I scrolled past this announcement. I’m on Substack, so MailerLite’s pricing changes are someone else’s problem.
Then I looked at what “3 automations” means for a typical indie author email setup, the kind with a reader magnet, a welcome sequence, and a new-release notification. And I stopped scrolling.
If you’re on MailerLite’s free plan, you have three weeks to decide what to do about it. What changed, why the automation cap matters more than the subscriber cut, and what your real options look like before the deadline hits.
Three cuts in two years
MailerLite has sliced its free plan three times since September 2025, and each cut came paired with a small feature unlock, as if the unlock made the cut easier to swallow.
Before September 2025 you got 1,000 subscribers, 12,000 monthly sends, and unlimited automations. That was the plan every YouTube channel told you to sign up for, the one that made MailerLite the default recommendation in every Reddit guide and blog post for half a decade.
September 2025 brought the first cut: subscribers dropped to 500, but sends stayed the same and automations stayed unlimited, so most authors barely noticed.
On July 1, 2026, subscribers dropped again to 250 and monthly sends were cut to 2,500, though automations remained unlimited.
August 13, 2026, which is three weeks from today: subscribers stay at 250, sends stay at 2,500, and automations are capped at 3 with a maximum of 5 steps per automation, plus 3 signup forms, one landing page, one website, one digital product.
The subscriber cut to 250 already hit on July 1, and if your list is above that number, sending is paused until you upgrade or delete contacts. But August 13, the automation cap, is what nobody’s talking about yet.
MailerLite framed these caps alongside “unlocks” like email templates, promotional pop-ups, and a second user seat, which is a bit like shrinking the rooms in your apartment and handing you nicer curtains for the ones that remain.
Why 3 automations is what breaks things
The subscriber cut gets the headlines. The automation cap is what breaks the funnel.
Walk through it. A reader downloads your book 1 reader magnet from the back of your ebook, which triggers an automation: deliver the magnet, wait two days, send a welcome email, wait three days, pitch book 2. That’s one automation, and four of your five allowed steps, gone on a single entry point.
Add a welcome sequence for people who subscribe through your website, with a different entry point and different content. That’s two.
A new release notification for your existing list when book 3 drops. That’s three. You’re done.
You haven’t built a reader magnet for book 2, there’s no re-engagement sequence for cold subscribers, and if you write under two pen names in two genres, you ran out of automations before you finished setting up the first name.
The five-step limit per automation is the other constraint, because the trigger doesn’t count but every email, time delay, and tagging action does. A welcome sequence that sends four emails with delays between them uses all five steps, which means there’s no room for a tagging action at the end to segment your list. Your automation works, but it can’t hand off to the next one in a way that keeps your data clean.
The free plan can’t support a functional email funnel for most indie authors anymore.
This is a pattern
MailerLite didn’t become the go-to recommendation for indie authors by accident. Five years ago the free plan was generous, with 1,000 subscribers, unlimited automations, and a clean interface that didn’t make you feel like you were fighting Salesforce every time you wanted to send an email. Every “how to build your email list” blog post for half a decade said the same thing: start with MailerLite.
That advice built a dependency. Authors set up funnels, connected reader magnets, linked back-of-book calls to action, and built sequences they stopped thinking about, infrastructure that hums in the background until someone changes the rules.
Mailchimp ran the same playbook before them, with a generous free tier to drive adoption and progressive cuts once the user base was locked in. The economics are not mysterious: free users are an acquisition cost when the platform is growing, and when growth slows, those users become an expense. The free tier shrinks until enough people convert to paid.
None of this is unusual, and MailerLite is a business adjusting its margins, doing what any company does when the economics shift. But the result is that the most recommended tool in indie publishing now offers a free plan that can’t support a new indie author’s needs, while the guides that made the recommendation haven’t updated.
What to do before August 13
Four options, and each one costs you something.
Stay on MailerLite, upgrade to Comfort. That’s $12/month for up to 500 subscribers, which gets you 50 automations, 10 forms, and 10 landing pages. A real tool at that tier. The question is whether $144/year makes sense for your revenue: if you earn $50/month from KDP, that’s a real percentage of your income; if you earn $500/month, it’s a rounding error. Only you know which side of that line you’re on.
Switch to Kit (formerly ConvertKit). The free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers, with no send limits. Sequences, meaning linear email series for reader magnet delivery, welcome series, and new release announcements, are unlimited on the free tier. Visual automations are limited to one, but sequences handle what most indie authors need day to day. Migration from MailerLite takes an afternoon, and Kit publishes a step-by-step import guide.
Move to Substack. Free, with unlimited subscribers and no automation caps, but a different animal entirely: no reader magnet delivery, no back-of-book funnels, no tagging or segmentation. Substack is a newsletter platform, not an email marketing tool, and the distinction matters. If your list exists to support book sales, wrong fit. If it exists to build an audience you write to on a regular basis, it might be the right one.
Accept the limits. Consolidate down to 3 automations, delete the rest, trim your list to 250, and run a lean setup while you decide what comes next. Some authors sitting at 200 subscribers with two automations won’t feel August 13 at all, and if that’s you, this whole article is academic.
The advice in indie publishing has always been to start free and upgrade when you can afford to. Free KDP account, free Canva, free BookFunnel trial, free MailerLite. Build first, monetize later.
That’s decent advice when the free tiers are stable, but it stops working when they aren’t. The author who followed every guide, built their funnel on MailerLite Free, grew to 400 subscribers, and earns $200/month now faces a choice between $12/month for a tool that used to cost nothing, or spending a weekend migrating to a platform they’ve never used, while their back-of-book links still point to the old signup forms. Neither option is catastrophic, but both are friction nobody warned them about.
I’m not saying leave MailerLite, because the paid product is good and $12/month is not an unreasonable ask. What I’m saying is the recommendation pipeline, the YouTube videos, the Reddit threads, the blog posts that say “just start with MailerLite Free,” haven’t caught up to what “free” means in July 2026. If you’re still on that plan, you have three weeks to figure out what it means for you.
I moved to Substack, because of the last change. However, my reader magnets are handled by StoryOrigin, which does other things that justify the subscription for now.
I have long had a WordPress site, and use the Pretty Links plug-in to point where I want things to go. This sort of thing is one reason for that. That way, if I change providers, the links in the back of the book remain current. I just change where the forwarding link points.