EmailOctopus pricing and review

Reachkit makes a cold email tool, a different job from EmailOctopus’s newsletters to people who signed up. Every price here was checked in October 2026 on EmailOctopus’s own pages, or credited to the review site that reported it.

EmailOctopus pricing starts at $0 on Starter and $9 a month for Pro billed yearly, and after that the bill follows how many subscribed contacts you store. Prices are in USD, excluding tax, from emailoctopus.com/pricing as of October 2026.

• Starter (free): 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, with no time limit and no card. Emails carry EmailOctopus branding, reports last 30 days, and you get 1 user, 1 landing page, 1 form and 3 automations of up to 5 steps. Chat support covers the first 30 days only.
• Pro: from $9 a month billed yearly, or $10 month to month. Branding goes, reports are kept, and landing pages, forms and users are unlimited.
• Over 500,000 subscribers: “contact us for a quote.”

The pricing page shows only the entry tier, so the other yearly prices come from EmailOctopus’s own October 2026 blog post and the tier sizes, caps and monthly prices from Tooltester, read in August 2026. That post puts Pro’s email allowance at 10 times your list size. Nonprofits get 20% off for life.

How you’re counted: unsubscribed, bounced and complained contacts don’t count, but each list is separate, so one person on two lists counts twice. Pass your tier and you move up “immediately”; on a yearly plan you can’t drop a tier mid-year (billing help).

EmailOctopus Connect sends through your own Amazon SES account instead. Its pricing page lists Starter as free and Pro from $8 a month billed yearly, both with emails marked “Unlimited”. Amazon bills you separately: EmailOctopus’s help center says about $0.10 per 1,000 emails, while new SES accounts default to a $0.16 plan.

What a typical setup costs (my math): a weekly newsletter to 1,000 subscribers is about 4,300 emails a month, inside the 10,000 cap, so $12 a month billed yearly.

EmailOctopus sends email to people who asked for it. You import contacts or collect them with its forms and landing pages, sort them with lists, tags and segments, and send campaigns from a drag-and-drop editor, your own HTML or 100+ templates. Automations cover welcome and drip sequences, including birthday triggers.

Mail is sent by EmailOctopus itself on the standard product, or from your Amazon SES account on Connect, where dedicated IPs bought from Amazon are possible. EmailOctopus doesn’t host or warm inboxes.

Every new account is reviewed before campaigns can go out. The acceptable use policy requires permission or another lawful basis, bars anyone who hasn’t asked to hear from you, and bans bought, rented and scraped lists.

AI and building on it: there’s no AI writing assistant as of October 2026, only a help-center chatbot. The v2 API manages lists, contacts and tags and can start an automation, but campaigns are created in the dashboard. There’s no official MCP server, only third-party ones such as Composio’s.

Strengths

• A big free plan. 2,500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month, automations included. A July 2026 open letter says the plan isn’t being cut back.
• Low prices as lists grow. 10,000 subscribers cost $40 a month billed yearly, per EmailOctopus.
• Quick to learn. A Capterra reviewer in September 2026 called it “easy to set up, straightforward to use”.
• A cheap route at volume. Connect sends through your own Amazon SES, with emails listed as unlimited.

Drawbacks

• Vetting can hold you up. Several one-star Trustpilot reviews describe accounts restricted at signup or campaigns “held for review without any clear explanation” (April 2026). The policy lets EmailOctopus pause sending until you show permission.
• Upgrades happen on their own. Growing past a tier, or one person counted on several lists, raises the bill. A few Trustpilot reviewers describe charges they didn’t expect; in one case EmailOctopus cited a bug and refunded.
• Fewer extras. Tooltester lists “limited automation”, no A/B testing and no triggers on opens or clicks.

EmailOctopus holds 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 334 reviews as of October 2026, with 89% five-star and 5% one-star, and EmailOctopus has replied to every negative review. Search listings show 4.8 on Capterra from about 657 reviews and 4.2 on G2 from 46.

Praise centers on price, the free plan, ease and support; one October 2026 Trustpilot reviewer praised its “phenomenal pricing.” Complaints come back to account checks and held campaigns, surprise upgrade charges and a thinner feature set.

EmailOctopus fits a newsletter writer, creator or small business whose list signed up: free under 2,500 subscribers, and cheap above that if price matters more than A/B tests. Connect can go lower for teams already on AWS.

Look elsewhere if you need behavior-based automations or split tests, or if your contacts came from a directory, social media or a scrape: the policy names all three. Prospect outreach is a separate system in my setups, with its own lookalike domains and Google or Microsoft inboxes, so a cold campaign never touches the newsletter account (the setup).

• MailerLite: Comfort starts at $12 a month for 500 subscribers and includes A/B tests, but its free plan stops at 250 subscribers (profile).
• Brevo: billed by emails sent, from $9 a month for 5,000 emails and 500 contacts, and free for 300 emails a day (profile).
• Moosend: $9 a month for 500 subscribers with unlimited sends, no free plan (profile).
• Mailchimp: from $13 a month for 500 contacts on Essentials (profile).
• Reachkit (our product): for the prospects EmailOctopus’s policy won’t let you email, while your newsletter stays where it is. Reachkit finds verified leads (1,000 credits a month on the $39 Growth plan), registers separate domains ($15 a year) with Google or Microsoft inboxes on them ($5 a month each), warms those inboxes with AI-written emails and puts every reply in one Unibox.