click, or buy anything from you.
A guest podcast goes well. Four thousand people join in a fortnight. That is a good month — and your software costs went up before a single one of them read a word.
The uncomfortable second-order effect: you start pruning the list to manage the invoice, rather than pruning it to protect deliverability. Those are different decisions and they should never be confused. Nobody should delete a subscriber for accounting reasons.
On CleverlyBox the price is attached to the software, not the audience. Free is $0 for 1,000 contacts. Starter is $20/mo for 5,000. Business is $50/mo for 100,000. Between thresholds, growth costs nothing at all.
This is a model, not a quotation. The left column is calculated at $0.60–$0.95 per 100 subscribers per month — the published band across mainstream per-subscriber providers at these volumes. It is not ConvertKit's quoted price and we make no claim about what they charge you today. Take your own invoice, divide by your subscriber count, and see where you sit. The right column is our real list price.
Creator lists accumulate. Lead magnets, giveaways, conference sign-up sheets, that one viral post. A meaningful share of what comes in is mistyped, disposable or long dead — and on a per-subscriber plan, you are paying rent on every one of them.
Not a separate SaaS you upload a CSV to before a big send. Verification is native, and verification status is a segment operator — filter on it, automate on it, exclude on it. Clean the list because it improves deliverability, not because it lowers the bill.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC verified in-app. An IP warm-up engine. Automatic sending pause when bounces or complaints spike — so a bad list does not take your domain down while you sleep. RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe, blacklist checks, and a banned-word scan before you send.
Segment on last opened or clicked within N days, tags, verification status, created date and field matching. “Everyone who has not opened in 120 days” is a segment, not a project.
Sending is included on every paid plan. No AWS console, no setup fee. From the Business tier you may instead attach one of 9 sending providers — Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, SparkPost, Elastic Email, Blastengine, Gmail OAuth, Sendmail or any SMTP — and send under your own reputation at your own cost.
We will not publish ConvertKit's prices or feature matrix as fact — their rate card is theirs and it changes. So the right-hand column is a checklist. Open your account in another tab and work down it.
| Dimension | CleverlyBox | Check on your ConvertKit plan |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing basis | Software. $0 / $20 / $50 / $150 a month. Growth between thresholds is free. | Per subscriber. Divide last month's invoice by your subscriber count, then project it at double the list. |
| List verification | Native. 16 providers. Verification status is a filterable, automatable segment operator. | Any separate verification tool you run before big sends — add its cost to the total. |
| Deliverability | SPF, DKIM, DMARC verified in-app. IP warm-up. Automatic pause on bounce or complaint spikes. RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe. Blacklist and banned-word checks. | What happens automatically if a send starts bouncing at 3am, and whether anyone has to be awake to stop it. |
| Bring your own sender | 9 optional providers from Business: Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, SparkPost, Elastic Email, Blastengine, Gmail OAuth, Sendmail, any SMTP. | Mainstream platforms send on shared infrastructure and do not let you attach your own SES account. Decide whether that matters at your volume. |
| Automation | Graph builder, 12 triggers, branching on open or click, with wait, tag, list copy/move, field update and mid-flow webhook nodes. | Which triggers your tier includes, and whether a flow can call your own systems partway through. |
| A/B tests & AI copy | Up to 5 subject variants, winner chosen automatically on open rate or click rate. AI copy is in the composer on every plan. | How many variants you get, plus any separate writing subscription — add it to the total. |
| Forms & pages | Embeddable forms with double opt-in, plus funnels — landing pages, products and payment gateways. | What is included versus what sits behind an upgrade. |
| Reporting & team | Opens, clicks, geo maps, per-recipient logs, CSV export, and a public report URL needing no login — useful for sponsors. Seats carry per-section permissions. | Whether a sponsor can see the numbers without a seat, and the per-seat cost if you have an editor or a VA. |
ConvertKit built its business by understanding creators better than anyone else, and some of what they offer is not a feature we could ship even if we wanted to. If any of the following is you, stay — and we mean that.
They connect creators with newsletter sponsors and let creators recommend each other's lists. That is a revenue channel, not a software feature — you cannot rebuild it by switching tools, and no comparison table can price it. If your newsletter earns from sponsorship through their network, that income is a very good reason to stay put.
Years of creator-first documentation, a large and generous peer community, and product decisions taken by people who genuinely understand the newsletter business. That is worth real money, and it is not something a feature list captures.
ConvertKit is famously easy to sit down with. We have more surface area — 16 verification providers, 9 sending providers, an IP warm-up engine, agency sub-accounts. If you never want to think about DMARC and just want to write and press send to a list of 900 people, their simplicity is a feature and our depth is overhead.
We are an email platform. We are not a CRM, and there is no SMS, no ads module and no store builder. Our automation conditions branch on open and click rather than arbitrary field logic. And we have no sponsorship marketplace — if that is where your newsletter revenue comes from, the honest advice on this page is to keep it.
Run both in parallel for a fortnight if you want to. A migration you can reverse is a migration you can take calmly.
Export from ConvertKit and bring in the CSV or XLSX. Map fields as you go; we dedupe on the way in, and anything that fails lands in a downloadable error log — so you see exactly what did not import and why, rather than guessing at a row count. The REST API takes contacts too if you would rather script it.
We generate the DKIM, SPF and DMARC records for you. Paste them into DNS, hit verify, and the app confirms each one is live. Do this before the first real send — it is the step that most decides whether your newsletter lands in the inbox or the promotions tab.
Lay your welcome sequence and evergreen flows out in the graph builder — 12 triggers, sends, waits, conditions on open or click, tag and list operations, webhooks if you need them. While you are in there, run a verification pass over the imported list. Most creators are surprised by what a few years of lead magnets left behind.
Not just the sending platform — the verification tool and the AI writer as well. One login, one invoice. That is usually the moment the maths lands.
Probably not yet, and we would rather say so. At that size, per-subscriber pricing is cheap and the ratchet is theoretical. Take our free plan for the 1,000 contacts if you want to try the flow builder and the verification, but do not tear up a working setup for a saving that does not exist yet. Come back when the list is growing and the invoice starts noticing.
If it comes through ConvertKit's own sponsorship network and creator recommendations, then yes — that is theirs, not ours, and we cannot replicate it. Weigh that revenue against the software saving honestly. If the sponsorship income is larger, the answer is easy: stay.
Because we have not audited their current rate card, and publishing a wrong price would be unfair to them and a good reason for you to distrust everything else on this page. We describe the model — per-subscriber billing — which is verifiable on their own site in seconds. Our cost figures are a clearly-labelled model with the assumptions printed beside them. Your invoice is the only authoritative number.
Yes. Every campaign report has a shareable public URL that needs no login — opens, clicks, geo. Send the link with the invoice. No seat, no export, no screenshot.
It is a visual graph, so it looks like the flow it runs. A welcome sequence is a trigger, three sends and two waits — about five minutes. The depth is there when you want it, including branching on opens and clicks and mid-flow webhooks, but nothing forces you to use it. Sending, by the way, is included on every paid plan: no AWS console, no SMTP server, nothing to configure.
Flat pricing, verification and deliverability tooling included — one login for the lot.