beehiiv Pricing 2026: Free, Lite and Pro Plans Explained

beehiiv changed its pricing on 1 October 2026. Launch, Scale and Max are gone, replaced by Free, Lite and Pro, and most of the beehiiv pricing pages you will find still quote the old names or the old numbers. This page uses only beehiiv's own pricing page and help centre, checked on 11 October 2026.

beehiiv pricing plans at a glance

beehiiv has four plans. Free and Enterprise are simple. Lite and Pro are priced by how many subscribers you have, so the figures below are the starting prices at 1,000 subscribers. The full price ladder is further down.

Seats are 1 on Free, 2 on Lite, 10 on Pro and unlimited on Enterprise. Every plan, including Free, now gets the website builder, a podcast, a community and digital products. What changes between plans is the limits, and whether you can earn money through beehiiv at all. That second part is the real dividing line: on Free you can grow a list, but paid subscriptions, the Ad Network and paid recommendations start on Lite.

What changed on 1 October 2026

Tyler Denk announced the new structure on 1 October in a post on the beehiiv blog. New customers pay the new prices straight away. Existing customers have a grace period, covered below.

Launch, Scale and Max are now Free, Lite and Pro

Your content and workflows carry over to the new plan. Nothing is deleted in the move.

When existing customers pay the new price

• Nothing changes before your first renewal on or after 1 November 2026. That is the date to watch, not 1 October.
• Monthly billing: beehiiv gives at least 30 days' notice before the first bill at the new price.
• Annual billing: you keep your current price to the end of your term, then move to the new plan automatically.
• Discounts carry over. They cannot be stacked, and a new offer such as a Black Friday deal replaces the old one. A discount is also removed if a payment fails and the plan is cancelled.
• Re-tiering: if your list had grown past the tier you were billed for, you are moved to the tier that matches your subscriber count, billed from that same renewal.

That last point is the one that catches people. If you have been sitting on an old tier while your list grew, the renewal bill can jump for two reasons at once: the new plan price and the correct tier.

What got bigger, and what got smaller

• Pro now goes to 250,000 subscribers. In beehiiv's words, self-serve plans used to force you into Enterprise at 100,000.
• Free gained Community, alongside the website, podcast and digital products.
• More AI on every plan. The pricing page lists it as limited on Free, elevated on Lite and five times Lite on Pro, without giving credit numbers.
• Team seats are now 2 on Lite and 10 on Pro. Free has 1 and Enterprise is unlimited.
• Boosts are now called paid recommendations, and Email Boosts and Direct Links have been retired.
• A bigger yearly discount. How big it really is turns out to be less than the headline, as the yearly section shows.

beehiiv has not published the old Scale and Max prices at each tier alongside the new ones, so this page does not quote a before and after. If you are on a legacy plan, the reliable way to see your new price is the plan change screen in your own billing settings.

beehiiv pricing by subscriber count

This is the full ladder from beehiiv's pricing slider. The tier is the bucket you pay for: a list of 6,000 sits in the up to 10,000 tier.

Yearly prices are per month, paid as one bill of twelve times that figure, so Lite at $49 is $588 a year. "No" means Lite is not sold at that size.

The gap between Lite and Pro is $50 a month at 1,000 subscribers and $100 a month at 10,000. It keeps widening as the list grows, to $230 a month at 100,000. On the pricing page, the Free card shows as unavailable from 5,000 subscribers up, and Enterprise always shows as custom.

How beehiiv counts your subscribers

• Active subscribers only, across every publication in your workspace. Two newsletters with 3,000 and 2,000 subscribers count as 5,000.
• Auto-upgrade moves you up a tier when you cross a limit and charges a prorated amount for the rest of the period.
• With auto-upgrade switched off, beehiiv says sends to your subscribers may be delayed when you go over your plan limits. That is worse than a slightly higher bill, so leave it on unless you watch your count closely.

