GetResponse Free Plan (2026): The Account You Keep on Day 15

On September 18, 2025, GetResponse's pricing page invited visitors to "Try all features with a free 30-day premium access period." An archived copy from October 15, 2025, has the same sentence with one change: "a free 14-day premium access period."

That edit matters more than the 500-contact number reviews lead with. GetResponse Free is a permanent plan, but it comes in two parts. For the first 14 days you get much of the paid product. From day 15 you get what GetResponse calls the free version, and that's the plan you'd actually be keeping. This page describes day 15, using GetResponse's own lists of what stops and what stays.

Before you sign up: From day 15, GetResponse Free is a newsletter you send by hand, with no scheduling, to at most 500 contacts, within 2,500 messages a month. Removed and unconfirmed contacts count toward the 500 and the limit can't be reset. Automations switch off, message reports and the support chat disappear, and you keep one form and one landing page that goes offline at 1,000 visits a month. It suits a small, occasional newsletter. If you need a welcome email or any numbers, plan to pay or pick another free plan.

Day 1 and day 15, side by side

GetResponse's help article "Can I try GetResponse before I buy?" lists the limits during the premium period and then, item by item, what you can and can't do once it ends. This table puts the two lists next to each other.

Two rows deserve a second look. The support row comes straight from the help article: on day 15 "You won't be able to open up the chat window to talk to the Customer Success Team" and "You won't have access to email support form." And the reports row: "You won't have access to the message reports on a Free plan." The article says you'll still see contact statistics and landing-page statistics, but not how a newsletter did.

What a day-15 account is for

Read the "You'll be able to" lines on their own and a clear plan comes out of them. You can collect people through one form or popup and one landing page, keep up to 500 of them, import and export them, sort them into lists, and send them a newsletter you write in the drag-and-drop editor and send right away. That's the whole loop.

So I read GetResponse Free as a tool for one job: a newsletter that a person sends by hand, to a list that stays under 500, from one signup point. A monthly update to a club, a shop's occasional news email, a writer's first few hundred readers. It isn't a tool for anything that sends while you sleep. A lead magnet that should arrive the minute someone signs up, a three-email welcome series, a reminder before a launch, a newsletter queued for Tuesday morning: all of those need either the premium period or a paid plan.

The badge stays on every message in both periods, and on day 15 you lose the predesigned templates and HTML, so every newsletter starts from the plain editor.

How far 2,500 messages stretch

GetResponse's message limit is 2,500 a month on Free, in both periods. During the premium period, that one allowance covers newsletters, autoresponders and automation messages together; from day 15 only newsletters go out, so they get all of it. Confirmation emails don't count. The help article also says the "Calculation period starts with the first message sent," so your month runs from your first send, not from the 1st.

What 2,500 buys depends on how many people you send to:

Weekly fits at every list size the plan allows, but only just at the top. A month has four or five sending days for a weekly newsletter, and five sends to 500 people is exactly 2,500. There's nothing left that month for a correction or a resend. Twice a week is a different plan: eight to ten sends a month caps the list at 312, 277 or 250 people.

If a send runs past the limit, it doesn't wait for next month. "Sending will be interrupted according to the limit of usage," the help article says, and "the recipients over the limit will not receive the messages." A newsletter scheduled during the premium period that runs into the cap is discontinued, too.

Contacts count on the way in

The 500 isn't a count of who's on your list today. GetResponse's Free description says "the unconfirmed and removed contacts do count toward the list size," and the limits section adds that inactive contacts are included and that "It is not possible to reset the limit."

That changes how fast a free account fills. Someone who signs up through a double opt-in form and never clicks the confirmation link takes one of your 500 places. So does someone you remove after a bounce, and, as I read "removed" and "inactive," someone who unsubscribes. Cleaning the list doesn't hand those places back. The help center doesn't say whether removed contacts ever stop counting, so I'd plan on the 500 meaning signups since the account opened rather than people you can email.

Past 500, new signups go to the Contact queue. On Free, "all contacts added via any method will go straight to the Contact queue," and if you don't upgrade, they're "removed from the Contact queue upon reaching 32 days." GetResponse says it will notify you before they go. Upgrading moves them onto your list.

Four clocks and two one-way doors

A day-15 account has several timers running at once, and two decisions that can't be reversed.

Day 14. The premium period ends 14 days "from the moment you set up your Free account," not from your first send. If you sign up to look around and come back three weeks later, the trial is already over.

32 days in the queue. Each contact past the 500th waits 32 days for an upgrade, then is deleted.

90 days of not using it. GetResponse's Terms say that if you don't use a Free account "for 90 consecutive days, it will be disabled," with 30 days to restore it by contacting Customer Support. That's 120 days from your last use to losing the account. The Terms don't define "use," and a day-15 account has no chat window or support form, so the route back is unclear to me. I'd export the list before any long break.

A rolling month for messages. The 2,500 resets on a cycle that starts with your first send.

The first one-way door is the account itself. The Terms say "You may create only one Free Account," so the 14 premium days are a one-time test. Decide what you want to try (a welcome sequence, a webinar, the website builder) before you open the account, not after.

The second door is upgrading. Once you pay, the Free account ends, and GetResponse's free-trial help article answers the question of going back with a flat no. One user on X, explaining in November 2025 why GetResponse failed their checklist, put that rule first: "GetResponse won't allow you to downgrade from a paid plan if you want." So upgrading during the 14 days to keep a workflow running is a decision about the long term, not a trial extension.

