Beehiiv Review (2026)Free to 2,500 Subs, You Keep 100%
By Daan Haket · Tested hands-on · written with an AI assistant · who does what
Next to Substack it's more to learn. Throughout this review we weigh it against Substack.
newsletter operators who want growth tools, automation, SEO control and ad/referral monetisation — and to keep 100% of subscription revenue.
you're a beginner starting from zero who wants the simplest setup and Substack's built-in discovery, and don't need automation or SEO.
Transparency: the “Visit” links on this page are affiliate links — we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. No vendor can pay for a better review or verdict. How we make money →
Tested by our team on 23 October 2026 on our existing Free account (the publication we use for our weekly mail, 3 subscribers), as a draft only: our AI assistant ran the test in Daan's browser. We wrote a post with a title and three known lines, checked all four previews and walked through every publishing step without sending or publishing anything.
How we tested
- Inspected the Free plan and looked for a separate publication route
- Opened a Blank draft post from New
- Entered a title and three short paragraphs
- Compared email and web previews at desktop and mobile sizes
- Walked through Audience, Email, Web and Review
- Closed the editor and located the draft in Posts
- New > Blank draft post opened the editor (Compose, Audience, Email, Web, Review) in about 10 seconds. Above the editor sat a block 'Earn revenue with this newsletter! Upgrade to the Lite plan to claim them'.
- The title and all three lines came through unchanged in all four previews (email and web, desktop and mobile): 0 field errors in 4 previews. The email preview used the title as subject and left the preview text empty; the web preview said '2 min read' for 12 words.
- The Review step listed 'Fix before you publish: Add email preview text', next to Send test email and Schedule. We sent nothing.
Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 9 Oct 2026
Subscriber-based, and you keep 100% of paid subscriptions — beehiiv shows a 0% take rate, against Substack's 10%, leaving only Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30. Free is $0 up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. At up to 1,000 subscribers Lite is $59/mo billed monthly or $49/mo on yearly billing, Pro $109/mo or $95/mo yearly. At 10,000 subscribers Lite is $139/mo ($119 yearly) and Pro $239/mo ($199 yearly); at 50,000 Lite is $299/mo ($249) and Pro $469/mo ($399); at 100,000 Lite is $469/mo ($399) and Pro $699/mo ($599).
Lite stops at 100,000 subscribers; Pro runs on to $999/mo billed monthly at 250,000+. Read again on 9 October 2026 with the slider, step by step (Free shows 'Unavailable' above 2,500 subscribers). Lite billed monthly: $59 at 1,000, $79 at 2,500, $109 at 5,000, $139 at 10,000, $199 at 25,000, $299 at 50,000, $389 at 75,000, $469 at 100,000; billed yearly, per month: $49, $69, $95, $119, $169, $249, $329, $399.
Pro billed monthly: $109 at 1,000, $149 at 2,500, $199 at 5,000, $239 at 10,000, $349 at 25,000, $469 at 50,000, $589 at 75,000, $699 at 100,000, $799 at 150,000, $899 at 200,000, $999 at 250,000 (the last step reads '250,000+'); billed yearly, per month: $95, $129, $169, $199, $299, $399, $499, $599, $689, $779, $869. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Category context: Growth & Revenue. Across the 83 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is $29 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Beehiiv’s entry price of $59 a month sits above that median. Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →
What the price did
We capture Beehiiv’s own pricing page every month and keep the figures, so this is our record of the page — not a forecast, and not someone else’s summary.
Our Price Watch captured beehiiv's pricing page in July and in August 2026 and the headline figures did not move: $0, $43 and $96 a month on annual billing in both captures, with annual totals of $517 and $1,151 by August. Between 16 August and 5 October 2026 the line-up itself changed: Launch, Scale and Max became Free, Lite and Pro. At 1,000 subscribers the entry paid tier went from $49 to $59 a month on monthly billing ($43 to $49 a month yearly); the top tier stayed at $109 monthly and moved from $96 to $95 a month yearly. Higher up the ladder the rise is larger: the August file listed Scale at $329 a month at 100,000 subscribers, and Lite now shows $469 monthly at that size.
