Moosend Pricing 2026: The Whole-Send Rule Behind $9

Try this pricing puzzle before you read another Moosend price list. You pay $48 a month for Moosend Pro at 5,000 subscribers. A webinar brings in a burst of sign-ups and your list ends the week at 5,001. You send your regular newsletter. What does that newsletter cost?

The intuitive answers are $48 (the plan covers it), $48 plus a few cents for the one extra person, or $64 because you've been bumped to the next tier. Moosend's own documentation gives a different answer. Its help article on subscription plans and credits says that while you stay within your plan's subscriber limit, the plan covers your sending, but "if you exceed your plan's subscriber limit, the additional usage will be charged against your credits." Then it gives its own example: "if you have 10,000 email addresses on your list and want to send a campaign to all of them, the full 10,000 will be deducted from your credit balance."

So the newsletter to 5,001 people costs 5,001 credits, about $5, on top of the $48 you already paid. If you have no credits, the answer is stranger: Moosend's billing FAQ lists "Insufficient credits" and "Need to upgrade your monthly plan" among the reasons a scheduled campaign doesn't get delivered. The newsletter costs nothing because it doesn't go out.

That is the part of Moosend pricing the ladder doesn't show. Moosend sells the same email two ways, by the subscriber and by the send, and the switch between them is all-or-nothing: one subscriber over your tier and the whole campaign is billed in credits, or doesn't go out at all. I call it the whole-send rule. Most of what follows, the price list included, is about where that rule costs you money and where it saves you some.

The price list, checked

Moosend has one self-serve plan, Pro, priced by the number of unique active subscribers. Above it sit Moosend+ (custom: Pro plus add-ons) and Enterprise (sales call). Separately, you can skip the plan and buy email credits. These are the Pro prices from the rendered pricing page on October 8, 2026, per month:

A few things the table doesn't say on its own:

• The yearly price is the default. The page opens on yearly billing ("Save 20% automatically"), so the first number you see at 500 subscribers is $7, not $9. The six-month option saves 15%. Nonprofits get 25% off on top of the yearly discount, according to the pricing FAQ.
• This ladder hasn't moved since at least June 2024. An Internet Archive capture from June 5, 2024 shows the monthly tab with a 15% promo code applied; divide those figures by 0.85 and you get today's monthly column, tier for tier. Captures from May 2025 and from January, May and September 2026 show the same monthly figures. Several price lists that rank well today quote that old promo figure, or a free plan, as current.
• There is no free plan. Moosend closed its Free Forever accounts after January 20, 2022 and launched Pro "starting at $9 per month" the same week, according to a January 17, 2022 post announcing the change and a Hacker News thread from that week. What exists now is a 30-day trial without a card, with "unlimited email sends (for up to 1,000 contacts)". The trial allows one published workflow, and its form and landing page can't be published. The plan card inside a trial account shows the same two publishing limits, and the account header counts your contacts against 1,000.
• You pay for unique addresses. "If the same subscriber appears in multiple lists or segments, you're only billed once." The help center says billing is based on unique active subscribers across all your lists. Mailchimp counts unsubscribed contacts and counts a person once per audience, so a Mailchimp audience total overstates what Moosend would bill.
• Pro is not the whole product. The comparison table leaves transactional emails, "browses any page" and "views any product" automation triggers, custom reports, SSO and a dedicated IP out of Pro; they're add-ons on Moosend+ or included in Enterprise. Pro includes 5 team members.

Payment is by card or PayPal. Pro's sending is uncapped only in the sense the page means: no monthly send limit within your subscriber tier.

Where the ladder bends

Price per subscriber usually falls as a list grows. On Moosend it doesn't fall evenly, and twice it goes backwards. Here is the cost per 1,000 subscribers at each tier's ceiling, monthly billing:

The 8,000-to-10,000 step adds 25% more subscribers for 38% more money ($64 to $88). The 75,000-to-100,000 step adds a third more subscribers for half again the price ($416 to $624). Those two steps are where the ladder bends: if your list is closing in on 8,000 or 75,000, the next step is the expensive one per subscriber.

The other steps worth knowing in dollars: 10,000 to 25,000 is +$72 a month, 25,000 to 50,000 is +$155, and 100,000 to 150,000 is +$312. The first two are large next to what one campaign at that size costs in credits ($10 and $25), which makes them the lines where credits give you the most room. More on that below.

