Start With the Money

Most newsletter platforms charge you to send email, then take a cut when the newsletter finally earns something. beehiiv inverts that. On the Scale plan and above it takes 0% of paid subscription revenue, and it runs an Ad Network that goes out and sells sponsorships on your behalf. Substack, the obvious comparison, keeps 10% of every paid subscription for as long as the subscriber stays.

The Ad Network is the part worth understanding before anything else, because it is what makes beehiiv different from a nicer-looking Mailchimp. Sponsors are matched to your publication algorithmically: beehiiv surfaces up to 15 offers in your dashboard at a time, with three highlighted as recommendations, based on your content, audience and past performance. Deals are priced on CPM or CPC. beehiiv's own worked examples, on the Ad Network page in July 2026, are "a $5 CPM means you earn $5 for every 1,000 unique opens" and "a $2 CPC with 100 verified clicks would earn you $200."

The payout mechanics matter more than the rate card. You connect a Stripe Express account, your performance report lands roughly 96 hours after the send, clicks count only if they happen within 72 hours of it, and beehiiv pays on the 20th of the following month. An ad you run on 3 August is reported around 7 August and hits your bank on 20 September. That is normal for ad networks, but it means sponsorship money will not cover this month's subscription fee.

The aggregate numbers are large and beehiiv publishes them: $37,872,727 paid to creators through the Ad Network to date, and, per the company's 16 July 2026 announcement, newsletters collectively earning over $1 million a month from it against a roster that includes Netflix, Nike, Roku and HubSpot. Publishers have also generated more than $50 million in subscription revenue on the platform. None of that guarantees a single offer for a 900-subscriber newsletter in a niche advertisers do not buy. Demand follows list size and category, and the dashboard can be empty for months on a small list.

What the Free Plan Actually Gives You

Launch is free, needs no credit card, and holds 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. You get three publications, one team seat, a custom domain, the recommendation network, API access and basic AI tooling. A custom domain on a free tier is rare enough to note.

What it blocks is the whole business layer. No Ad Network. No paid subscriptions, no digital products, no community. Automations are absent apart from a single welcome email fired on signup, so a three-part onboarding sequence already requires the paid plan. beehiiv branding stays on your emails and your site, and it stays there on Scale too, which is the detail most people miss.

Treat Launch as a real publishing tool with a hard business ceiling rather than a trial. You can write, send, host a site and collect subscribers indefinitely without paying. The moment you want to charge readers or accept a sponsor, you are on Scale.

Pricing: the Number You See Is Not the Number You Pay

Scale advertises at $43/month. That figure is the annual-billing rate at the smallest tier, up to 1,000 subscribers. Monthly billing is $49. Price is set by subscriber count rather than send volume, with no per-email overage, and it steps at fixed thresholds: 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 75,000 and 100,000.

Crossing 2,500 subscribers takes Scale to roughly $89/month, or about $77 on annual billing. By 100,000 subscribers Scale is near $290/month annual. So the honest way to budget is to price the subscriber count you expect in twelve months, not the one you have today: a list that triples crosses three thresholds and the bill roughly doubles.

Max at $96/month annual is what buys branding removal, and that is a steep step for something cosmetic. It also adds the sponsorship storefront, RSS-to-send, dynamic content, audio newsletters, priority support, Getty image credits, ten publications and unlimited seats. Enterprise is quoted individually and is where dedicated IPs, SSO, a named account manager and the Send API live. All figures checked on beehiiv's pricing page in July 2026.

How beehiiv Grows Your List

Two mechanisms, and they are not the same thing. The recommendation network is free on every plan: after someone subscribes, you show them other publications, and other publishers show yours. It costs nothing and compounds slowly.

Paid Recommendations, the feature previously sold as Boosts, is the paid version and requires Scale or Max. You set a price per subscriber, an audience filter and a budget, and other publishers promote you into it. You are charged only for subscribers who pass verification and then engage. The example price shown on beehiiv's own page in July 2026 is $2.20 per subscriber.

