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MailerLite Just Raised Prices (June 2026). If You Send Transactional Email, That's a Signal.

2026-10-16 · MailAnvil Team

MailerLite Just Raised Prices (June 2026). If You Send Transactional Email, That's a Signal.

In June 2026, MailerLite changed its pricing structure. The free plan dropped from 500 subscribers / 12,000 emails per month to 250 subscribers / 2,500 emails per month. Paid plans were renamed (Growing Business → Comfort, Advanced → Power) and got more expensive at scale: at 200,000 subscribers, the old Advanced plan cost $738/month — the comparable Power plan now costs $1,007/month. That's +$269 every month, over $3,200/year.

If you're a marketer, this is an annoyance. If you're a developer building a product that sends transactional email, it's a signal you should read carefully.

The trap: your transactional email isn't even on MailerLite

Here's the part that catches people: MailerLite is a marketing email product. Password resets, OTP codes, invoices, booking confirmations — those all belong on MailerSend, MailerLite's separate transactional product. Same company, separate account, separate pricing.

And MailerLite's June 2026 reprice made the split sharper. On the new free plan, API and MCP access no longer include sending — that's paid-plan-only. If your fintech's OTP verification flow was riding on a free tier, it just got walled off.

MailerSend's own pricing: Free 500 emails/month, Hobby $7/mo for 5,000 emails ($1.50 per 1k overage), Starter from $35/mo for 50k. Fine numbers for a global product. But billed in USD, and priced for the global market — not for a bootstrapped startup in Jakarta paying rent in rupiah.

What Indonesian developers actually pay

Run the math at 50,000 emails/month:

Same 50k emails. Less than half the price, billed in IDR, payable via QRIS or GoPay — no international credit card, no FX markup on your company card, no USD invoice your finance team has to reconcile.

At 100k/month: MailerSend scales past Starter pricing; MailAnvil Max is Rp 749rb flat. For a travel-booking platform sending reservation confirmations, a food-delivery app sending order invoices, or a fintech sending OTP verification codes, that gap is real money every single month — and IDR billing means the cost doesn't jump when the exchange rate does.

Price changes are a vendor-risk checklist item

The MailerLite reprice is a textbook case of a broader pattern in 2025–2026: email platforms repricing upward (SES did it in July, MailerLite in June, others before that). When you build on transactional email, your cost base is someone else's pricing decision.

Three things to check about any email API you depend on:

  1. Is transactional a first-class product or an add-on? MailerLite pushes transactional to a separate product with separate billing. That's two accounts, two dashboards, two invoices for one app.
  2. What currency are you billed in? USD billing adds FX exposure that Indonesian startups can't hedge cheaply.
  3. Does the free tier support real development? A free plan where API sending is locked out isn't a dev tier — it's a demo.

The Indonesia-first alternative

MailAnvil is a transactional email API built on Cloudflare Workers + AWS SES, made for Indonesian developers:

Signup to first verified domain to first sent email is minutes, not days.

Bottom line

MailerLite's June 2026 reprice didn't create the cost problem for transactional senders — it just exposed it. If your app sends OTP codes, invoices, or booking confirmations, you're paying per email in a currency that isn't yours, on a product line the vendor treats as a side business.

You have a local option now. Try MailAnvil free at mailanvil.com.