The Free plan: what you get and where it stops

beehiiv's Free plan is free forever and needs no credit card. It is a real plan rather than a trial, and for a newsletter under 2,500 subscribers that is not trying to make money yet, it covers a lot.

What the Free plan includes

• Up to 2,500 subscribers and unlimited email sends
• The website builder at its basic level, with 1 custom page
• 1 publication, 1 team seat and 1 guest author
• A podcast with up to 5,000 downloads a month
• A community with up to 5,000 notifications a month
• 1 digital product, with no platform fee on its sales
• API access, the welcome email and 30 days of analytics

What Free does not include

• Paid subscriptions. You cannot charge readers on Free.
• The Ad Network and paid recommendations. Both start on Lite.
• Custom automations. The welcome email works, but sequences and other live automations need a paid plan.
• New custom domains. Your newsletter and site stay on a beehiiv address.
• Removing beehiiv branding. That is a Pro feature.

What happens when you reach 2,500 subscribers

beehiiv's help centre says that once your subscriber count reaches your plan's limit, you need to upgrade to the next plan type to keep growing. From Free, that means Lite or Pro. Lite's up to 2,500 tier costs $79 a month, or $828 a year, if you want paid features before you hit the limit. Once you are past 2,500, Lite's up to 5,000 tier is $109 a month, or $95 a month billed yearly.

Free is for growing a list. The moment you want that list to earn, you are on Lite.

Lite: who it is for and the limits that matter

Lite is the plan that turns monetisation on. It starts at $59 a month for 1,000 subscribers, or $49 a month billed yearly, and is sold up to 100,000. It adds paid subscriptions with one paid tier, the Ad Network, paid recommendations, custom domains for the newsletter and website, the advanced website builder, A/B testing, polls and surveys, coupons and promo codes, metered paywalls, custom HTML and publishing to segments.

The limits that matter in practice:

The hard ceiling is list size. Lite stops at 100,000 subscribers, and beyond that the slider shows it as unavailable, so the only self-serve option is Pro.

Pro: what the extra money buys

Pro starts at $109 a month at 1,000 subscribers, or $95 a month billed yearly, and is sold up to 250,000. Over Lite it adds:

• No beehiiv branding on your newsletter and site
• Unlimited paid tiers, plus paid trials and group subscriptions
• A sponsorship storefront for selling your own sponsor placements
• Unlimited live automations, with click-triggered automations, A/B splits and dynamic content
• RSS to Send, audio newsletters, newsletter lists and the Send API
• Order bumps, upsells and custom checkout pages for digital products, unlimited products, and webinars and coaching as product types
• 10 team seats, 10 publications and unlimited guest authors
• Unlimited analytics history, unlimited webhooks and redirects, custom robots.txt and AI bot control
• 50,000 podcast downloads a month, priority support and five times Lite's AI usage

Most of that list only matters once a newsletter is a business with more than one person, more than one offer or more than one publication. For a solo writer with one paid tier, Pro is mostly paying for branding removal.

Lite vs Pro: which one do you need?

Upgrading later is straightforward. In beehiiv it sits under Settings, then Billing & Plan, then Change, where a slider picks your tier and a toggle picks monthly or yearly. Downgrades take effect at the end of the billing period, so starting on Lite and moving up when you hit a limit costs you nothing extra.

Enterprise: when it makes sense

Enterprise is priced on a call and beehiiv says it is available at every subscriber tier. It adds SSO and SAML, dedicated sending IPs, audit logs, granular role permissions, unlimited seats, a customer success manager and concierge onboarding. It is for publishers who need those controls, whatever their size, and for most independent creators it is not the plan to think about.

Monthly vs yearly: the real saving

beehiiv's pricing FAQ says yearly billing saves up to 20%, and the announcement says up to two months free. On the prices the slider actually shows, the saving is smaller and it varies by tier.

Across every published tier the saving runs from 12.7% to 16.9%. That is still worth having once you know beehiiv is staying, but it is not 20% anywhere on the current slider.