Run the arithmetic before you scale the budget. A thousand bought subscribers at $2.20 is $2,200, and bought subscribers reliably open at a lower rate than people who found you themselves. Since the Ad Network pays you on unique opens, a cheap acquisition binge can lower the exact metric your sponsorship revenue is priced on. The channel works, but it rewards patience over volume.

Automations sit alongside this and are better than the category average. Triggers cover signup, link clicks, purchases, custom events and segment entry; steps include conditional branches and arbitrary delays; there is no cap on workflow length. It is enough for welcome series, post-purchase follow-ups and lapsed-reader win-backs.

Everything Else It Now Does

beehiiv spent 2026 turning a newsletter tool into a publishing suite. The 16 July 2026 Summer Release added Community for memberships and conversation, Copilot, an AI operator you drive by chat, Programmatic Ads, and a rebuilt visual editor. Earlier releases brought an AI website builder that generates pages from prompts, native podcast hosting that distributes to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, digital products sold at zero commission, and native website analytics inside the same dashboard.

CEO Tyler Denk framed the strategy plainly in the announcement: "It never made sense to us that creators and publishers should have to waste time juggling multiple platforms to operate one business."

Read that consolidation with some skepticism. Every module here competes with a specialist that has been at it longer: podcast hosting against Transistor and Buzzsprout, community against Circle, the site builder against Ghost and Webflow. beehiiv's versions are new. That is a good trade when the module is a convenience already included in a bill you were paying anyway, and a bad one when it is load-bearing for your business. Host the podcast that is your product somewhere built for podcasts.

Where It Falls Short

• The Send API is Enterprise-only. Launch lists API access "excluding Send API", and the Send API appears only in the Enterprise column of the pricing table as of July 2026. If your application needs to trigger transactional or programmatic sends, beehiiv cannot do it at any published price.
• Support is asynchronous on every self-serve plan. Scale gets human support, Max gets priority, Enterprise gets VIP. There is no published phone line or live chat below Enterprise, so a deliverability problem at 9am on send day is a ticket, not a conversation.
• Deliverability is a black box. beehiiv reports its own delivery rate and gives you open and click data, but there is no sender-score dashboard, no feedback-loop reporting and no in-product seed testing. That is invisible on a healthy list and painful when you migrate an old one and something goes wrong.
• Automation has a ceiling. Branching, delays and behavioural triggers are covered. Lead scoring, RFM segmentation and multi-channel orchestration with SMS or push are not. Kit and ActiveCampaign still win for anyone running a product funnel rather than a publication.
• Branding removal skips Scale entirely. Going from a beehiiv-branded footer to a clean one means Max at $96/month annual, more than double the Scale entry price.

Worth weighing against beehiiv's own satisfaction claim of 4.9/5 from 28,479 customers, displayed on its homepage in July 2026. That is a self-reported figure rather than an independent audit, and beehiiv is one of the platforms excluded from EmailToolTester's deliverability benchmark, so there is no neutral inbox-placement number to set against it.

Verdict

Buy beehiiv if the newsletter is the business. A publication past roughly 2,500 subscribers that intends to run sponsorships, sell paid subscriptions, or both, gets a platform that keeps none of the subscription revenue and actively fills the ad slots, for $77 to $290 a month depending on list size. Nothing else on the market bundles the sales side of the business with the sending side.

Skip it in three cases. If you only want to write and be discovered, Substack's network will do more for you than beehiiv's tooling, and its 10% cut costs nothing until you are actually earning. If your revenue comes from courses, products and funnels rather than the newsletter itself, Kit's tagging and automation are a better fit than beehiiv's publication-shaped model. And if you need transactional sends from your own app, or you want to own the stack outright, look at Ghost or a plain ESP instead: beehiiv's Send API is behind an Enterprise quote, and there is no self-hosted escape hatch.

One practical suggestion for anyone on the fence. Launch is free, uncapped on sends, and needs no card, so put a real publication on it and send for a month. You will find out whether beehiiv's editor suits you long before you find out whether its ad network pays you.