What the pricing page doesn’t say
Substack's built-in discovery network and dead-simple setup are easier if you're starting from zero with no audience and don't care about automation or SEO. Beehiiv's depth is the point, but it's a steeper start.
Watch the video review
The video version of this review, from our YouTube channel.
What Beehiiv does
Newsletter platform with growth, automation, SEO and monetisation tooling, priced by subscriber count. You keep 100% of paid subscriptions where Substack takes 10%; the trade is a steeper start than Substack's near-zero setup and built-in discovery.
What buyers report about Beehiiv
Hands-on: tested 2026-10-23Documented by the vendor: 3 features, read 2026-10-09Reported by buyers: G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Product Hunt and SourceForge, read August 2026
Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We tested Beehiiv ourselves on 2026-10-23, but one test is a narrow sample, so here is what other buyers report. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • Monetisation is built in rather than bolted on — ads, referrals and paid subscriptions in the same product. Around 4.3 across the platforms.
- • The editor and the growth tooling are what reviewers say they would miss.
- • The jump from free to paid is abrupt: Free stops at 2,500 subscribers, and paid subscriptions and ads only start on the paid Lite plan — so you cross that line at 2,500 subscribers or the moment you want to monetise, whichever comes first.
- • Cost at scale is the complaint on every single platform. In August 2026 reviewers put a list of around 5,000 subscribers near $78/month, with Max at $96; Beehiiv's ladder has changed since, so see the price section for today's figures.
- • The learning curve on the website builder and workflows is steeper than the marketing suggests.
- • Integrations are thin against Mailchimp's ecosystem, and support responsiveness slips exactly when something is urgent.
- • SourceForge holds exactly one beehiiv review (September 2024), so treat it as a single voice rather than a trend: an executive user who rates it well still names webhooks being paid-only and the editor refusing a full-width button in email content.
When the paid plan is worth it
beehiiv's Free plan is $0, and the pricing slider keeps it available up to 2,500 subscribers, with unlimited email sends, templates, landing pages, the recommendation network and API access, so the free tier is a real publishing tier rather than a demo. Between our August and October 2026 readings beehiiv renamed its plans: Launch, Scale and Max became Free, Lite and Pro. The jump that matters is Free to Lite, because that is where monetization moves: paid subscriptions at a 0% take rate, ad monetization, automations, polls and A/B testing all start on Lite, which at the default 1,000 subscribers is $59 a month, or $49 a month on yearly billing.
Lite to Pro is a narrower step: Pro ($109 a month, or $95 a month yearly, at 1,000 subscribers) adds removal of beehiiv branding, advanced analytics, AI credits, and webinars and coaching. Upgrading can be forced by list size: the slider shows Lite as unavailable above 100,000 subscribers, while Pro continues to $999 a month at 250,000+. It does not solve deliverability or domain setup, which is the same DNS work on every tier.
Our monthly capture read this vendor's pricing page in September 2026 and again in October 2026, and the amounts were the same both times, including $0 and $0.30 from the pricing above. We keep watching — the registry records what moves.
What we found running Beehiiv ourselves
The first findings are at the top of this page. The rest:
- Audience offers Email and web, Email only or Web only, defaulting to all subscribers. The Email step has subject, preview text, sender name, UTM settings and custom headers; the Web step has the post URL, thumbnail and SEO title and description (defaulting to the publication description). 'Audio newsletter' was available only with Pro.
- We could not find a way to create a second, separate publication on the Free plan: not in the sidebar or the New menu, and /publications/new returned a 404. That is why we tested as a draft in the existing publication.
- After Exit without publishing, Posts listed the draft with its last-edited time; the subscriber count stayed at 3 and no new send appeared.
Mail in the first 14 days
Measurement running until 2026-11-05T23:00:00Z (last observed 2026-10-26T02:18:02.350595Z).
0 emails in the 14-day window so far; first email: none observed; 0 with an explicit offer.