There is a trade-off besides commitment. Monthly plans can be paused for up to 30 days, which helps if you take a break between seasons. Annual plans cannot be paused, although you can move to a lower tier or to Free.

beehiiv fees: what beehiiv takes and what Stripe takes

The plan price is not the only cost, but beehiiv's fee story is simpler than most.

Paid subscriptions and digital products

beehiiv takes 0% of paid subscription revenue and 0% of digital product sales. Stripe still charges its standard processing fee, which beehiiv quotes as 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. beehiiv only quotes that one rate, and Stripe's own pricing varies by country and card type, so check Stripe's page for your country if you sell internationally.

For comparison, beehiiv's own pricing FAQ points out that Substack takes 10% of every subscription. That is beehiiv's claim about a competitor, so check Substack's current terms if it decides things for you.

Ad Network payouts

• Open to anyone on Lite or above who is actively sending on beehiiv.
• Ads pay on a CPM or CPC basis, with up to 3 ads per post.
• Earnings land in your beehiiv Wallet on the 20th of each month, for the month before.
• Payouts need Stripe Express. PayPal and Wise are not supported, and Stripe Express is not available in every country.

The plan cards show "Ad monetization: Avg. $39/mo". That is beehiiv's own figure and it does not say how it is calculated, so treat it as marketing rather than a forecast. beehiiv also does not publish what share of ad revenue it keeps.

Paid recommendations, formerly Boosts

Paid recommendations let you pay other newsletters for each subscriber they send you, and earn by recommending others. beehiiv builds a 20% fee into the cost per acquisition: if you pay $2.50 per subscriber, the publication that sent them receives $2.00. You need at least $20 in your Wallet, plus Stripe Identity verification and Stripe Express.

What you will really pay: five examples

Here is the bill at five common list sizes, using only the prices on beehiiv's slider.

And one paid newsletter, to show where the fees land. Say you have 200 paying readers at $5 a month. That is $1,000 a month before fees. beehiiv takes nothing. Stripe takes about $89: 2.9% of $1,000 is $29, plus 200 payments at $0.30 is $60. On Lite at the up to 10,000 tier, monthly, you keep about $772 after the plan and Stripe.

Free trial and the Upmish partner offer

When you create a beehiiv account you can start a 14-day free trial of Pro features, and no credit card is needed. During the trial your account is on Free with temporary access to Pro features, with some limits: 1 post per day, 10 live automations, 1 live digital product and 1 guest author.

Some things are not in the trial at all: the Ad Network, recommendations, the 0% take rate on paid subscriptions, team seats, beehiiv's Slack community, branding removal, extra publications and the Send API. If you do not upgrade when the 14 days are up, you stay on Free and keep your content.

Through our link, beehiiv adds 20% off your first 3 months on a paid plan once the trial ends. On Lite at the up to 10,000 tier, monthly, that takes $139 down to $111.20 for three months, a saving of $83.40. beehiiv's partner terms say the discount applies to any paid plan for the first 3 months, but they do not say how it works with yearly billing, so check the price at checkout before you choose yearly.

Which beehiiv plan should you choose?

How beehiiv's price compares

The headline difference with Substack is the business model. Substack takes a cut of your paid subscriptions, which beehiiv puts at 10%. beehiiv charges a monthly plan and takes 0%. On the 200 readers at $5 example above, a 10% cut would be $100 a month, while Lite runs from $59 to $469 a month depending on list size. The more paid revenue you make, the better a flat plan looks.

Kit is the other name that comes up when people price newsletter tools. Its plans are not covered on this page, so compare Kit's own pricing page against the beehiiv tier you need here rather than relying on someone else's table.

If you want funnels, courses and email in one account rather than a newsletter platform, our Systeme.io review covers a free plan built around that. For what dedicated email automation costs, see Kartra vs ActiveCampaign.

Common questions