State of SaaS Pricing: Marketing & Sales Tools, Q2 2026

Of the 37 tools we track, 23 ship a real free plan, 6 offer only a time-boxed free trial, and 8 are paid-only with neither. That is a 62% free-tier prevalence, which is higher than we expected before counting.

The clustering matters more than the headline. Every email-marketing tool in our spine has a free plan: beehiiv, buttondown, flodesk, kit, mailchimp, mailerlite, omnisend, substack, with drip the lone holdout (14-day trial). Both calendar-scheduling tools (cal, calendly) are free at the individual tier. Both analytics tools (mixpanel, posthog) are free up to a usage cap. All three transactional-email tools (mailgun, postmark, resend) are free.

The paid-only group is where the pattern breaks: customer-io (essentials starts at $100/mo), demio ($45/mo starter), leadpages ($79/mo grow), postscript ($49/mo minimum spend on starter), surfer-seo ($39/mo discovery), triple-whale ($107.50/mo growth), typeform ($28/mo basic), unbounce ($22/mo starter). Notice the shape: marketing automation, webinars, landing pages, SMS, attribution, paid SEO. These are tools sold primarily to teams that already have budget, not to individuals trialing a hobby project. A free tier in those categories is a customer-acquisition cost the vendor has decided not to pay.

The trial-only middle (close, convert, drip, ghost, intercom, lemlist) is the most interesting cohort. Each is the scaled-up version of a category where free competitors exist (close vs free CRMs, intercom vs crisp, ghost vs substack), and each is betting that 14 days of unrestricted access converts better than a permanently-limited free tier. Whether that bet is paying off is something we cannot judge from pricing pages alone, but the strategic divergence is clear.

Inside email marketing alone, the cheapest paid plan ranges from buttondown's $9 add-on tier and mailerlite's Growing Business at $10/mo all the way to beehiiv's Scale at $43/mo. That is a 4.8x spread for what marketing departments treat as a commodity category.

The full ladder, cheapest paid plan to most expensive paid plan: buttondown $9, mailerlite $10, mailchimp Essentials $13, omnisend Standard $16, flodesk Lite $25, kit Creator $33, drip $39, beehiiv Scale $43. Substack sits outside the ladder entirely because its only plan is free at the platform level and takes 10% of paid subscription revenue forever (more on that below).

We think this spread is not pure noise. The tools clustered at the low end (mailerlite, mailchimp Essentials) are bulk-broadcast products selling on price. The middle (omnisend, flodesk, kit) is selling on category fit: e-commerce, design, creator commerce. The top (drip, beehiiv) is selling on growth tooling and modern editing surface. A buyer who shops on starting price alone will end up at mailerlite. A buyer who shops on what their list actually needs will pay 3x to 4x more and probably get their money back in retention.

Mailchimp's named plans are Free, Essentials at $13/mo, Standard at $20/mo, Premium at $350/mo. Three of those tiers move in $7 increments. The fourth is a 17.5x leap. Premium is the only tier that includes phone support, advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, and the unlimited-seat model that mid-market teams need.

For comparison: customer-io's Essentials-to-Premium jump is 10x ($100/mo to $1,000/mo), close's Solo-to-Scale ladder is 15.4x across four steps ($9 to $139/user/mo), and posthog's Boost-to-Enterprise is 8x ($250 to $2,000/mo). All of those are spread across multiple plan steps. Mailchimp's $20 to $350 happens in one step, with no intermediate offering.

We surface this not because Mailchimp is wrong to draw the line where they draw it, but because it explains why so many of our migration guides start at "mailchimp." Six of our 43 migration guides have mailchimp as the from tool, more than any other slug in the spine. The next-most-common origin is substack at three. When the next plan up is 17.5x your current bill and you do not yet need phone support, you start shopping.

Calendly charges $10/seat/mo at Standard and $16/seat/mo at Teams. Crisp charges a flat $45/mo per workspace at Mini, $95/mo at Essentials, $295/mo at Plus, regardless of seat count (Plus supports 20-plus agents on a single workspace). For a 10-person team, Calendly Teams costs $160/mo while Crisp Plus costs $295/mo. For a 30-person team, Calendly Teams is $480/mo and Crisp Plus is still $295/mo. The lines cross around 18 to 19 seats.