Retained inbox and junk only; removed or archived mail is outside this observation. Ambiguous supplier attribution is excluded. Day numbers use elapsed 24-hour periods since the recorded signup date at midnight Europe/Amsterdam; the signup hour is unknown. Offer flags quote literal subject/body text. Replies in our own correspondence (support tickets, our comment requests) are excluded; one-time codes, our own address, our account name and our name are replaced in brackets.
| Day | Time (UTC) | Sender | Literal subject | Folder | Offer evidence |
|---|
Screenshots from our test (click to enlarge)
What this test does not show:
- Actually sending, deliverability and open rates
- A separate second publication on the Free plan
- Importing subscribers, the growth network (Boosts), the Ad Network and paid subscriptions
- The website builder and a custom domain
- The difference between Free and Lite or Pro beyond the visible locks (Ad Network claims, audio newsletter)
Most of our reviews are researched rather than run — how we review explains which is which, and why we do not pretend otherwise.
How to actually use Beehiiv
beehiiv's own platform walkthrough sets the order: create and confirm the account, then set up the workspace and publication; each post moves through 5 tabs in the Post Builder — Compose, Audience, Email, Web and Review.
Distilled from Vendor material only: beehiiv's pricing page plus help-center articles on plan types and tier pricing, custom domains, DMARC, the Substack migration, the platform walkthrough, the free trial and the Ad Network; we found no independent walkthrough worth citing.
Common Beehiiv setup mistakes
Where Beehiiv setups actually go wrong, and what it costs you when they do. Same sources as the setup notes above.
The friction is not in that list.
- A custom domain means adding 12 DNS records, and beehiiv says verification can take up to 72 hours and warns against removing or re-adding those records while it runs; Cloudflare users must set each record to DNS Only, since proxied records cannot be detected.
- A valid DMARC record has been mandatory for custom domains since February 2024, and DNS changes can take 24-72 hours to fully propagate.
- Migration is the other slow part: beehiiv's Substack guide puts content migration at 5-10 minutes and the Stripe paid-subscriber transfer at 5-15 minutes, but recommends excluding subscribers with an activity rating of 0 for the first 2-4 weeks of sending.
- The free trial sits on a free account (Launch, in the help-center wording we read) with temporary higher-tier access, and locks the Ad Network, paid subscriptions, community and additional users; no trial length is stated.
The natural comparison is Substack — the simpler, network-driven newsletter platform. Weigh it against Substack on the job you actually need done.
Frequently asked questions
What are the limits on beehiiv's free plan?
Free costs $0 and the pricing slider keeps it available up to 2,500 subscribers, with unlimited email sends, templates, landing pages, the recommendation network and API access. Paid subscriptions, ad monetization and automations start on Lite. Read on 5 October 2026.
What does beehiiv cost once I pass the free tier?
At up to 1,000 subscribers Lite is $59 a month billed monthly, or $49 a month on yearly billing; Pro is $109 monthly or $95 a month yearly. The price then steps with list size rather than sliding: 10,000 subscribers puts Lite at $139 a month on monthly billing, 50,000 puts it at $299. Read on 5 October 2026.
Does beehiiv take a cut of paid subscriptions?
No. beehiiv shows a 0% take rate on paid subscriptions, which start on Lite; what you lose is Stripe's processing fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That is the difference their own pages draw against Substack's 10%.
Is this a hands-on review of Beehiiv?
Yes. We tested Beehiiv ourselves on 2026-10-23; the section above says what we tested, what we found and what we did not test, and where a figure comes from the vendor's own documentation instead. Most of our reviews are researched rather than run; we say which is which. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Product Hunt and SourceForge, read August 2026.
- Re-verified 2026-10-05 on beehiiv.com/pricing, prices in USD.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
- Our own hands-on session with Beehiiv (2026-10-23), written up in full further down this page.
Others in this category
Reviewed growth & revenue tools that share ground with Beehiiv — comparable in what they do, not drop-in swaps:
New reviews, price changes we recorded, and the cost conditions we found. No sponsored placements. Unsubscribe anytime.
This is our researched assessment — not a paid placement. The “Visit” links on this page are affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you, and it never changes our take. How we review →