The premium days do win some people over. A Reddit user in r/Newsletters, still inside the trial, wrote: "Im using though still on free trial, Im happy with what they offer, many tools to use apart from newsletter, I think Ill stay but thinking which plan to upgrade to". That's the decision this section is about, made while every tool is still switched on. If that's where you are, I'd price the plan against the workflows you actually built during those days, because those are what stop on day 15.

Where GetResponse's own pages disagree

GetResponse describes Free in three places (the pricing/free page, the help center and the Terms), and they don't line up on four points.

• Reports. The free-plan page lists "Track key email marketing metrics" under email marketing. The help article says a day-15 account has no message reports. The page doesn't say the metrics are a premium-period feature.
• The contact limit during the trial. The free-plan page says you can "add up to 500 contacts during the first 14 days." Its own FAQ, further down, says "you can add up to 1,000 contacts during the first 14 days." The help center says 500, with no exception for the first 14 days. I'd treat 500 as the limit.
• Webinar recordings. The help article allows one 30-minute recording during the 14 days. The free-plan page says "Recordings and on-demand webinars are not available."
• Sending. The page's search description reads "free email marketing software with unlimited sends." Every limit list on the same page and in the help center says 2,500 a month. The help center saves "sending unlimited messages" for after you upgrade.

Pages still describing day 1

The 30-to-14 change explains some of the stale numbers, but not all of them.

• emailtooltester (updated August 5, 2026) says the free plan "offers a 30-day trial of premium features," the length before October 2025.
• Email Software Insights (modified September 24, 2026) describes the post-trial account and still adds: "But you still get 24/7 support." The help center says a day-15 account can't open chat or the email form.
• innovatehubfinance (April 1, 2026) calls its guide the permanent free tier "not the trial," then lists "basic automation workflows" and "a website builder with custom domain support." On day 15, workflows are switched off and the website builder is unavailable.
• SendX (June 29, 2026) lists the free plan with "a landing page, a website builder, and signup forms."
• Style Factory (August 27, 2026) has the 14 days right, but compares GetResponse Free with "Mailchimp's 1,000" emails. Mailchimp's compare-plans page now limits Free to 250 contacts and at most 500 sends a month.

On X, promotional posts still carry the old length. One from November 2025, which labels itself an affiliate link, offers a "30-day free trial." In September 2026 another promised "25 days Free Trial." A copy of GetResponse's pricing text posted in June 2025 shows where the 30 came from: "free 30-day premium access." Only one post I found described the current plan, in October 2026: "scheduling and automations switch off after the first 14 days."

Leaving: what it costs and what comes back

The smallest paid tier holds 1,000 contacts, so contact 501 means Starter at $19 a month, or $15.58 a month billed yearly ($186.96 for the year, which GetResponse shows as "save up to $41 a year"). Upgrading lifts the day-15 limits to the extent the new plan includes each feature, and moves queued contacts onto the list. Some integrations come back as they were and others need setting up again; the help article lists which.

If what you need on day 15 is a welcome email, Free won't send one, and that's the most common reason to leave. Some free plans elsewhere still run one; I ranked them all by what the first paid month costs once you outgrow them, which is the number to compare before moving a list twice. GetResponse's own full price list is in my GetResponse pricing guide.

Questions the help pages leave hanging

• Reports in the premium period. The trial-limits list doesn't mention message reports either way.
• Whether removed contacts ever stop counting toward the 500.
• What "use" means for the 90-day rule, and how a day-15 account contacts support to restore.
• 500 or 1,000 in the first 14 days. GetResponse's free-plan page says both.
• Whether the 2,500 count resets when the premium period ends, since its month starts with your first send.

I didn't open a GetResponse account for this page, so everything here is GetResponse's documentation, not a screen I saw.

Who should stay past day 15

• Stay on Free if you send a newsletter by hand, at most weekly, to 500 people or fewer, from one form or landing page, and you don't need open or click numbers.
• Upgrade to Starter if you need a welcome email, scheduled sends or reports, and you're sure you won't want Free back. For a 1,000-contact list that means $19 monthly; see the GetResponse plan page my link opens.
• Pick another free plan if a free welcome email matters more than staying on GetResponse, and check its exit bill in the ranking above before you import. If you're leaving GetResponse for good, I priced each alternative by the GetResponse feature it replaces.
• Use the 14 days on purpose. You get one Free account. List what you want to test before you sign up.

FAQ

Is GetResponse Free really free forever? Yes. The Terms describe 14 days of fuller access, after which "you may still use your Free Account on an ongoing basis but with limited features." It needs no card. An account unused for 90 days in a row is disabled.

Does GetResponse Free include automation? Only during the first 14 days. After that, workflows are switched off and autoresponders stop. You can still build and save drafts.

How many emails can I send on GetResponse Free? 2,500 messages a month, counted from your first send. That's five newsletters to a full 500-contact list.

Do unsubscribed contacts count toward the 500? GetResponse says removed and unconfirmed contacts count, and the limit can't be reset.

Can I go back to Free after upgrading? No. GetResponse's help center rules it out, and you can only have one Free account.

What does leaving GetResponse Free for a paid plan cost? Starter is the first step: $19 monthly at 1,000 contacts, or $186.96 billed yearly. Upgrading lifts the day-15 limits to the extent the new plan includes each feature and moves queued contacts onto the list.