Agencies feel the ladder first, because a client's list can climb two steps in a year. Ricki O., an agency owner who set Moosend up for clients, rated it 3.0 on Capterra in November 2024 and said one client wanted to leave "because of the pricing once their list grew larger." The same review calls the drag-and-drop editor easy to use, so this is a cost complaint, not a product one. If you're setting Moosend up for a client, show them the step after the one they're on before they sign.

The second meter: credits

Credits are Moosend's pay-as-you-go option. One credit is one email to one recipient. They come in four packs on the pricing page: 350,000 credits for $350, 500,000 for $500, 750,000 for $750 and 1,000,000 for $1,000. That is $1 per 1,000 emails at every size, so the only volume discount is that there isn't one. Credits never expire, Moosend notifies you at 80% used, and the credits card advertises "Unlimited Subscribers", automation, forms and landing pages.

The billing screen inside an account puts the unit in six words, under the credit balance: "Each email recipient costs one Credit." Every recipient, not only the ones over your limit. That's the arithmetic the whole-send rule below runs on.

The billing FAQ fills in the details that matter for a budget:

• Bounces cost credits. A bounced email still deducts a credit; the address then moves to a bounced category.
• Automation emails cost credits when you're sending on credits. On a monthly plan, they don't.
• Test emails are free, to up to five addresses.
• You need enough credits for the whole send. Moosend's example: a campaign to 60 recipients with 59 credits won't dispatch.

The $350 entry is the real gate. Whether credits beat Pro on price depends on how many campaigns you send a month. Where Pro gets cheaper, by list size:

Read the first and last columns together. A 500-person list sending monthly would take 700 months, over 58 years, to use the smallest pack. A 100,000-person list burns it in three and a half sends. So credits as a main plan work in a band: lists large enough to use a pack within a year or so, sending fewer campaigns than the middle column. A 10,000-person list sending three times a month uses $30 of credits against $88 for Pro. A 1,000,000-person list sending four times a month spends $4,000 on credits against $5,840 monthly or $4,672 yearly.

Under that band, I wouldn't put a list on credits at all. Take a one-off send to 2,000 people: one month of Pro is $24, and you can cancel afterwards; the smallest credit pack is $350 and covers 175 such sends, which is a bargain only if you're sure you'll make them.

Some senders are that sure. A five-star Trustpilot reviewer in November 2024, mailing about 2,500 subscribers, put it this way: "$350 gets you 350,000 emails you can send. I only have 2500 subscribers and it's lasted me for years and I'm only down to around 200k credits left." That's around 150,000 credits used, or about 60 sends to the whole list. A list that size sits in Pro's 3,000 tier today, at $32 a month or $26 billed yearly. For someone who sends a few times a year and expects to keep doing so, the pack is the cheaper meter by a wide margin. The cost is $350 paid once up front, and that only pays off if you keep sending for years.

The whole-send rule

Now combine the two meters. If you have a Pro plan and credits, the help center describes the order: the plan covers you "as long as you stay within its limit for active subscribers". Past the limit, the entire campaign draws on credits. If you have no credits, the campaign is held, and the in-app banner tells you to upgrade.

That gives you three ways to handle a list that has just crossed a line: stop sending, pay for each campaign in credits, or upgrade. The bridge between paying per campaign and upgrading depends on which line you crossed:

Three readings.

The rule ignores your plan. At 10,001 subscribers on the 10,000 plan, a campaign costs $10 in credits while the $88 you paid this month covers none of it. The plan isn't partly used; it's switched off for that send.

The bridge shrinks as you grow past the line. The table uses a list one subscriber over. At 15,000 on the 10,000 plan, each campaign is $15, and credits only beat the +$72 upgrade below 4.8 campaigns a month. At 20,000, below 3.6.

For a weekly sender, it only pays at a few lines. Run the math at four campaigns a month across all twenty tier lines, and credits beat the upgrade at five of them: just over 500 and 1,000 (where the $350 pack would take years to use), 3,000 up to 4,000 subscribers, 10,000 up to 18,000, and 25,000 up to 38,750. Those last two are the +$72 and +$155 steps from the previous section: large enough next to a $10 or $25 campaign that paying by the send stays cheaper for a while. Just over 50,000, a weekly sender should upgrade straight away; two campaigns in credits already cost about what the upgrade does.

