Pricing

$10 = 10,000 emails

One price, one unit. You buy credit, and each email you send spends one of it. There is no monthly seat, no subscriber tier, and no plan to be moved between.

You pay before you send

Credit arrives first and is spent afterwards. That ordering is the whole design, and everything below follows from it.

A send that would exceed your balance is refused, never billed. Before an issue goes out we count its recipients and reserve the full amount against your balance. If the balance will not cover it, the send does not start, and we tell you how short you are.

This is a guarantee we made structural rather than promised. There is no code path that could bill you for an overage, because there is no overage to bill: the reservation happens before the first email leaves.

It protects something else too. An issue that runs out of money at recipient 3,000 of 5,000 is worse than one that never starts — there is no clean way to resume it without sending twice to the first three thousand. Reserving the whole send up front makes a half-sent issue impossible.

What a credit is spent on

One email to one subscriber 1 credit
A test send to yourself 1 credit
A recipient the mail service refuses outright Refunded
Subscribers, newsletters, archive pages, RSS No charge

An issue sent to 800 subscribers costs 800 credits — eighty cents. A weekly newsletter at that size spends roughly a third of a $10 top-up in a month.

Unused credit expires monthly

Whatever is left at the end of a calendar month is zeroed. This is the least generous thing on the page, so it belongs on the page rather than in a terms document: buy for the sending you are actually about to do, not for a year of it in advance.

The reason is that a balance which never expires is a liability we would have to carry, and carrying it is what turns one honest price into tiers, minimums and annual commitments. One number stays one number this way.

What happens when you run out

Nothing bad, and nothing automatic. Your list, your drafts, your archives and your subscribers stay exactly as they are. The only thing you cannot do is send, until you top up. There is no dunning email, no failed-payment retry, no service suspended for non-payment — none of that machinery needs to exist when the money arrives first.

What you get for it

What is not in the price, because it is not in the product

Open rates and click rates. There is no tracking pixel in your emails and no rewriting of your links, so we cannot report either number and will not pretend to. Open rates have been largely fictional since Apple Mail began pre-fetching images on its readers' behalf, and a rewritten link is a link that breaks when the rewriter goes away.

What you get instead is what actually happened to each message. That is a smaller set of numbers, and all of them are true. More on why.

Reader-paid subscriptions

Not yet. Charging your readers is a different and much larger problem than charging you for sending, and building it badly would compromise the part above. It is planned, and it is not here.

Not open for signup yet. Letter Kit is still being built, and its first two newsletters are ours. Tell us what you send and we will let you know when accounts open.