This is not a one-off. We see the same architectural split repeatedly across categories: per-seat (calendly, close, lemlist, intercom on Essential and Advanced), versus flat-per-workspace (cal Teams technically per-seat but with bundled limits, crisp, help-scout's tier system, tally Pro). Four of our 43 migration guides are explicitly tagged "Per-seat to flat" (calendly to cal, intercom to crisp, typeform to tally, help-scout to crisp), and the inverse direction has its own three guides ("Inverse migration" tag, where smaller teams trade flat pricing for per-seat to keep the bill low while the team is small).

The takeaway is direction-of-traffic, not absolute right answer. As a team grows past roughly 15 to 20 seats, every per-seat tool in the stack starts to look expensive against a flat-rate competitor. Below that line, flat-rate looks expensive against a per-seat competitor charging only for the seats that exist. Vendors price for one shape of customer, and the shape changes with growth.

Of the 37 tools, exactly one charges a percentage of customer revenue as its core pricing model: substack, which is free to publish and takes 10% of paid subscription revenue plus Stripe fees. There is no other rev-share model in the spine. Postscript charges per-SMS (usage-based), customer-io charges by tier, mailgun and resend charge by email volume, but none take a percentage of what their customers earn.

The math is easy to do and worth doing. At $1,000/mo of recurring paid-subscription revenue on Substack, the platform fee is $100/mo, $1,200/yr, growing with you. At $10,000/mo, it is $12,000/yr. Compare that to kit Creator at $33/mo, beehiiv Scale at $43/mo, or ghost Starter at $18/mo (all of which support paid subscriptions with zero revenue share, though ghost adds Stripe Connect fees on top). At $1,000/mo of paid-sub revenue, every flat-rate competitor crosses below Substack within the first month of operation.

This is exactly why three of our migration guides have substack as the from tool, all tagged "No revenue share": substack to kit, substack to beehiiv, substack to ghost. It is not coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of a single percentage-based pricing model competing against an entire category of flat-rate alternatives.

The three transactional-email tools in our spine all have 5-tier plan structures (free, three paid, one custom-priced). Mailgun and Resend price the paid tiers by volume: Mailgun goes $15 to $35 to $90, Resend goes $20 to $35 to $90. Both products charge more for higher base allowances, and overage rates fall as the tier rises (resend: $0.90 per 1,000 emails on Pro, dropping toward $0.46 on Scale).

Postmark does something different. Basic is $15/mo, Pro is $16.50/mo, Platform is $18/mo. The price barely moves across paid tiers. What changes is feature scope: Pro adds longer message retention (up to 365 days) and lower overage ($1.30 vs $1.80 per 1,000), Platform adds unlimited custom domains and unlimited users with no volume jump. The volume scaling happens entirely through overage charges layered on the same monthly base.

We point this out because it explains a migration pattern: mailgun-to-postmark in our guides is tagged "Deliverability focus, Compliance retention, Inbound primary," not "cost reduction." Postmark is not the cheapest. But for a small team that needs the message-retention or unlimited-domains features without crossing into a higher volume tier, Postmark's flat-feature model is materially cheaper than Mailgun or Resend's volume-tier model. It is the same product category, priced on a different axis, and that single decision moves which buyers each tool wins.

Of the 43 migration guides we ship, 12 are tagged "Inverse migration." That is the largest single tag in the dataset, larger than "Cost reduction" (10), "Add commerce" (4), "Per-seat to flat" (4), "Creator-focused" (4), "No revenue share" (3), or "Open source" (3).

What "inverse migration" means in our editorial framing: we wrote a guide for the popular direction (kit-to-beehiiv, mailerlite-to-flodesk, calendly-to-cal), and then we wrote the inverse guide because real teams move that way too. Tally-to-typeform, crisp-to-intercom, mailerlite-to-mailchimp, omnisend-to-mailchimp, beehiiv-to-kit, posthog-to-mixpanel, customer-io-to-kit, kit-to-mailerlite, unbounce-to-leadpages, cal-to-calendly, flodesk-to-mailerlite. None of those are typos. Each is a real shape of buyer: someone who tried the cheaper or more modern option and found a specific reason to move back to the legacy player.