A November 2025 Trustpilot reviewer, who gave two stars and called support nice, met the limit on a brand-new account after paying an outside service to clean the list, as support had advised: "so i had to upgrade for $24 on moosend (with no 30 day free trial as advertised btw, i was charged immediately)". A list over 1,000 contacts is already past what the trial covers.

Upgrading is the clean exit. The help center says an upgrade raises your limit right away "with a prorated charge applied to your next bill". The subscriber count that decides all this can take 5 to 10 minutes to update after you import or clean a list.

Downgrading goes the other way, slowly: "The downgrade to your plan will take effect at the start of the next billing cycle, and please note that prorated adjustments will not be applied." On monthly billing, that's a few weeks. On yearly billing, it's the rest of the year.

The credit-pack safety net

One way to protect a launch on Moosend is to keep a credit pack in the account, so that a sign-up surge near a tier line never stalls a campaign. Credits don't expire, so the pack sits there as insurance. For most lists I wouldn't do it.

The whole-send rule is why. The net doesn't catch the 50 extra subscribers; it pays for the whole list, every campaign, until you upgrade or clean the list. Just over 50,000, two campaigns cost $100 against a $101 upgrade. Just over 100,000, three campaigns cost $300 against a $312 upgrade. The pack doesn't make the launch cheaper; it postpones the upgrade decision while draining at full list size, and the first warning is the 80% notification.

Under 10,000, the net is out of proportion: $350 held against an $8, $16 or $24 step is money parked for years.

What I'd say now: if your list sits between 10,000 and roughly 18,000 or between 25,000 and roughly 38,750, and you send about weekly, a pack is a fair bridge for a month or two. Anywhere else, decide before the launch whether you'll upgrade, and do it the moment the count crosses. The upgrade is prorated, so doing it the day you cross costs only the rest of that billing cycle at the higher price.

Yearly billing and the 60-day clause

Yearly billing saves real money at every tier. At 10,000 subscribers, 12 months on the monthly price is $1,056 and the yearly price is $840, a $216 difference. It also locks three things in for the year.

Quantities. Moosend's terms of service (last updated June 2025) say "fees paid are non-refundable, and quantities purchased cannot be decreased during a relevant subscription term." With the downgrade rule above, a list you clean from 10,000 down to 8,000 a month after paying yearly keeps the 10,000 price until renewal. The yearly gap between those two tiers is $228 ($840 vs $612).

Renewal notice. The same terms say subscriptions renew automatically "unless either party gives the other written notice (email acceptable) at least 60 days before the end of the relevant subscription term." The help center, meanwhile, describes a cancel button under Billing: "Your cancellation will be effective at the end of your current, paid term." The two descriptions don't contradict each other outright, but they're not the same promise, and if they ever conflict, the terms are what you agreed to. A Trustpilot reviewer in February 2026 described the case you want to avoid: "My business closed in November and I cancelled my subscription then. Skip to today, 3 months later I've been billed for another year because the cancellation didn't go through on their end… they're refusing to give a refund." I can't tell from outside what went wrong in that account. I can tell that "non-refundable" and "60 days" are in the contract.

Price changes. The terms let Moosend amend the pricing plan "at its sole discretion at any time" and make it "your responsibility to check the Pricing Plan for any such updates." The ladder above has been stable for over two years; the contract doesn't promise it will stay that way. When Free Forever closed in 2022, one Hacker News commenter read it as a warning that "Moosend doesn't honor its contracts." That's a harsh reading of a free plan's end, but the clause above gives Moosend the same freedom over a paid one.

One more clause sits in the trial. The pricing FAQ says that after your trial, "Your account and all your data stay intact. You'll regain full access as soon as you upgrade." The terms, in capitals, say data entered during a free trial "WILL BE PERMANENTLY LOST UNLESS CUSTOMER PURCHASES A SUBSCRIPTION". The FAQ describes what happens; the terms describe what Moosend is allowed to do. A 2022 reviewer, after a trial: "after that trial I can no longer access any data. MY data is now behind a paywall."

A wall instead of an invoice

Every tool in this category has to decide what happens when you outgrow your plan mid-month. The three I've compared on this site send you a bill. GetResponse adds a List Extension Fee each billing cycle until you're back under. systeme.io upgrades a paid plan automatically on the fourth day over its limits; I covered both in systeme.io vs GetResponse. MailerLite moves you to a bigger tier for the cycle when you pass its monthly email cap, as I explained in GetResponse vs MailerLite.

