SaaS pricing and terms, checked against the official pages — not against other review sites.
The headline price is not the whole price.
Every SaaS tool publishes its prices, limits and conditions on its own pages — but the numbers are rarely defined the same way twice. Stack Tools Lab reads the vendors' pricing pages, help centers and terms, lines the figures up under one definition at a time, and marks each figure with the date it was checked. We start with email and newsletter tools.
Published: November 9, 2026 · Last updated: November 9, 2026 · Facts checked: November 9, 2026
Kit — free plan ceilingFREE10,000 subscribers
beehiiv — free plan ceilingFREE2,500 subscribers
Systeme.io — free plan ceilingFREE2,000 contacts
Free-plan audience ceilings as published on each vendor's official pricing page, checked November 9, 2026. The three numbers are not directly comparable until you read what each vendor counts — Kit counts confirmed, unique subscribers; beehiiv counts unique email addresses; Systeme.io counts contacts. That counting rule is where comparisons usually break, and it is what the first article below works through.
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What this site does
Choosing a tool usually fails at the same three points: the free plan's real ceiling, the definition hidden inside a limit, and the fee that appears only when you start selling. We work on those three.
1. Compare published specsPrices, audience ceilings, sending limits and plan gates, read from the vendors' own pricing and help pages and placed side by side under shared definitions.
2. Read the counting rulesWhat a "subscriber" or "contact" means, when a tier price jumps, and what the vendor says happens when you cross a limit — before you cross it.
3. Follow the cost past the headlineTransaction fees on paid newsletters and products, annual-vs-monthly billing differences, and the price of the first paid step — the figures that decide what a tool actually costs in year one.
One rule we do not bend: we do not describe tools we have not used as if we had. These articles are checks of published terms — what a vendor promises on paper — and they say so on the page. Where a figure could not be confirmed on an official page, it is left out rather than estimated.