The cluster of destinations in our guides is also informative. "kit" is the destination in 5 of the 37 guides, "beehiiv" in 4, "mailerlite" in 3. All three are creator and small-business email tools, all three are flat-rate or near-flat, all three are gaining ground from larger incumbents (mailchimp dominates the from column). But the inverse traffic toward mailchimp, calendly, intercom, and typeform tells us that "creator-tier wins" is too clean a story. The honest version: buyers move to the tool that fits their current shape, and the shape changes as they grow, contract, pivot, or hit a feature wall. The migration economy is symmetric, not directional.

A few patterns we noticed but did not give a full section to:

• Webflow's $14/mo Basic tier is the cheapest paid landing-page plan in our spine, 5.6x cheaper than leadpages's $79/mo Grow. Leadpages does not even ship a free tier. The two tools are sold as direct alternatives, but their pricing pages aim at different buyers entirely.
• Posthog's free-plus-pay-as-you-go tier sits next to a $250/mo Boost tier with nothing between. The model assumes teams either stay on usage-based forever or commit to a flat $250/mo floor, with no $50 or $100 step in between.
• Buffer is the only tool in the spine that prices per-channel ($5/channel/mo on Essentials), which makes it cheap for a single-channel publisher and rapidly expensive for an agency. Their Agency tier is contact-sales precisely because the Essentials math breaks above 10 channels.
• 26 of 37 tools have a custom-priced enterprise tier (`has_custom_enterprise: true`), and 12 of 37 have no contact-sales plan at all, including buttondown, crisp, demio, drip, flodesk, help-scout, intercom, kit, leadpages, mailchimp, substack, and tally. Whether enterprise pricing is the eventual exit ramp or a category-wide habit is something we will track as the dataset grows.

We track pricing by hand. Each tool in our spine has a JSON record with one entry per plan, an anchor monthly USD price, a billing cycle, plan limits where the vendor publishes them, and a captured-at timestamp citing the source URL we read. Anchor prices are normalized to monthly USD cents at the smallest paid step, which is why subscriber-tier products like mailerlite and mailchimp show their entry prices and not their $300/mo at 50,000 contacts prices.

We do not track historical pricing changes in this post. Our pricing-history JSONL log is wired up but currently empty, so any year-over-year claim would be fabricated. When the cron-detected change events accumulate, the next quarterly post will include them; this one does not. All numbers cited above are current as of the captured-at timestamps in the spine, which run from late April 2026 through the publication date of this post.

The 43 migration guides are editorial. We write them only when there is something worth saying about the specific from-to pair beyond a derived pricing diff, which is why the set is exactly 43 and not 37 squared (37 tools, 1,332 possible directed pairs). The tag distribution we cite reflects what we wrote, not what crawls a search query, so treat the migration analysis as a read of our editorial choices, not the broader market.

For the per-page rules behind capture, ranking, editorial copy, affiliate disclosure, and corrections, see the standing methodology page. The full machine-readable dataset behind this post is at /api/tools.json.

If we had to pick one through-line from this read of the data, it is that the marketing and sales tools market in Q2 2026 is not converging on a single pricing model. It is fragmenting deliberately. Per-seat lives next to flat-per-workspace. Subscriber tiers live next to volume tiers next to feature tiers. Free-forever lives next to trial-only next to paid-from-day-one. Substack's revenue-share model is genuinely structurally unique, and three of our migration guides exist primarily to help people leave it.

The buyer-side implication is uncomfortable but useful: there is no universal "right" pricing model in this category, only a pricing model that happens to fit your team's current shape. As your shape changes, the tool that fit you 18 months ago will not fit you anymore, and the migration will be cleaner if you noticed the shape change before the bill did. We will read the spine again in three months.

Want to see what your own stack costs? Open the stack calculator and pick any combination of the 37 tools we track. The total updates as you add and remove rows. No fabricated numbers; usage-based and custom plans are flagged separately.