Moosend, with no credits in the account, stops the campaign. I'd rather hit a wall than get a surprise invoice; a wall never charges you for something you didn't approve. But a wall on launch day costs more than any invoice, because the email that doesn't go out is the launch email you planned the month around. The trade is fair only if you know the wall is there, and none of the price lists I read before writing this mentions it.

The ownership question sits behind the policy. Constant Contact acquired Moosend from Sitecore on June 6, 2025, according to the press release. Moosend's help center now runs on Constant Contact's knowledge-base platform, and the terms are dated the same month as the deal. The price ladder hasn't changed since, as far as the Archive captures show. Support is a different story in at least one account: a September 2026 Trustpilot reviewer wrote, "Their customer support used to be fantastic, but plummeted since they were acquired by ConstantContact." One review isn't a trend, and the ownership change before this one went down well with at least one user: in 2022 a Hacker News commenter listed Moosend among products that had "remained great after being bought out/got investment". What else the 2025 sale changed, and what it left alone, I sorted out by date in my Moosend review.

Gaps in what I could verify

• Automation emails over the limit. The FAQ says automation emails deduct credits when you send on credits and don't on a monthly plan. It doesn't say what happens to a running automation when a plan account is over its limit: whether those emails draw credits, pause, or keep going. I couldn't confirm it.
• Deliverability. I haven't tested inbox placement, and price doesn't tell you anything about it.
• Credit pricing above 1,000,000. The page lists packs up to 1,000,000 credits; larger volumes aren't priced publicly.
• Inside the app. I opened a Moosend trial account on October 8, 2026 and read its billing screens without importing a list or sending anything. They agree with the public page on how credits are counted and on the 15% and 20% discounts, but nothing I found in the account mentions going over a plan's subscriber limit. The whole-send rule rests on the help center and the billing FAQ; an empty trial can't hold a campaign or deduct a credit, so I haven't watched it happen.

My Moosend price rules

Before a launch on Moosend, check two numbers: the unique active subscriber count against the tier ceiling, and the credit balance. Everything above comes down to those two.

1. Know your distance to the next line. If a launch could take you across it, decide in advance: upgrade or bridge.
2. Bridge only at the steep steps. Credits make sense as a short bridge just past 10,000 or 25,000, for a weekly sender. Past 50,000 or 100,000, upgrade.
3. Don't buy the $350 pack for a one-off send to a small list. Under 10,000 subscribers, one month of Pro costs $9 to $88; the pack pays off only if you'll really make the 35 to 700 sends it covers at those sizes.
4. Take yearly billing only for a list you expect to keep or grow. The 20% saving is real; the downgrade waits for renewal and fees aren't refundable.
5. Read a yearly renewal date as 60 days earlier than it is. That's the notice period the terms set for stopping auto-renewal.

Moosend's ladder still starts low: $9 a month at 500 subscribers, $7 billed yearly. The whole-send rule doesn't change that. It changes what the ladder costs on the days your list moves.

Start a 30-day Moosend trial (no card; sends to up to 1,000 contacts).

FAQ

Does Moosend have a free plan in 2026? No. The Free Forever plan closed in January 2022. There is a 30-day trial without a card, limited to 1,000 contacts and one published workflow. Export anything you build during the trial before it ends: the terms say trial data can be permanently lost if you don't buy a subscription.

What does Moosend cost for 10,000 subscribers? $88 a month on monthly billing, $75 a month billed every six months, or $70 a month billed yearly ($840 a year), as of October 8, 2026.

What happens if my list goes over my Moosend plan? With credits in the account, your next campaign is charged in credits for every recipient, not just the extra ones. With no credits, the campaign isn't delivered until you upgrade or buy credits. To avoid it, remove inactive addresses you no longer want to mail before a big send, wait 5 to 10 minutes for the count to update, and upgrade before the send if you're still over. The upgrade is prorated.

Do Moosend credits expire? No. Credits never expire, according to the pricing page and the terms ("unless otherwise indicated"). The smallest pack is 350,000 credits for $350.

How do I cancel Moosend without being charged for another year? Use the cancel option under Billing, and also send written notice by email at least 60 days before your renewal date, which is what the terms require for stopping auto-renewal. Keep the confirmation.

Is Moosend cheaper billed yearly? Yes, 20% cheaper than monthly; the six-month option is 15% cheaper. Fees aren't refundable and a downgrade waits until the next billing cycle, so yearly suits a list you don't expect to shrink.